Conexant sound card works (sort of) but integrated microphone does not

[Canon_Man]

ThinkPad SL500 Model 27463YU

We continue to have a driver issue related to an Op Sys upgrade Lenovo offered for the Laptop (from Vista to Windows 7 Home Premium - 32-bit). We purchased the upgrade eight months after purchasing the laptop.

Since installing the upgrade, the machine has slowly gone down hill. While this may sound contradictory, the laptop does work but the driver for the sound card is non-existent, or has 'disappeared' entirely.

At first, the laptop performed well, everything, including the sound card worked well. But after several Windows 7 updates, the Conexant sound card driver 'disappeared' and the sound card became only marginally functional. Everything else about the laptop is fine. However, the sound card is so unstable, that the integrated microphone no longer works making the laptop unsuitable for Skype or Windows LIVE chats.

Attempting to use the upgrade disks provided by Lenovo, there is a file on the drivers disk that attempts to access the 'Net, pointing to a Lenovo server that should contain the compatible driver. However, the file (name unknown) is no longer resident on the server and as a result, the update fails.

[robot.txt]

You can fix the issue by opening Recording Audio troubleshooter.

• You have to click on start button and go for Control Panel.
• Enter troubleshooter into search box and click on Troubleshooting.
• Now click on Hardware and Sound and click on Troubleshoot audio recording.

[Canon_Man]

You can fix the issue by opening Recording Audio troubleshooter.

• You have to click on start button and go for Control Panel.
• Enter troubleshooter into search box and click on Troubleshooting.
• Now click on Hardware and Sound and click on Troubleshoot audio recording.

Thanks for the reply. Would be excellent if it were that simple. Forgot to mention that Lenovo gave me similar advice, but it, plus a bunch of other stuff didn't work. Apparently the root problem is that the card is running off of some generic driver, but not the original Conexant driver resident with Vista. That's why we have been trying to baseline it with the original driver Windows 7 had when we upgraded it.

At some point after the upgrade (several months later) the Conexant driver 'disappeared' during a patch download, either from Lenovo, or Windows 7. I think this was in later 2010, or early 2011, because my daughter was beginning to have trouble with the mic using Skype. Finally, the mic stopped working altogether, and when the device is viewed in device mgr, there is virtually no information displayed about what the sound card is, only that it is 'functioning'.

At one point we thought restoring Win 7 from scratch might work, but that meant backing up all her data to another drive (the laptop has a 320 Mb drive), we didn't have a destination drive large enough to store everything. Now we do, but the laptop is back at university, so I hoped to find an easier way to fix it.

The upgrade disks were actually two, one for Op Sys and one for related drivers. Some of the less common drivers needed were on a Lenovo server. But when the drivers disk is loaded, it tries to go out to the server to find a suitable driver but fails to find it and the driver update fails with some error (don't remember now).

I have no reason to believe that the sound card is defective. It does drive the speakers. The mic is the only part not working and the machine (touch wood) has not had any hardware issues to date.