Sound disabled with no speakers

[Sean]

Desktops wise, we've only installed Windows on Dell OPtiplex 760s and 755 so far so I don't know if its a general 'feature' of the OS or perculiar to the sound card on those models, but we are finding that when there are no headphones or speakers plugged in the sound mixer in the tray gets a red 'x' on it and many programs report that there is no sound hardware installed

Now, I can kind of see why it makes sence to disable sound output when there's no sound output device attached but it also means that many apps that don't absolutely need sound throw errors all over the place or just refuse to run at all!

So is there a way to get windows to happily output to the sound port when there's nothing attached - like it used to in XP?

So far we have found Mission Maker and Crystal Rainforest 2: Mission control (ancient though it is) throw errors everytime they try to play sounds

While Movie Maker live doesn't seem to want to output sound unless you had speakers plugged in when you logged onto windows to being with!

[mullet_man]

I had this problem with a few Lenovo laptops and machines, try downloading the sound drivers from the Dell website, rather than letting Windows 7 install the pre built ones that are installed during setup.

[Sean]

tried a more specific sound driver and its seems to have helped a lot, thanks for that

Seemzs obvious that you check for updated drivers but, as I say, it kinda looked like that was how Windows 7 was going to work by design...

Glad it isn't - thanks again!

[lickydog]

We picked this up also on a Freedom 2 media book, and again on some Dells 360/760 (sans audio drivers) flash content would either not load correctly of have weird button failures unless a headphone was plugged in before launching the application - with Abacus Evolve and BBC Active software.

[Ric_]

I've noticed this feature but never had it report a missing hardware device. I suspect that the automagically installed drivers weren't quite a correct fit.

 

All my builds have been through SCCM following the injection of the manufacturer's drivers into the OS deployment gubbin.