Audio Input/Output Missing in Device Manager After Trying to Update Drivers Because of Microphone Issues

  • Thread starter Thread starter bradmoose
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bradmoose

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Hello everybody, I'm terrible with electronics so I apologize if this post is a bit confusing or if I use some of the wrong vocabulary, but I hope everything makes sense. I hope to break the problem down into a few key points:


I have a laptop which I used to play videogames all of the time, but it hadn't been used for around 4 months or something.


1. When I came back to use it yesterday, the microphone wasn't working as intended. I would plug in my headset, and despite the fact that my port recognized the headset speakers, the microphone wasn't being recognized. I opened up my sound settings and went into the recording devices or whatever the tab is called, and there was no headset mic that was being recognized, even when I clicked "show disabled/disconnected." I tried using another headset and had the same problem, and tested both of them on another computer and found the headsets to work fine in another computer, just not the one I want them to work on. I was stuck using my in-line microphone which is pretty terrible.


2. After this, I tried to restart my computer and mess around with some settings but still nothing worked. In order to fix this, the next day (today) I decided to try my luck at updating or reinstalling my audio drivers from RealTek. I went to their website and downloaded the installer, which had me uninstall my current drivers and then reinstall everything. After doing this however, I completely lost access to my sound icon/settings, and lost my sound mixer as well. I still could hear, but I had to edit volume manually in each specific tab, and the sound was much lower quality than before. I tried reinstalling the realtek again, but this time I had a red x on top of my sound icon and didn't have any sound on my computer. I tried to fix this but failed, and ultimately said screw it and just factory reset my computer since I didn't really have much on it that I cared about anyways. This fixed it somewhat as I was able to get sound again, but again my microphone didn't work, so being an idiot I decided to use the exact same fix again with realtek, and this gave me another red x on my sound icon/settings. I then factory reset again which is when the real problems started.


3. After factory resetting twice, things got kinda messy. My computer still had the red x after the factory reset, and when I went into device manager again, I saw that my old audio driver titled "Audio input/outputs" didn't exist anymore. I still had the game/controller audio one, but one of my drivers seemed to completely dissapear, and I had no sound coming out of my computer at all. I checked my sound settings, and had absolutely nothing in my recording devices tab, even when I ticked "show disabled" and only had 2 things in my audio output tab, but both of those said they were disconnected. Basically I have no sound on my computer and am missing a driver. Anybody have any ideas on how to help?

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