At the mooment this is a placeholder post. Ever since I purchased my new computer, I’m having intermittent audio problems where it stops working for no reason. This seems to be quite common, and the usual fix is to reboot, or sleep and wake your computer.
I still think it’s a driver issue, as Realtek Audio Drivers appear to be rubbish, however I’m trying to work on developing a fix for it so it stops happening. It’s something simplistic, but ridiculously annoying when you lose sound to your computer for no reason.
My older motherboards have had no issue with sound dropping once, but they also had dedicated Realtek Audio Apps, my new one appears to use the built in windows drivers which for whatever reason must upset it. Or something is conflicting and I don’t know yet.
Rebooting fixes the issue, but I’m trying to determine whilst it’s not working
This is the latest thing I’ve tried which “seems” to be working so far (20/03/26)
- Go to device manager (start – run – devmgmt.msc)
- Expand sound – video and game controllers
- Right click on all, uninstall device
- If any produce an error about “cannot uninstall this device because its descendants refused the request) see below:
- Open services (start – run – services.msc)
- Stop the Windows audio service (right click – stop)
- Stop the audio endpoint builder service (right click – stop)
- Delete the remaining devices
- Download the device driver uninstaller from guru3d (or techpowerup)
- Open the application, choose the sound driver option in top right (mine was audio / Realtek)
- Choose the first option (clean up and reboot or something like that)
- Let the computer restart
Try again to see if the Audio is better. It seems to be working for me now. Plus the benefit is windows detects it as “SPDIF Interface”, previously it was just a “Realtek – USB” interface or something like that. If sound is still disabled at this point you can try reinstalling drivers from the manufacturers website. Mine picked up straight away
It could still be gunk, but I’ll keep posting here anything I find useful. It could help others figure out a permanent solution
