Thinkpads Forum

Have a T61 w/Vista Business, 1.8 Ghz Duo, 3Gb Ram. Last week I did the Windows updates which included a new driver for the Soundmax. After the updates I noticed my sound was gone. Tried rolling back the driver, still nothing. In Device Manager, it says Soundmax "working properly." In the windows tray, if I roll cursor over the speaker it recognizes the Soundmax card in the pop up window and says volume 0. If I open the mixer it says "no audio device is installed." I have tried unistalling drivers to death, tried PC Doctor and get a error response that I have no idea what it means. I took it to my IT folks at work and after a few hrs with it they have no idea and said I should re-install Vista. I called Lenovo support, they said it's a Vista issue and to contact MS. Contacted MS support, got a pleasant but hard to understand Indian guy for about an hour having me unistall and install drivers, rebooting and checking services.msc. His final advice was to re-install Vista.....arrrrrgggghhh!!!! Even tried a few different register fix programs. Any one have any ideas???? At least ones that don't involve re-installing Vista? Just got the XP downgrade disks from Lenovo, seriously considering downgrading till Vista has more bugs worked out....

Sorry to hear of your problems. I don't have any specific info to resolve your problem but probably some other people will chime in shortly with more ideas.
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I do have a couple of suggestions though. First, for the future, in general, it probably is not a good idea to install hardware drivers for a Thinkpad from windows update. As a general rule (with some exceptions that need not concern us now) it's better to get them direct from Lenovo.

Second, you might try installing SP1 for Vista. Who knows, it just might resolve your problem and I think would be worth trying before doing a clean install. It is currently available on the Web and from windows update, but you will have to search for how to find the files or how to tweak your computer to make it install from windows update at this time. But it is not hard and the info is out there.

try to get some drivers from lenovo to see if that solves the problem. I guess that's the next logical step. You might need to reinstall the HD Audio drivers (not SoundMax which is another driver) to get it to work again.

The windows update thing never caused any problems for me. Drivers from WU are from Lenovo but Microsoft certifies them once they deem them to be stable and fit for WU.