Toshiba Satellite L550, mic suddenly stopped working

[mikeymikec]

My dad's laptop is pretty ancient (C2D, Vista era), but I installed an SSD and Win81 a few years ago and its workload is rare and basic these days (Skype / FB chat). It's been fine in this role for ages, and of course I can't think of anything that's changed on it lately, but the internal mic has stopped working.

I vaguely remember an audio-related incident with it a fair few years ago that resulted in me removing the Realtek audio driver and used the default Windows hi-def driver to fix a problem, and this time around I put the latest Realtek driver on but it made no difference. In the end I have a spare 3.5mm ext mic which did the trick for today's Skype call. It's not ideal as the socket is on the left of the laptop and my dad doesn't have great control with his left hand and so knocked it off the laptop once during the call. We're already using Bluetooth to pipe the audio through a sound bar so my dad with his poor hearing can hear the call properly. I'd rather not rely on BT more than I have to.

I found a cheap-as-chips clip-on 3.5mm mic on ebay for £3 but I wondered if anyone had any bright ideas to get the internal mic going again. I've spent about half an hour trying to get the internal mic working, but the meter in CP > Sound > Recording registers nothing when speaking and so I get nothing with the default sound recorder app. I had to restart Windows when reinstalling the realtek audio so that's out of the way. Older laptops often have bizarre hard switches to disable things like the wifi but I didn't find anything for the mic, nor are there any FN-type keyboard combinations for toggling the mic.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I think that I remember certain RealTek (among others) mic drivers, having a "gain" function (numeric, maybe, maybe a slider, maybe not, maybe a spin-box) setting, and having to set that to nearly "max" gain, to get anything meaningful recorded from the mic.

This may be exacerbated by various driver revisions.

Did you try un-installing drivers, and installing the drivers from the OEM? Then again, those drivers for an older laptop may pre-date Windows 10 altogether, so that may not be helpful.

But sometimes, at least with DIY boards like my Asus ROG STRIX B450-F, I had to install the board-specific audio drivers, the generic MS or generic RealTek drivers weren't doing it for me, with the mic especially, because they didn't have the right gain settings that the board-specific drivers had.

 

[mikeymikec]

OEM: They don't offer Win8x drivers.

As soon as the 3.5mm mic was connected, the mic function worked perfectly. Gain and other mic settings were all normal for the internal mic (ie. I'd previously set them myself). It wouldn't even register a glimmer of activity with the internal mic.