Little Robyn =

I have a similar problem. When I start up my laptop, I never know if the sound will happen or not. The icon at the bottom is there on the sound days but not on the silence days.

A common cause of something that flip-flops between working and not working is that recent versions of Windows (especially XP and Vista) always check during boot to see if everything is good, and if an "error" is found, System Restore automatically goes back to an earlier setup.

If an earlier System setup is in the archive, and has a bad driver, the driver that doesn't work gets re-installed. While the system is running, even without rebooting, the OS may discover that a driver isn't working, and may substitute a new "default" driver that works.

The "defect" that caused System Restore to bring back an old version may not necessarily be the driver that's causing the problem you see. A System Restore is mostly an "all or nothing" replacement of all the settings. When it goes to System Restore to fix a "real boot problem" it may restore something that contains another "minor error."

The fix that sometimes works is, when the sound is working, simply turn of System Restore. Turning it off DELETES all the older backup versions of the system setup. Fix the sound problem, if necessary, then turn System Restore back on, and reboot. When you reboot with System Restore turned back on, a new backup copy of the system setup will be saved, and then the current setup will be the only one saved.

If there's another error that was causing an old version to be brought back, the OS won't be able to bring it back, so it will look for another way to fix it. Either it will succeed and you'll never know that it did anything, or at least then you'll know why it kept going back to previous setup versions so that you can do something about the real problem.

John