All sound disappeared from I6000, please help!

I've had my 6000 for about 3 days. Yesterday I spent time installing a series of software including iTunes and many applications to sync with my Treo 650. I also used the built in software removal tool remove much of the bloatware. I then searched for lingering files and folders (earthlink, aol, etc) and removed those. I felt pretty confident and double checked that everything I removed was associated with a bloatware app and not inadvertently removing something valuable from the system.

After removing bloatware and installing iTunes at some point my sound completely disappeared. No sound from internal speakers or external when attacked to my desktop speakers. The system sounds are gone, iTunes plays but no sound comes out. I also installed Firefox and a number of extensions, though none of them should have any impact on system sound AFAIK. I was so busy installing software that the exact timine eluded me

I went through alll sound settings and they are on with no "mute" anywhere and then did the entire software troubleshooting guide stepb-by-step and nothing made the sound come back on. I got to the section on checking settings in BIOS and I don't know how to do this so I'm stuck at this point. I tried using McAfee to scan for any viruses that might have caused this during downloading and nothing. I reinstalled the audio drivers that came on a CD with my 6000, nothing. I tried the troubleshooting option at Dell's website, but no yield.

Any thoughts on this or suggestions? I'm not a computer expert, but not a novice either and I feel like I've exhausted my options at fixing this and am now left with soundless laptop after 72 hours of ownership

 

do you have the speaker icon in your systray?

sounds like you may have inadvertantly deleted your sound card driver or other important files/folders/registry keys that it needs.

i'm surprised a reinstall of the drivers didn't fix it.

i doubt the problem lies in any of the software you installed. it's more likely from the clean-up you did.

maybe try grabbing the drivers from dell's support site; they may be newer.

another place to look would be control panel > sounds > "Speaker settings" Advanced tab > Speakers > Speaker setup:... and see if the setting got changed to something that is incompatible with the machine.

problems like these are why i would recommend reformat and reinstall of the OS rather than deleting folders and uninstalling applications.

 

Yeah, I had the exact same problem while removing bloatware from my Dell 6000. I was having trouble uninstalling Norton Internet Security (it kept telling me some random stuff) so I went into safe mode to delete all the Norton files. I started back up and voila, no sound. Somehow the sound driver (Sigma something) got deleted too, and though I found the driver on Dell's website, the installation didn't work. In the end I just did a XP System Restore and got my sound back. After that, Norton uninstalled perfectly as well. I don't know what happened, but everything's okay now

 

Thanks for the feedback. I realized the problem was that I had the Kensington Port dock plugged in. I had actually just installed it that day as well. I was tipped off after noticing in the sound prefs that "USB Audio" was selected. I didn't think anything of it initially, but when I selected it (on my second go round with the troubleshooting algorithm) and saw the actual I6000 driver listed below the USB Audio, I realized what was happening. My options were to select the internal driver or simply unplug the dock which I did. It was plugged into the I6000 in back and because it was visible I just didn't think of it until looking through the driver settings... out of sight out of mind. Thanks for the feedback which helped me track down the problem. Amazingly simple fix, fortunately

 

talking73,

A format and clean install of XP Pro cleared many of my problems (similiar to yours). Sexy Southern Girl has a todo list of just how to do it (a sticky at the top of forum). This way you know for sure your system will be in top shape. Since your system is new, why not take sometimes out to set it up correctly once.