Why isn't my sound working?

[pocaracas]

Everyone knows (yeah right) that if you need Realtek drivers, you need to get them from the source:
http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/

As you can see, after you've clicked on their disclaimer, they have a single installer for win7, 8 and 10...
Don't let M$ tell you that you're using the correct driver.
Also, forget about getting drivers from the ASUS site... those are good for motherboard-related stuff... but, for sound and graphics, you need to go to the source.
I once went to the source on my old touchpad, too.... that worked great!
Sadly, it doesn't work so great on this new laptop... FFS, why cull a touchpad with crappy drivers?!... well... it's not really the drivers, it's the action that happens when I triple-click. The touchpad handles it fine... the software won't let me choose - either you want Cortana, or you don't want anything. F**K Cortana, I want middle-mouse-click. 2009 drivers perfectly worked for that... 2016 ones don't - where's the sense in that?

[Iroscato]

I really dunno why you old bastards hate Windows 10 so much, I think it's great. Never had an issue with it

[dyresand]

sounds like a windows audio service error.

[Defender]

Try the following:

1) Uninstall the driver completely and install a newer driver (there's probably an update to your driver and the error might be a bug)

2) Try to update your machine

3) Avoid third-party driver updating tools (there's simply no need to update your drivers without the existence of a bug/security issue)

[brewer]

Replace hearing aid batteries.

[Aegon]

I never responded to this thread because my sound just randomly started working again....which actually ticked me off even more, since THERE WAS NO LOGICAL REASON FOR IT TO START WORKING AGAIN.

See you all in this thread when it inevitably stops working again

[Autumnlicious]

There's a logical reason - you don't know it yet. We have yet to determine if it's just a software problem (very common) or a hardware one. When hardware fails, it usually just up and dies (critical fault) or has a period of increasing faults before dying.

Software bugs are more common and can really create a rather confusing user experience. In some cases an Event Log or other logs will show something obvious. In other cases the time to diagnose and fix would well exceed the time for a complete reinstall. Sometimes relentlessly searching Google and crawling through various different keyword/context selections can give you enough information to form a working understanding of what's wrong.

Thankfully, the advent of cloud based services has made it possible to make thinner backups. It's easier to do a clean slate when you don't need to copy as much data yourself. If it's a software problem, you may be lucky to confirm it by successfully getting sound on a Linux Live USB image - chances of encountering the same bug are slim (I can think of various exceptions...).