Thinkpad 390 sound failure

[Stuff]

I recently bought a 390 and it was working a treat apart from an error 270 on boot (it's just the clock so it doesn't matter) but about a day in I was playing some Doom 95 when for some reason the computer's sound just entirely died. I can't be sure but it might've stopped as the level BGM ended and normally would loop. I've tried fiddling with the outputs in control panel (the Thinkpad runs Win98) but to no avail. There's no MIDI, no CD audio, no Windows chimes. How do I make it work again? I'm not sure if somehow I was the first person to explode the speakers in 24 years or what, which I doubt is the case as they're pretty quiet anyway and there wasn't any rasping or popping when they were working. Please help.

[t43_guy]

I have a T43 with similar issues except they're intermittent in mine and now I can only hear the right audio channel. In your case it looks like a hardware problem as you already tried adjusting software settings and such, the problem could either be your speakers or the audio subsystem on the board. I don't know much about the 240, does it have an audio jack for sound output? you could plug in some headphones and try if that works, if it is the case then maybe your speakers are dead or aren't properly connected.

Something else you can try is to remove the speakers from the laptop and measure the resistance of their coils with a multimeter, for a stereo speaker you have two coils and measuring the resistance from both terminals of each coil should display a short or almost 0 ohms, if that doesn't happen your speakers blew up, although make sure you are doing the proper measurement to avoid false conclusions. I have two set of speakers for T43 which both have the left channel blown up, maybe that's a common issue on old thinkpads or perhaps given the age of your system the audio circuitry is just dead.

[SMA]

I'd say you should change the bios battery. It is a standard CR1220 battery.

To rule out any windows issues, go to bios setup, select change date/time and try to set month to 22, this should make it beep at you.

[axur-delmeria]

Given its age, hardware failure isn't unexpected. I've seen a newer laptop (Pentium 4 IIRC) where the audio device isn't detected at all and doesn't show up in Device Manager.