Hey

After I reinstalled Windows on my laptop a good year ago (Windows 7) I started having audio issues. The same issues are here with Windows 8 but I've managed to make it a bit better.

Basically when I reinstalling Windows 7, after booting the PC the speaker audio would disappear after about 10 mins. A reboot would give my audio back but the audio jack works.

A few weeks ago I installed Windows 8 - same issue - but I downloaded the driver from the manufacturer's website and now it acts differently.

The audio works again for 10 minutes or so, but then pausing WMP and playing fixes it. Also enabling and disabling audio enchancements fixes the issue too. And also reinitialising audio in LFS fixes the audio, but after 10 minutes it goes again

Any idea what to do? It's an Acer Aspire One 522 laptop. Any suggestions are welcome

I suggest taking a good look at energy saving settings

Quote from PoVo :

Also enabling and disabling audio enchancements fixes the issue too.

What are these and do you need them? Is it maybe some vendor-specific crap that stopped working because some update changed the way something works internally in Windows? (I remember fixing an odd audio issue on a laptop a while back. I eventually solved the problem by downgrading the audio driver to a pretty antiquated version I happened to find in Realtek's public FTP directory )

They are Windows audio enchancements that are disabled but you can enable them to get bass boost, etc. I enable and disable them and the audio comes back

Try the website of the manufacturer

So I looked at the power settings, nothing much to be changed - disabled any kind of power savings in the advanced options = same issue.

Looked at manufacturer's website, downloaded drivers, reinstalled them = same issue.

Searched for latest drivers, installed them = same issue. I looked through a thread on audio on Microsoft's issue, another person had the same issue with the same laptop but no fix was mentioned.

It looks as if it's a hardware fault but it can't be - reinitialising audio in LFS fixes the sound temporarily?

The audio card is called "Conexant HD Audio CX20584".

Honestly?

Can't say I've heard of it.

External sound card? They're pretty cheap if you get a USB one; I've got two

Are you running 64 or 32 bit windows ?

Are you using the laptop screen or an external monitor ?

Quote from Racer X NZ :

Are you running 64 or 32 bit windows ?

Are you using the laptop screen or an external monitor ?

64 bit.

Laptop screen.

You might want to try to boot a Linux live distro and check if it works there. It the sound always cuts out after the same amount of time, it's very likely some odd power saving issue.

Same issue on Fedora

I'm going to try a 32bit linux distro now because when I bought the laptop, it had Win 7 32bit and the issue was never there.

EDIT: Well it seems it disappears in 32bit operating systems too.

Just noticed that plugging in a headset and unplugging it makes the audio work again.

This only happens after I installed a driver that I downloaded, it didn't happen with the default driver provided by Windows

Could this be some sort of power saving issue? Perhaps the driver incorrectly powers the sound chip off and some action such as start of playback wakes the chip back up. The official Windows driver might be dumb enough to not know how to put the chip to sleep so it doesn't do that.

No idea, I've tried many versions of drivers and they all have the same issue

Checked Windows power settings and everything is set to performance.