Troubleshooting Sound Card issues on a Toshiba Satellite

While the Toshiba Satellite line of laptops are fairly high-quality and packing some reasonably high-end components, they aren’t exactly perfect. One of the most common issues I’ve come across involves the sound card. For some reason, after coming out of sleep mode, the system will occasionally forget that it can play sound. The card simply stops working, and nothing -not even system sounds- will play through either the speakers or the headphones.

Believe it or not, this is likelier to be a software issue than it is a hardware glitch(though this might not always be the case). Were it a hardware issue, it’s not likely that many of the fixes detailed here would work – the hardware itself would need to be repaired. Note that all of these fixes assume you’ve got Windows 7 installed, and were attempted on a Satellite P75o- though they should work fine with virtually any product in the line.

1. Disable and Re-Enable

This is probably the simplest fix. Simply open up the control panel and click on “Sound.” on the “playback” screen, disable whatever audio devices you happen to be using, then re-enable them. Hit “test” to make sure they’re working. If you hear sound, you’re golden. If not, try the second step.

2. Restart

When something on a PC doesn’t work, this is pretty much the go-to solution. Try restarting your system. If this doesn’t fix things, then you’re probably looking at a driver malfunction. If that’s the case, move to step 3.

3. Reinstall the Drivers

Visit the downloads section of Toshiba’s website, and figure out which of the devices they list is yours. Once you’ve done that, it’s a simple matter of downloading the sound card drivers and running the installation process. That should fix the problem. If not, well…it’s likely a hardware issue, or else some other software you’ve got is interfering with things. Either way, you’re probably going to need to bring it in for repairs.

Image Credits: [Notebook Check]