Precision M6500 no audio, clean Win 10 install

@IGOffice the M6500 has never been officially supported for Windows 10 as we can't guarantee it's compatibility with certain drivers. 

The audio drivers for this system were made by a company called IDT. Not longer after this system was introduced IDT were sold to another company and Dell moved to Realtek for their audio drivers. This is why Dell don't produce any audio drivers newer than Windows 7.

Doing a bit of digging around, there was a Windows 8.1 updated driver released by IDT.I can't guarantee this will work but you could try downloading the driver from this non Dell website - https://drivers.softpedia.com/get/SOUND-CARD/IDT/IDT-High-Definition-Audio-Driver-61064960-for-Windows-81-64-bit.shtml

You may also find the following forum thread helpful as they had essentially the same problem with the audio drivers as yourself - https://www.dell.com/community/Laptops-General-Read-Only/Latitude-E5520-Audio-Problems-After-Win-10-Upgrade/td-p/4676396

Alan

Thank you very much for your reply.

Unfortunately none of the recommendations in that thread would work, and the driver also didn't work.

Using the generic HD Audio driver I can get audio from the headphone jack. I have used the dell diagnostics, and the audio works in DOS so I know the port is not damaged.

At this point, I will have to give the client this computer and tell them they will have to either use headphones or external speakers.

This is very unfortunate. This is a "portable workstation", and IDT, although sold, still makes drivers. I did find updated IDT windows 10 drivers in the Microsoft update database, but they would not work on this laptop. Apparently if IDT got paid by Dell they would tweak their drivers to work with these models (the ones using an IDT audio chip). It seems odd that Dell would choose to abandon the people who purchased a very expensive i7 workstation over a simple audio driver.

Is this fair to Dell? Personally, I think it is. The people who purchased this hardware must be some of Dells best customers (not for quantity purchases, but for quality purchases). They don't deserve to be told that "Dell doesn't support Windows 10 on this laptop". They don't need full support, but just to arrange to have the one driver that isn't working updated by the one company that can do it, I would have thought this would be worth it to Dell from a customer service point of view.

To be completely fair, I have seen this same thing from HP. A few of their higher end laptops will not work with the new Windows 10 accelerometer driver. I have had multiple versions of these laptops fail with that driver, and no drivers will correct the problem. Those laptops are even newer than this M6500, which is 10-years old now (design wise, first gen i7), but any i-series laptop or desktop is still a perfectly fine computer at this time.

Maybe Dell should crowd-source paying for updated drivers since it seems money is the problem here.

Again, thanks very much for your assistance. It's unfortunate nothing will get this working properly.

@IGOffice i'm sorry to hear that the suggestion didn't work. 

Updating drivers to suit Windows isn't the sole responsibility of Dell, it also falls with the hardware manufacturer in this case IDT and Microsoft themselves. Some technologies simply don't work with Windows 10 as it's too advanced.

As you have mentioned the system is 10 years old, as a company technology constantly changes and we have to move with it. There comes a point where we have to stop providing support or else we would have to provide support for everything. As a business that isn't financially sustainable to support a few systems which no longer have a valid warranty.

I hope this helps to explain why we cannot provide an updated driver for system.

Alan

Here's an idea which might help (it didn't help my M4700 "Nou audio output device is installed" problem, though):

There are inexpensive USB sound adapters available, some even with good audio quality; maybe one of those would work for you either by working around intermittent hardware, or by causing a different software configuration that works.

I can't help directly on your problem.  But I have a Precision M6500 and the speakers work fine in Windows 10.  So it can work.

David

So it seems it's not a driver issue, but finding the driver that will work.

Well, this laptop is long gone. I don't even remember what we ended up doing with it. However, it seems then that since there is a driver that works, someone at Dell could be tasked with finding the correct driver and putting it in the download area.

The fact here is that overall, this really doesn't happen very often. I don't think it would be a great hardship on a billion dollar company like Dell or HP or Lenovo to fix problems like this. After all, it really is only a matter of money, and in the grand scheme of things, not much money.

Same problem here. I upgraded from 7 to 10 without any problem, last month I started to have issues at starup, black screen and audio problems. I reinstalled win 10 and have less startup problems but they are still appearing often. Today I started the laptop and didn't get any audio. After 4 hours of searching I finally give up

download this it will solve your problem https://www.driveridentifier.com/scan/download_file.php?url=ftp%3A%2F%2Fftp.dell.com%2Faudio%2FIDT_92HDXXX-HD-AUDIO_A17_R278544.exe&hardware_id=HDAUDIO%5CFUNC_01%26VEN_111D%26DEV_76D5%26SUBSYS_102802EF&driver_inf_file_id=341297&scanid=37FC42D1BCF542AFB98075DCA7406170