Vostro 1015 voice recorder not working

vostro 1015

Hello. What is the operating system on the laptop? Dell supports XP, Vista, and 7. No audio driver for 8, 8.1 or 10.

I also uninstall the driver from device manager and it automatically reinstall after restart of computer

Are you using the Conexant audio driver or the Windows native audio driver?

If you have the Conexant driver, then in Device Manager, after you right click on the Conexant driver and select uninstall, put a check mark in the box to delete the software.

If you do that, then when you restart, Windows will not reinstall the same Conexant driver, because its files will have been deleted from the computer. If Windows does install a Conexant driver at that point, it will be a different one, an older one that you had previously downloaded. Go through the same process to remove that one. When you have removed all Conexant driver files from the computer, Windows will install its native audio driver, named High Definition Audio Device. At that point, download a fresh copy of the Conexant driver  from the Dell support site, and install it.

Then test the mic. If the green bars move (on the Recording tab of the Sound properties), then the mic is working. If it still doesn't work in Skype then something wrong in Skype.

Hello, my OS is windows 7. As you mentioned I installed conexanct driver and the green bar move. But still the voice recorder of windows, speech recognition and Skype can't record/ hear my voice. That means mic isn't working at all though whenever I open the recording section of sound properties green bar is moving for only once.

Sorry for the delay in replying but I had to evacuate for Hurricane Matthew. Am back home now.

I installed conexanct driver

Test the driver by switching to the Windows native audio driver.

1. Open the Device Manager (find it in the Control Panel, or type devmgmt.msc into the search box).
2. Expand the "Sound, video & game controllers" and right click on the Conexant.
3. Select to "Update Driver Software".
4. Click on "Browse my computer for driver software".
5. Click "Let me pick from a list of drivers on my computer".
6. Put a check in the box "Show compatible hardware" if not already checked.
7. In the list of devices, click "High Definition Audio" (the native driver).
8. Click "Next".
9. On the Update Driver Warning box, click "Yes" (install the driver).
10. Restart the laptop if prompted. If not prompted, sometimes you have to restart, sometimes not.
[To get back to the Conexant driver, do it again but reverse the names in steps 2 and 7.]


If you only have the symptoms with one of the drivers, then the other is at fault. If you have the same symptoms with both audio drivers, then it is very probably not a driver issue, and could mean failed hardware.

There are 2 ways to test the hardware. The first is the audio test in the Dell 32-bit Diagnostics utility. It was included on the original hard drive, so if you still have that and if it has never been fully wiped, then use these instructions. Run through the test and eventually there will be a mic test.

If you do not have Dell 32-bit Diagnostics on the hard drive, install it on cd or flash drive, like this:

Download to your desktop Dell 32-bit Diagnostics -- and get the one labelled File Format:Hard Drive, not Linux. Double click the downloaded folder to unzip. Let the extractor unzip the files to the folder location it suggests. After extraction, the diagnostic should start, but if if does not then go to the folder and click the file named DDDP. Next you will see a dialog with several options. Select either Install to a USB Flash Drive, or Create a Bootable CD.
After you create the medium,
1. Restart the laptop while pressing F12 during the startup process, to open the Boot Menu.
2. On the Boot menu, select either USB Storage, or CD/DVD. The diagnostic should open.
3. If you see a choice of 3 Customer options, select option 2 -- Graphics Based Diagnostic.
4. On the diagnostics Main Menu screen, select 'Custom', then the audio tests.
5. The tests will run. There are roughly 6 of them for audio.

If for some reason you cannot run the diagnostics, you can still test the hardware by performing a system recovery (revert back to original factory configuration) and test for the issue immediately afterward. If the issue is still there then it is in the hardware. If gone, it was the software (but this test assumes that the issue was not there when the laptop left the factory).