I appreciate your reply. I tried to give you a thumbs up, but it wouldn't allow me to. I should have explained, I have been working on this problem for over a week. It happened just after I reset the notebook by redownloading and installing Windows 11. The sound had been working well before this. I tried to reload Windows without erasing all my local files, but it would not work -- I could only boot Windows in Safe Mode. I finally "bit the bullet" and did a clean download and install. When I first did that, the audio was working. Just about 15 minutes later, Windows did an automatic update, and the audio quit working and I could no longer adjust the brightness of my display.
I have gone through all the troubleshooters both from HP and from Microsoft. They all indicate no problems. I ran the UEFI hardware tests and found that the sound card and the speakers do, in fact, work. They played the test tone perfectly.
But once I start Windows again, there is no sound. When I pull up Control Panel > Sound, it shows the Realtek Audio Speaker and it is selected as default. It also shows a Realtek audio for headphones and that are unplugged. If I right-click on the speaker icon and select Test, I get an error message that says "Failed to play test tone".
If I plug headphones into the jack, it shifts the "Headphone" device to default, but the headphones also do not play any sound and also give the same error message.
I have spent hours on the phone with MS Windows support. They ran through everything they could think of and then recommended I call HP. I called HP, paid for a month of SmartFriend support, and spent hours last night working with a gentleman in India. He remoted into my laptop and went through all the same checks I had already done, tried to download and install drivers from HP, Microsoft, and Intel. All failed to produce sound. We were able to finally get the display driver fixed so I can now adjust the brightness of my display.
The service technician said he had been doing this type of support for 17 years and had never run into such a stubborn problem before. He finally tried a Restore Point recovery, to the earliest one saved, but that did nothing except wreck my video driver again -- which I easily fixed, though.
He finally had to give up since he was already an hour past the end of his shift. He said the next step would be to reset the PC, i.e., reload Windows again. I really was trying to avoid that, and I don't see how it will fix anything since it seems to have only broken the sound before, and that was less than a week ago. It does seem that the automatic update started the problem, and maybe if I reset from scratch again, and then go in right away and pause automatic updates for while, I would know for sure.
So what we know is that the notebook audio hardware works fine. The audio drivers in conjunction with Windows 11 do not work.
I cannot understand, given that these have to be some of the most popular all-in-one notebooks sold over the last several years, they use a standard Intel chipset, how this could be so difficult to solve. Am I missing something? The only thing a little unusual about them is they have Bang & Olufsen speakers. But I understand that the Realtek HD Audio Driver should be the right replacement for the driver.
I also was responsible for hardware and software support for over 100 Mac and Windows desktop and laptop machines in my last job, so I'm not exactly a novice. Of course, when Windows introduced a glitch into one of our machines, we just reinstalled a fresh standard image file.
I'm just hoping someone out there has seen this exact situation before -- I mean, it has to be pretty common, right? -- and who is willing to gift me with that magical one little missing step that will fix this.
