I have to reinstall my sound drivers every time I reboot Windows 10.

M

mrwhateverism

New member
Joined
Jul 26, 2016
Posts
4
I've been having this problem ever since I "upgraded" from Windows 7 to Windows 10 a year ago. Before the upgrade, everything worked fine.
If I have to reboot my computer for whatever reason, most of the time Windows boots back up with no sound. Windows tech showed me how to go into device manager, delete the sound hardware I'm using,
scan for new hardware and then reinstall new drivers. This process also involves a reboot, and is the only way to get Windows to boot up with the sound working.
I've been trying to just live with it since I leave my computer on most of the time, but am finally ready to deal with it and ask for help.

Things I've tried:
  • Turning off auto updates
  • Manually installing drivers for the sound card I'm using (Creative Labs X-Fi)
  • Removing the X-Fi sound card and sound drivers and using the onboard RealTek sound hardware instead. (Still have the same problem using onboard sound. I have this completely disabled in the BIOS when I'm using the X-Fi card, so there's no chance the cards are being confused with each other somehow)
  • Hours on the phone with Windows tech help.
  • Every single option in the sound properties.
  • Making sure the Windows audio services are running and set to Automatic.
  • Endless Googling.

The computer is a tower I built myself and ran beautifully without issues until the day I installed Windows 10. I've been trouble shooting computers since my 286 as a kid and like to think I'm fairly computer literate, but am completely frustrated by this sound issue. Any help is greatly appreciated!
 
Hi mrwhateverism ... and welcome to the forums ...


Interesting problem you've got there. I haven't seen this one before. How about sending along a copy of your Event Viewer logs in "evtx" format? There might be a clue in their somewhere.
KB1873: How-To Export Windows Event Logs

I've got to deliver a few systems, but I'll check back later on....
 
Hi again

The Administrative Events sounds good. The view in Event Viewer that I find most helpful - for most of us - is the "Summary of Administrative Events" window.

Can I guess that you grabbed your Creative drivers from the page for the Windows 10 drivers?
Creative Worldwide Support

Creative seems to have every flavor of the X-Fi card in that list..... (I didn't even know that many versions of them existed)
 
Yes, that's the page where I got the driver. I just reinstalled it and compared its driver version to the one Windows was automatically installing and noticed the Windows one was much, much older (from 2010). I disabled auto updates again after installing the new driver and reset the computer so I could have a specific time to give you, when lo and behold, the sound worked after resetting. I don't want to speak to soon, but I restarted it 5 more times and the sound worked after every reboot. I'm sure I tried this combination (new driver + disabling auto updates) in the past, but it seems to be working now. I'm going to see how it goes the next couple of days, and if it acts up again, I'll upload the Admin Events. Thanks for your help!
 
Sounds good so far. Good work!



Note: you might want to use a Microsoft tool that will let you hide the problem driver update from every installing again. There is also a somewhat hard-to-find setting that lets you disable all driver updates from Windows Update [which hasn't been doing a very wonderful job in Windows 10 so far: witness that our Windows Update forum is the busiest forum here on SysNative :) ]

With the problematic update blocked, you can then go ahead with whatever updates look safe enough to try.

Here's a link to a "How To Geek" article on those two update-blocking strategies for Windows 10:
How to Uninstall and Block Updates and Drivers on Windows 10

Cheers!
 

Has Sysnative Forums helped you? Please consider donating to help us support the site!

Back
Top