[ltsb, 1607] HP 620 laptop and Windows 10 = no sound.

[Koldov]

We have just had a refresh of our teacher laptops and I've taken the opportunity to go site-wide Windows 10 LTSB 1607 (x64).

 

I was ready to scrap the very old teacher laptops as they were beginning to fail and slow down (2GB ram and HDD), previous OS was Win 7 Pro (x86).

 

However the powers that be have decided that H.L.T.A.'s in each year group needs laptops now to cover the teacher's PPA time etc.

 

Obviously there is no money in the budget for this and therefore I have been tasked with making this happen with the old teacher laptops.

 

I have spent a lot of time time pulling them apart and making a few good ones out of the various ones with failed screens, usb ports or wi-fi issues and adding the extra 2GB of ram in from the ones I scrap.

 

Eventually I managed to get a few half decent ones up and running (still run like dog sh*te but honestly they don't need to be top spec for a bit of Smartboard, Word, Powerpoint or Youtube)...

 

Then one of them came back to me with no sound (I checked and none of them had sound)! I hadn't even noticed in all the installing of the OS, various USB insertion/removals or install prompts, that there had been no sound (although while working over the summer I had loud heavy rock playing most of the time)!

 

The other common issue was that the video replay/streaming Youtube was extremely choppy.

 

It appeared not to be a driver issue as such, although not supported by HP for Win 10 (or even 8), the Microsoft drivers were installed and appeared to be ok.

 

It turns out after a little Googling that the fix was a tick box in MSCONFIG > BOOT > ADVANCED OPTIONS > MAXIMUM MEMORY (showing 4096 as max).

 

However, this has the unfortunate effect of actually reducing the amount of available RAM! It appears to 'lose' over 1GB and obviously that is a big hit on an already struggling laptop (out of 4GB - 2.90GB available).

 

Now I have no clue why this would be the case, but I am probably going to go with some sort of Southbridge/GFX/Soundcard x86 architecture limitation (only because I have seen similar issues on other Southbridge chips and trying to install a 64bit OS) and that with onboard GFX some RAM is lost to that. Also the fact that it has taken it to just under 3GB I think points to an x86 issue.

 

Having said that, HP does support and have drivers for Win 7 (x64)... So maybe not!

 

EDIT: Tried those.... no change...

 

 

 

Edited September 14, 2018 by Koldov

[Arthur]

The other common issue was that the video replay/streaming Youtube was extremely choppy.

h264ify may help with that if you use Chrome.

 

Try h264ify if YouTube videos stutter, take up too much CPU, eat battery life, or make your laptop hot.

 

By default, YouTube streams VP8/VP9 encoded video. However, this can cause problems with less powerful machines because VP8/VP9 is not typically hardware accelerated.

 

In contrast, H.264 is commonly hardware accelerated by GPUs, which usually means smoother video playback and reduced CPU usage. h264ify makes YouTube stream H.264 videos instead of VP8/VP9 videos.

 

I've taken the opportunity to go site-wide Windows 10 LTSB 1607 (x64).

Have you tried the latest version of Windows 10 on one of these old laptops? There's a chance it may not have the same issues as LTSB.

 

Alternatively you could wait until the next LTSC version of Windows 10 is released which will be based on v1809 and be more up-to-date.

[TheElusiveOrangeButton]

I imagine you've sorted this by now, but we had this exact issue with a bunch of HP 450 G4s, and the fix for us was to update the BIOS.

[yesme]

I have the same problem, When I check "Max Memory" the sound works but I get "2.90 usable", Did you fix it?

[Koldov]

No, unfortunately not...

 

I have just left them limping along with 2.90GB RAM, we have upgraded the estate laptops recently and so these are hardly ever used (maybe the odd lesson for a supply teacher who just needs to show a Powerpoint or something).

 

My other option was to leave the system using 4GB (with no sound) and purchase some sort of USB sound card, but I decided not to because you know... teachers...

[yesme]

Thanks for your reply, I think I will consider buying USB sound card.