No Audio Output Device is Installed

Jerochy · December 16, 2015

Hey guys,

I'm pretty much outta options and don't know what to do. I have an HP a1726x here that I got for free, and I popped in my old external hard drive in it and a gt240 and was hoping to get some use outta this. I got a windows 10 educational edition OS from my school and loaded it it on no problem at all. I noticed that I started running into some trouble when I went to play CoD MoD 2 and it couldn't launch because no audio device was installed.

I didn't think much of it and thought everything would work it self out as, with windows updates, it usually does within the next couple days. If anything, it seemed to be getting worse. The computer would randomly become unresponsive as I was trying to download all this stuff at the same time of the windows update. So I decided it might be a good idea to just install windows again.

I did it again, let all the windows updates go through and they all installed successfully. I think downloaded the drivers for my gpu and whatnot. BUT I noticed the same thing was going on with the "no audio output device installed."

I saw this was starting to turn into quite the problem. So I went into my device manager and looked at what was there and noticed there was no "realtek HD audio" hanging out there as there is on my main computer. I went in to the "add legacy audio" and it wasn't in there either. I went on realtek's website, downloaded it and tried to add it to the sound section in my device manager, and it keeps failing to get in there.

I thought maybe it would sort itself out if I disable everything in the sound section except for one, and that didn't work either. I also made sure that every audio device int there was up to date, and it was.

I then just uninstalled everything in the sounds,games, controls section of the device manager and rebooted hoping it would install correctly. I turned it on and it was just saying the same thing as always and the same devices in the device manager were there too.

I installed the nvidia geforce experience in the offcase that my drivers were out of date with in a few hours, and everything was good and up to date.

I went on hp's website and typed in my computer and they don't even have any support for any OS beyond windows 7 for this desktop and they said that the windows update should take care of everything, which it didn't and wont.

I'm kind of lost on what else to do, so any suggestions at all would help. Thank you guys.

Oh also, the stock troubleshooter that comes with windows 10 tells me absolutely nothing as expected.