sound just stopped

I'm using a Toshiba Satellite A205 with Vista. A couple days ago, for no apparent reason at all, my laptop stopped making sound overnight. I went to sleep with an hour-long playlist going on iTunes, when I woke up and tried to play some music, I got nothing, not from iTunes or CDs or games or anything else that should be making noise.

I'm getting levels in iTunes, but when I go to the volume mixer it shows iTunes as silent, but has the level bar bouncing under speakers. Nothing is muted, the volume is up, no headphones are in (and when they are, I don't get sound from them either).

In device manager, it says Realtek High Definition Audio is working properly. I've reinstalled the drivers both from the disk that came with the computer and downloaded from Realtek's site, with no change.

It seems to me (though I really have no clue) that something must have come unplugged between whatever tells the computer the speakers and headphone jack are working and the speakers/jack themselves. How that would have happened with it sitting on my desk untouched overnight, I don't know. I've spent the last two days wandering all over the internet reading stuff trying to figure out my problem and I can't, so here I am asking.

 

Forgot to mention, I've also tried system restores...no luck.

 

I know this sounds elementary and I most surely do not mean to insult you, but I had the same problem with my toshiba laptop. I spent a week messing around before i found that it was the physical volume controller. Toshiba laptops have a physical dial that controls the volume coming out of the speakers/headphones. I would check and see if this is turned down first.

 

No problem. It's happened before and that's the first thing I checked. It's turned up plenty loud. Or at least it would be if sound was coming out.

 

Yes. No sound from headphones or built-in speakers.

 

Something like this just happened to me 2 days ago.

I checked all the wires.. not that.
I checked all my settings, all the mutes, all the sound adjustments.. could not figure it out.

So I went into my Creative control panel and restored my default settings, and sound came back. I then went back through and tweaked my sound to the way I like it.

If you have a Creative card installed, go into the control panel and restore the default settings. I'm not sure how to do this with any other card, or onboard sound, but I'm guessing it's pretty much the same.

Good luck.

 

Still nothing. I've been in and out of every control panel I can find, restoring defaults, updating, rolling back, uninstalling, reinstalling...this is strangest thing this computer's ever done.

 

Took it by Circuit City today. They say I'll have to send it to Toshiba. Who knows how long that might take, or how much it'll cost...Merry Fuppin' Christmas to me.

 

You said that you checked everything in the control panel, does that include the Realtek sound mixer? It has it's own volume dial.

Other than that, the only thing I can think of is a bad sound card.

 

I agree. And you can get a cheap soundblaster for 20-30 bucks.