No sound at all.

I've gone through the Microsoft trouble shooting thing, all the way through and that did not help my problem at all.
You see, one night I was watching a movie and when it finished I turned off my speakers, turned them back on and there's no sound..
The next morning I hooked up different speakers, still no sound. I tested out the original speakers I was using and they worked fine on my stereo, so it has to be a problem with my computer.
Now, i've gone trhough device manager and everthing seems perfect, everthing is recognised, says it's working fine, but still No Sound.
I even updated my SoundMax program, but still nothing..maybe my sound card is broken ? I just don't understand why it's not working, any help is appreciated.

I'm running Windows XP with the SP2 installed, and my mother board is a Asus p4p800s.

 

Some programs like to mute certain sound inputs. Open your sound mixer and check that there are NO checkmarks at the bottom. Check that the Wave input volume has not been set to zero.
That's probably not the solution but worth checking. You can check if it's a software error (broken codecs or so) by playing your music in a program which has a visualizer. If the visualizer doesn't do anything, you have a software problem.

 

Well the visualizer on Winamp seems to work fine, so that means it's hardware related ?

 

1. Go to start->run and type dxdiag. Go to the sound tab. Execute the sound test.
Alternately you could try turning hardware acceleration completely off by moving the slider all the way to the left and click the save button. Try again now.
2. Try upgrading directX
3. Completely uninstall and reinstall your soundcard. Delete it from the device manger and reboot (while you're there, check if there is a red X or a yellow ! next to it). If windows does not automatically installs it, install Soundmax manually.
4. Check if your soundcard accidentally got disabled in the bios. Enter your bios setup and navigate to Integrated Peripherals. Check if onboard AC97 audio is still enabled.

 

I ran the DirectX test and still no sound, I don't know how to uninstall my sound card OR how to get to the bios setup..
I went to the Device manager, but there's nothing there named 'Sound card etc' so i'm not sure what i'm looking for

 

The sound card is located in the device manager under 'Sound, video and game controllers'. It should have AC'97 in its name. (It's not 'Audio Codecs' or 'Legacy audio drivers'). If no sound card is listed, it may be broken or disabled in the BIOS.
You can get in your BIOS by hitting a certain key on your keyboard. Which key to hit should be in your manual. If you see a message like 'Press <KEY> to enter BIOS setup' when you boot, then KEY is the one you should hit WHILE the message is there.

 

I followed the earlier steps and still don't have sound.

I checked for commercial power first.

I uninstalled and reinstalled the driver (ESS Allegro) from boot. (there were no warnings in the form of a yellow ! or a red X. Although there had been one in the past before updating it.

I ran into a problem on the diagnostic at step 19 from running dxdiag:
DirectSound test results: Failure at step 19 (User verification of software): HRESULT = 0x00000000 (error code)

I updated directx and ran it again and got the same error message.

I looked through my user's manual and couldn't find any way to look at my BIOS but I did buy a Compaq package so my manual is probably not very good.

I hope I haven't violated the TOS by making my first post in this thread but it did apply to my most important concern (besides my current paid AV subscription which is currently acting more like a virus than an anti-virus.)

 

The BIOS of compaq computers can be accessed by pressing the F10 key while the cursor is in the upper right hand corner of the screen.

If your board supports onboard (AC'97) audio, but you are using a PCI sound card, the onboard audio should ALWAYS be disabled. If you only have onboard audio, it has to be enabled. Where the disable/enable option is located depends on your BIOS.

 

My sound card is listed, and enabled in the BIOS.
My father thinks I may have somehow blown the soundcard, because I had an amplifier hooked up to it with pretty powerful speakers. But I've tried using normal computer speakers and still nothing..any other ideas ?