Why is there no sound coming from my laptop speakers?

Q  My Sony Vaio laptop is 10 months old, running Windows 7 Home Premium with Service Pack 1. All of a sudden, it’s not playing any sound.

I have checked in the Sound section of Control Panel and it apparently has a Realtek High Definition Audio device, which is set as the default.

I have also checked the ‘Sound, video and game controllers’ section within Device Manager: Windows says there are no updated device drivers, but I deleted the driver regardless and reinstalled it.

Even so, I can still get sound through the headphones, but not through the speakers. Can you help, please?
Tina B

A  You’ve already tried most of the things we would’ve suggested, so all we’re left with are what we think of as obvious ideas. But if you haven’t thought to try them, perhaps they’re not so obvious after all.

First, we assume that unplugging the headphones doesn’t fix the problem? While it’s usually possible to configure audio to play through both headphones and speakers at the same time, few people want this so laptops are generally set up to mute their built-in speakers when headphones (or external speakers) are plugged into the headphone socket. As we said, this is an obvious point – but we’re trying to help.

However, we think it’s more likely – and fortunately this is little less obvious – that the speakers’ volume has been muted using the laptop’s function (Fn) keys.

You didn’t tell us the Vaio model number but on the recent models we’ve seen, the F3 and F4 can be used respectively to lower or increase the volume. Moreover, the F2 key serves to mute the volume entirely – so perhaps that’s what’s happened?

Otherwise, we’re all out of ideas. We’d suggest contacting either Sony or the retailer: your laptop is less than a year old, so it’ll still be under guarantee, and you have statutory rights that last much longer. So, ask for a fix.