Laptop without sound and no apparent software problem

[Rudiger]

Hi,
The sound suddenly disappeared on my old Dell Inspiron 1200 laptop recently. There is no sound from either the onboard speakers or from the headphone socket, though device manager says there's no problem.
It has a SigmaTel onboard audio chip like most Dell laptops. Having reinstalled the drivers, installed new drivers, reinstalled Windows XP, and finally wiped the whole system and reinstalled everything from scratch I think I've eradicated the possibility of a software problem.
Since the warranty's done and I don't want to pay someone to fix something which could be relatively simple I opened it up to see if the problem was obvious, like a loose cable or some such, but to no avail.
If anyone has any idea as to how to fix this I'd be very grateful as living without all the music and videos I have on my laptop is getting annoying
Thanks.

 

[Rudiger]

cheers, don't have a volume knob but tried the fn+volume buttons
got the newest drivers from dell, and loaded the bios defaults, still nothing.

probably just have to get an external sound sound card, been looking at getting a surround sound set of speakers anyway.

the thing that confuses me is that if the sound chip'd just died, surely it'd say something in the device manager? maybe not, it's never told me when old hard drives or cd drives on my desktop system have started to fail

 

[Rudiger]

another question i just though of actually, is whether there's any point sending it off to dell to see if they can fix it? the wee sound sticks are really cheap, but i suppose they'd be quite prone to breaking, especially as i've used and broken wifi adapters that just plug straight in the usb ports. would it be easily fixed or would it require a whole new motherboard and thus be too expensive to bother with?
ta.