X201 No Sound problem and solution (OpenAL the culprit)
Posted: Tue Jan 07, 2014 4:26 pm
I just want to post this to make it useful for any other having the same problem.
Problem: My X201 suddenly stop playing any sound at all via the hardware speakers. Sound via the headset was working.
OS: Windows 7 Professional - 64 bits.
Making sure hardware was OK: To make sure there were no hardware problems I restarted the machine pressing F1 without lifting my finger from the key to see if the "beep" sound goes off as a signal of the key being pressed several times waiting for a key buffer overflow BEEP. When the sound went off (BEEP
) I felt a sense of relief that the hardware was working.
After reviewing the last installations or changes in configurations I found that the problem started when I installed a modified version of FlightGear Flight Simulator ( http://wiki.flightgear.org/FlightGear )
FlightGear uses OpenAl (Open Audio Library) - http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAL
what the installation does is to have FlightGear and OpenAl as two different software packages.
I uninstalled FlightGear and OpenAl and then uninstalled the internal sound cards drivers via Device Manager and searched for them again, once automatically installed I restarted Windows and everything went back to normal.
With that said and from my experience, I have no one else to blame but OpenAl.
Why and how to solve the problem without uninstalling FlightGear and OpenAl? I have no idea and have no time and not enough knowledge in sound drivers to find that out, sorry
Again, I wanted to post this in the forum just in case any other one runs into the same problem.
Problem: My X201 suddenly stop playing any sound at all via the hardware speakers. Sound via the headset was working.
OS: Windows 7 Professional - 64 bits.
Making sure hardware was OK: To make sure there were no hardware problems I restarted the machine pressing F1 without lifting my finger from the key to see if the "beep" sound goes off as a signal of the key being pressed several times waiting for a key buffer overflow BEEP. When the sound went off (BEEP
) I felt a sense of relief that the hardware was working. After reviewing the last installations or changes in configurations I found that the problem started when I installed a modified version of FlightGear Flight Simulator ( http://wiki.flightgear.org/FlightGear )
FlightGear uses OpenAl (Open Audio Library) - http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAL
what the installation does is to have FlightGear and OpenAl as two different software packages.
I uninstalled FlightGear and OpenAl and then uninstalled the internal sound cards drivers via Device Manager and searched for them again, once automatically installed I restarted Windows and everything went back to normal.
With that said and from my experience, I have no one else to blame but OpenAl.
Why and how to solve the problem without uninstalling FlightGear and OpenAl? I have no idea and have no time and not enough knowledge in sound drivers to find that out, sorry
Again, I wanted to post this in the forum just in case any other one runs into the same problem.