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January 24th, 2015 16:00
Dell N4010 audio issue troubleshooting
Hi guys,
I got a Dell N4010 inspiron system running Windows 7 Home basic. Its put up quite a bit of mileage now (5 years since i bought it) and i ran into some issues lately with the audio. I was unable to detect any sound during startup (the usual windows startup theme) or from the headphone port as well. The speakers had the 'No audio devices installed' message showing up. I proceeded to check in the forums here and followed the troubleshooting tips suggested.
The Device manager displayed just "High definition audio device' without any exclamation mark ( it also the device is working properly as well). Next i ran the diagnostics during startup and when it came to the screen where colors are displayed and the system prompts 'were you able to see colors', i gave no deliberately and the system gave a series of beeps indicating that the internal speakers seemed to work. During that particular startup, the audio issue vanished and everything seemed to work fine. Later when i was browsing a video on youtube, the audio went off all of a sudden and the same set of issues cropped up again. There was no sound again either during or after startup. This time i followed jimco's suggestion and installed the Dell system software, intel chipset and realtek drivers in that order restarting after each installation as suggested.
Now the audio seems to work fine but i am not sure if the issue is solved completely and if this might come back again. Any idea what might be wrong here?Is it a software/hardware issue?Would appreciate if someone could throw more light on this.
Thanks in advance.
Regards
Arun
Jim Coates
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13.6K Posts
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January 26th, 2015 04:00
Hello Arun. I saw your post Saturday and tried to think it through but can't come up with much. It could be an early sign of hardware failure. If it gets worse and you can't get the audio to come back, run the audio tests in Dell 32-bit Diagnostics to see if the hardware has failed. (No point in running the test when the audio is working.)
Keep your fingers crossed and hope it was just a random event or two. Sorry but can't think of any better advice right now.
arun.sub
6 Posts
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January 26th, 2015 07:00
Hello Jim,
Thanks for looking into my query. Over the past couple of days, the problem seems to have worsened (the frequency of audio outages being as small as a couple of minutes apart now). I will monitor for a couple of more days and run the diagnostics when i get the chance.
Regards
Arun
arun.sub
6 Posts
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January 29th, 2015 05:00
Hello Jim,
I got a chance to run the dell diagnostics today since the audio went dead for a couple of days now. I was able to run all the audio tests and everything passed (except for the side microphone test for which i did not have the right headphones to complete). Everything seems ok now for the moment. But i guess it is starting to be a bit annoying now when the audio hangs up on you all of a sudden. Would be great if you could share your suggestions on this. thanks in advance.
Regards
Arun
Jim Coates
6 Operator
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13.6K Posts
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January 30th, 2015 04:00
Hello Arun. The next time you perform a system recovery see if the problem stops. If it is something caused by an issue in Windows then the system recovery will fix it. If the recovery does not fix it then it is a hardware issue.