I have an ASUS X75A laptop, with built-in sound card (a proprietary VIA model that ASUS uses; it shows up as a "dev8446"). It came with Win8 pre-installed and I applied the free upgrade to Win 8.1. Everything worked fine for a while, then one day the volume indicator in the task bar had a big red X over it, and claimed I had no audio devices installed.
The Windows sound troubleshooter can't figure out the problem -- i.e. the proper Services start up and are running.
The device drivers are all up to date and none of them show a problem.
The Sound panel in Control Panel is checked off to show disabled/disconnected devices. Says there are no input or output devices present.
The sound card is not turned off in the BIOS, in fact there is no place in the BIOS to do that.
I don't have any malware.
Nothing else in Windows is behaving oddly.
I don't recall installing anything interesting (or anything at all, actually) right before it happened, except for a MS automatic update.
I tried a restore point when it first happened, and that didn't help. The relevant ones have long since been overwritten.
Now here's the interesting part:
I got a cheap USB external sound card, and the same thing happens -- it's recognized, the drivers load, and it doesn't show up as an audio device in the Sound panel. Since I would rather get a root canal than have to reinstall Windows and all my software (I despise Win 8 and do not use Metro apps -- I've tweaked it so the Desktop loads automatically and I can use it like Win 7 or XP -- this means I have to reinstall everything if I do a repair installation from the recovery partition), I tried connecting a Bluetooth headset. No dice. The headset is recognized properly as a Bluetooth device; the properties indicate the system knows it's a headset -- and it does not show up as an audio device, so I still have no sound! I even tried to reroute the sound to my iPhone (there's software for that) and that doesn't work either. The connection is established, but it's not recognized as being an audio output, so it doesn't play sound.
I repaired computers professionally for almost 20 years, and have never seen this problem.
Can you think of anything else I can try doing besides reinstalling Windows?
