The audio output of a motherboard
has suddenly stopped. That is,
no program that produces audio to
the little green female connector in
the back -- games, Windows Media Player,
whatever -- can be heard. And I've
determined that the speakers are okay.
The motherboard is a few years old,
but young enough to be running XP.
I don't know the exact circumstances
of how it failed, except that the
person using the box claims not to
have been messing around with anything
in particular. Simply rebooting didn't
help. Is this likely to be an
electronics failure? Or should I call
in an XP genius?

--
Charles Packer
http://cpacker.org/whatnews
mailboxATcpacker.org

On May 18, 4:34 am, mail... (AT) cpacker (DOT) org wrote:
Your symptoms can go either way, but fortunately it's easy enough to
fix in either case.

If it's an XP problem, then most likely it's a driver issue.
Check the device manager for any question marks, Xes or exclamation
marks.

The second possibility is that the audio is disabled in the BIOS, as
bioses vary, I cannot give you an exact path, but in general the bios
is entered by pressing delete, f1, f2, f10, or the spacebar during the
reboot cycle.

The last possibility is that the onboard sound is indeed toast, in
which case, disable the onboard sound in the bios, and get a pci
soundcard.