No sound on T61

[Donal]

I've had this laptop on a shelf for a few months. I have iTunes on it along with a full load of music, so I am confident that it at one time did have sound. Something has happened . There is no sound from the onboard speakers and when I connect external speakers there is nothing. I've uninstalled and re-installed drivers, re-installed the system. Nada. I've done a search on the forum and found that others have had this problem with the T61, but don't recall a straight out solution that anybody found. I seem to recall that this problem happens across operating systems also, so it prolly wouldn't do much good to try a different system. Has anybody made any headway with this?

[RealBlackStuff]

Sometimes people inadvertently press the speakers-OFF button...

[Donal]

Where would this "speakers-OFF button" be located? I'm familiar with the mute/volume up and down buttons and the wireless switch on the front. All my indicators say I've got sound, but there is nothing from the onboard speakers or external speakers or headphones.

[rkawakami]

Besides the hardware mute/volume buttons, check the Windows controls. There should be a speaker icon in the System Tray; double-click it and verify that both the Master and Wave volume sliders are mid-range and the Mute buttons un-checked. If there's not a Tray icon, then use Control Panel/Sound and Audio Devices.

[Donal]

Ok. Been investigating and think I have found the problem. I went thru device manager and checked drivers. My device drivers are totally screwed. For some reason, I have a lot of items that when I click on the properties, it says no driver installed. But when I check another section of properties, it will show as the driver is installed. Don't know why this would be. Maybe it is somehow connected to Vista no longer being supported?

[Donal]

The disc I used to install the current os may not be a good disc. It's a burned disc, not retail. I have some Lenovo discs for Vista, but they won't install on this machine for some reason. I think they came with a T400 I bought some time back. Thinking I need to either pick up a retail Vista disc, or maybe install windows 7. Real tempted to try windows 7.

[Donal]

Well, it now has Windows 7 installed. At this point, there is still no sound, but it hasn't done the Windows update yet. I'm hoping it'll end up with all the drivers it needs and installed correctly.

[Donal]

Just did a check on some of the system devices that didn't have drivers with Vista, and at this point, some I checked don't have drivers, yet, with Windows 7. Updater is still working, but it does not look promising. And it is looking like it did under Vista. Looks to be making sound, but none heard. We'll see how it goes.

[RealBlackStuff]

Did you take the machine apart and not reconnect the speaker-wires?
The connector is located top-left of the RAM-slots, under the palmrest.

[Donal]

I've not had it apart, but thanks for cluing me in to that. I suspect I'll end up checking it out.

[Donal]

Something going on with this laptop, and I'm thinking that I don't have the skill set to figure it out. Maybe someone on here will have an idea what's going on. After W7 installed, I clicked on windows update and after it collected it's info, it had 192 updates to download and install. Of the 192 updates, 89 failed. I downloaded a bunch of thinkpad updates and installed those. The behavour on the sound remains the same. I did notice that the picture of the volume controls that appear on the LCD screen shows that the one for the system is inactive, while the one for Firefox and the other one show activity in response to sound from youtube vid. And I did take note that my volume up and down buttons do work. I took the palmrest off to check the wires and all looked to be in order. There were some small wires plugged into a connector just where RBS said. Anyhow, that's where it is right now. If anybody has any ideas or suggestions, I'm wide open.

[Donal]

Read a post somewhere that said something about an audio setting in bios, under security, and under I/O port access, if I'm recalling correctly. Anybody know anything about this? I looked on both my T61s and found nothing that looked to be audio. Found microphone. The other T61 has same bios and it has sound.

[JBUK]

You could try booting from a Linux CD/USB to see if it is a driver or a hardware issue.

[Neil]

While rather rare on a T61, it's entirely possible for the sound hardware, the chip itself, to fail, or become damaged. I've owned a couple of ThinkPads where that is exactly what has happened. They just were not T61 models.

[Donal]

If I were to boot from a Linux disc , how would that work? I downloaded a linux disc img and burned it to disc and booted from it. There was no sound when I was booted on the linux disc. What would that indicate? Or is there something else I should do.
How would I determine if it is the chip itself? And if it is the chip, what is the remedy?
I have a retail(I think) Windows XP disc . I've thought about installing that. If I went that route, would I have to change the bios?

[brchan]

If the linux distro also has no sound when playing from audio or youtube, then you most likely have a hardware problem. Since you said that even that plugging in external speakers do not work, the motherboard is probably the culprit.

[Donal]

That's kinda what I figured early on, but was really hoping otherwise. Guess it'll get used for parts.