t61 sound missing -- what a surprise

[MichaelEber]

I received my preconfigured system with XP SP2 and the Thinkpad utilities on it. When I received it I did not have any sound. After running update until my face turned blue, I saw the article here about installing micrososoft update KB888111.

I removed the SoundMAX driver, read all of the information on the website for KB888111, then ran the installation of the fix.

It ran the new hardware utility -- which failed because it could not find any software for the hardware. (How brilliant to provide a driver install without a freaking INF file!!!)

So I ran the KB888111 install once again. When the hardware detect wizard ran, I ran the setup for the SoundMAX driver for XP SP2, then I killed the new hardware wizard.

With this done I was told that I needed to reboot my system. I select Reboot Now and during shutdown I actually heard sound for the first time in a week of head-banging on a brick wall.

Once the system came back up, however, I now have no sound whatsoever, once again. What a cluster....

So now what do I do to get a usable system???

[bill bolton]

I received my preconfigured system with XP SP2 and the Thinkpad utilities on it.

Just to confirm....... you received this system directly from Lenovo?

Cheers,

Bill B.

[erbbysam]

I have the same exact problem, it started a few weeks ago saying that soundmax needed to be reinstalled because the hardware configuration had changed. So I looked around online, unintalled soundmax, wouldn't reinstall saying that I have missing hardware.

I ran the thinkpad update utility and then ran the soundmax utility again and it actually worked!

Now.... my computer bluescreened randomly like it does sometimes when it's loading up a game like cod4 and I restarted it, had the same "soundmax needs to be reinstalled because the hardware configuration had changed" message waiting for me with no sound when Windows came back up. Nothing that I can do/find will fix this? This seems to be a common problem with soundmax drivers, you'd think they would fix this or at the very least offer a real driver, not just an install package?

Just a few things I've tried:
1)the soundmax driver always says "Installation Failed! The audio driver files do not support your computer hardware" regardless of what I do.
2)system restore doesn't find a difference between versions of my system with and without sound.(haven't tried a full restore from backup, not worth it yet
3)my system still detects "bluetooth handsfree audio device" so I wonder if that may have something to do with it, but haven't found anything online
4)I've tried installing every "high def" audio patch that I could find and restarting, all to no avail
5)also installing the correct intel chipset, didn't work either.
6)thinkpad update and windows update tell me that my system is up to date

edit... I also have T61, bought it mid July and haven't had a major problem until this
edit2... found this:
http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/mess ... ead.id=283

[MichaelEber]

I received my preconfigured system with XP SP2 and the Thinkpad utilities on it.

Just to confirm....... you received this system directly from Lenovo?

Cheers,

Bill B.

Billl

I am not sure how my company gets our laptops. I believe they come from a 3rd party reseller. However, the bottom of my laptop is labled with Windows XP Lenovo so I would guess that yes, it came from you that way.

I got tired of trying to get an old OS to recognize modern hardware and installed Vista on the machine. Voila! Sound.