billybgame

Hope I found a good spot for help, because I'm about at my wit's end. I lost sound, at some point on this desktop, awhile back. I don't use it much, anymore, so I'm not sure exactly when, or what happened. My wife mainly does now.

In addition to the sound issue, there isn't a speaker icon in the taskbar, anymore. That seems to make sense, as when I try to play anything, it says there's no sound source.

This has an integrated Soundmax Digital Audio system. I've already done a ton of online reading on how to fix this. I've troubleshot it. I got my motherboard and chipset #s(Intel 865PE), and re-downloaded the driver from Sony. Still no sound.

The oddest things are that I'm pretty sure there was a very faint sound coming from the speakers at a website that ran a song continuously. And, the one that utterly baffles me is that when I put my fingers on the volume knob of the speaker, suddenly you can hear a low volume of a radio station!

Does anyone know what the heck is going on? Virus? I had some other issues. I actually wiped the hard drive on this, this past summer. The sound loss has been since then. I ran AVG, awhile back, after the sound loss.....I saw it listed a Trojan Horse downloader. But, for some reason, when away from the computer, the computer had rebooted. When I ran AVG again, nothing found. So, I assumed it got rid of the Trojan Horse.

So, I'm at a loss, and don't know what to do next.

Can I disable the integrated system in BIOS, and hook up a PCI slot sound card? Will it work? I've certainly got old computers lying about.

Thanks. Bill