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I have a HP Pavillion DV7 laptop with win 8 pro. The laptop has an unidentified problem with sound drivers or hardware that sometimes causes volume to constantly jiggle up and down. This is very annoying because of these consequences:

  • Renders mute unusable - as the volume changes the sound unmutes automatically
  • Causes an annoying win 8 "surface UI" notification to appear constantly in the upper left corner, which is distracting enough by itself, but more importantly
  • Renders the whole "surface UI" unusable, because it loses focus whenever the sound changing notification appears
  • When the jiggling happens, the laptop also loses the ability to redirect sound to earphones - sound comes out of the speakers even if earphones are connected.

To solve these issues I want to completely disable sound in the laptop (I've tried reinstalling drivers several times to no end). I have tried disabling all sound related drivers and devices in the Device Manager but Windows re-enables those automatically whenever I restart the laptop. The BIOS doesn't have any settings to disable sound hardware either.

Please don't suggest having the laptop sound serviced or fixed. It's not worth the expense. I just want to remove sound support so I can use it normally. It is very unusable as it is now.

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  • This is a comment not an answer because it doesn't really answer your question. But the best solution is to either get the laptop repaired or ditch Windows 8.
    – staticsan
    Aug 28, 2012 at 2:59

4 Answers 4

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If you'd rather not play with the hardware directly, you can always disable the sound driver via Control Panel > Device Manager > Devices > Sound (right click, Disable)

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  • Yeah, like I said, I did that but Windows re-enables it on startup, on its own Aug 28, 2012 at 2:55
  • Try disabling the Windows Audio service. Also, are you sure it's the sound hardware and not bad volume keys?
    – LawrenceC
    Sep 4, 2019 at 16:31
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The best thing to do is disable the audio device in BIOS. That way Windows (or any OS) will not even detect that there is a sound device. I can not speak for your model of laptop & BIOS, but for the HP I have, I would boot into BIOS, go to System Configuration, then Built-In Device Options then disable onboard audio.

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You should be able to disconnect the speaker completely. This link shows how to get to it, and Step 12 explains how to disconnect the speaker cable. You can even remove the entire speaker assembly.

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  • Incidentally, how possible do you think it'd be to wire the wifi cable to a manual switch instead of the touch button in the media strip? That strip is the worst hardware design idea and implementation ever... Aug 28, 2012 at 1:54
  • I'd rather not mess with the hardware though, as previous attempts have left the screws wasted so it'd be quite difficult Aug 28, 2012 at 2:57
  • The wifi button is a soft-switch, which sends a command, presumably to a wifi chip. I don't know where the actual switching is done, but it's not at that button.
    – hdhondt
    Aug 28, 2012 at 3:56
  • But I suppose you could rewire it to another pushbutton, if you can find a suitable one - and a place to install it...
    – hdhondt
    Aug 28, 2012 at 4:17
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Device manager lets you disable sound devices, but you need to disable the sound controllers , not just the speakers, since these do in my experience continue to work after a reboot. Got frustrated by that, but disabling the controllers did it for me, but I had to reboot (not an issue after this much fighting) to disable all of the controller drivers (Windows 10 Thinkpad/Lenovo in my case) and 7 years too late to be any help.

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  • The question says “I have tried disabling all sound related drivers and devices in the Device Manager …”  What, exactly, should the user do that they are not already doing? Sep 4, 2019 at 16:25
  • quite often using a hammer when you don't need to is going to leave dents, just the controllers imageshack.com/i/pmCLrBg8p
    – Conrad B
    Sep 6, 2019 at 8:55

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