Headphone issue on netbooks

[Little-Miss]

Ok...

 

If the headphones are plugged in during boot-up then audio only works on the headphones and not the laptop speakers, even if the headphones are unplugged.

 

If the headphones are not plugged in during boot-up I get sound out of speakers only, plugging in headphones makes no difference.

 

It's a Toshiba NB300. They came with Win7 on but im running XP, don't know if that is the issue...any ideas?

[Little-Miss]

bumpy.....

[FN-GM]

Have you tried updating the drivers?

[sted]

as above i had similar with full laptops windows installs its own (realtek i believe) driver but that ignores the headphone port installing the driver from hp solved it

[vikpaw]

I remember some Toshiba laptops that had to have a special driver, also there might be a setting in BIOS that needs configuring. Basically, with the correct driver, it gives you a little icon in the systray, i seem to recall it was call HDsomething_or_other, anyway, this auto-detects when you plug headphones in, and even flashes a little message up to say it's detected a jack plug in.

 

Try windows updates and if that fails, do a specific search for that model. I reckon if you revert to W7 you'll find it works fine too.

[vikpaw]

A quick googling shows it is a realtek HD audio thingymedoodle.

Have you considered running Win7 and then a virtual XP as they recommend? Or would that overcomplicate things for your users. We were just advised to do that at a M$ conference, because we're running both clients and using XP screws up profiles. Not sure if that will sort your driver issue, depends on how the virtualisation is done.

[FN-GM]

How did you get one Little-Miss?

[AngryTechnician]

This is classic XP driver behaviour on newer machines with HD audio chipsets. We saw exactly the same thing on a lot of our newer RM machines before we went to Windows 7.

 

I believe the problem is down to the XP audio subsystem not supporting the internal notifications that are meant to switch the audio output from headphones to speakers. On older chipsets this was controlled by the hardware, but newer chipsets delegate this to software because the speakers and headphones can be used to play different audio streams independently. We never found a way around it, I'm afraid.