Audio Driver installation problem on Inspiron 5458

A complication is that Dell almost makes the driver available for download in 2 formats,

Should have been: A complication is that Dell almost always makes the driver available for download in 2 formats...

I don't don't if they are elimination the Hard Drive format because of the way Win10 does updates or if it is an oversight of some sort.

Should be:  I don't know if they are eliminating the Hard Drive format because of the way Win10 does updates or if it is an oversight of some sort.

Gotta proofread better.

Shouldn't it show Realtek before I even install the driver?

No, it is normal to just show "High Definition Audio Device" before installing the vendor's audio driver. Despite its name, Device Manager is a lot about drivers, and "High Definition Audio Device" is the name of the Windows native audio driver that Windows automatically installs in the absence of a vendor's driver.

The audio should work on the laptop with just the native driver. It is a basic driver and usually lacks some features of the vendor's driver, but playback of audio does normally work when it is installed. One thing I see that is wrong is that there are 2 instances of "High Definition Audio Device" where there should only be one. I have seen that on other laptops with audio problems but don't know the cause of it. I would try removing one of them (right click on it to open the context menu, choose to uninstall and check the box to delete the driver software.)

Also I would expect to see a separate audio driver for HDMI audio. That kind of audio driver is installed as part of the graphics driver. For example your laptop has Intel graphics integrated on the motherboard, so I would expect to see Intel Display Audio listed under Sound...Controllers, and maybe another one associated with the discrete nVidia graphics driver.

Or is the hardware for sound not recognized by the laptop thus the unsuccessful driver installation?

Normally Windows recognizes that audio hardware is installed, but sometimes it helps to update or re-install the Intel cpu chipset driver.

There is only one driver in the Downloads area for Audio regardless of OS

Go to the Inspiron 5458 html page where all of the Dell-provided drivers for the model are displayed on one page. There are 3 Realtek drivers there. ("WB" means Win8.1 and WT is for Win10.) The one for Win7 is the IDT 6.0.1.7433 version, which is the one you tried to install.

The chipset driver is under the CPU category, and looks like a slightly older version under the Chipset category.

the error log

It looks to me that the installer could not find the setup.exe file in

C:\ProgramData\dell\drivers\Audio_Driver_50GPH_WN32_6.0.1.7433_A00

I don't know if that is a new thing but for as long as I've been doing this the audio driver files had always been in C:\\dell\drivers, so I don't know what that's all about. On my Latitude with Win7 , the only driver files under ProgramData is for a network driver.

You could manually look for the setup.exe file in both locations. If you find it just click on it to start the installation. If you look in C:\\dell\drivers\xxxxxx (where xxxx is a folder name), look for a folder containing a sub-folder named WDM, which would only be in the audio driver main folder, so you can use that as an identifier of which xxxxx folder is the audio driver, if any.

A complication is that Dell almost makes the driver available for download in 2 formats, but in the case of your laptop the driver is only available in the "Update Package for Microsoft® Windows" format which might be the problem. The other format that one can normally get is called "Hard Drive" format which is almost the same thing but in a zipped file. It always unzips to C:\\dell\drivers\xxxxxx and the setup.exe file is easily found there. I don't don't if they are elimination the Hard Drive format because of the way Win10 does updates or if it is an oversight of some sort.

Sorry for the rambling answer without a definite solution. Hope this helps some.

Hello jimco!

Thank you for your response. I verified I had the right driver downloaded for Windows 7 32 bit. I extracted its contents to the desktop and ran setup.exe from there. I received an error message saying, "No Driver was supported in this driver package." :(

What shall I do next?

What shall I do next?

You could try downloading the Win7 driver directly from the Realtek site. On the page click on "High Definition Audio Codecs".
Check "I accept" and then "next".
In the column named "Description" find the file named README and download it. That has the instructions for installing or updating.
In the column named "Description" select your operating system and whether it is 32bits or 64bits from the top 2 choices in the list.
In the column named "Download" click on one of the server names to download the driver.


However as I said your audio should be working now regardless of whether or not you can install a Realtek audio driver, so there seems to be something wrong with the Windows installation and I doubt that installing a Realtek driver will fix it. If you reinstall Windows be sure to install the Intel Chipset driver first. That one might help Windows find the integrated audio hardware.