Nothing taunts a systems administrator like a yellow exclamation triangle in device manager.
After an HP all in one computer had been worked on to remedy another issue, the only problem that remained was no sound & no webcam. And that stupid little yellow symbol. This appeared after Windows Updates had automatically updated the operating system from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1.
I tried all the usual suspects – disable the driver, uninstall the driver, try to update the driver (already the latest version), install the Realtek High Definition Audio driver directly from the Realtek website, disable the anti virus software etc etc. Every time, after each reboot, device manager taunted me with that little yellow symbol.
Then, on a whim, I did three things:
1. Bumped the User Account Control setting right down to the bottom.
2. From a command prompt running as administrator, executed an sfc /scannow
3. Uninstalled sound & webcam drivers, rebooted …. no more triangle!
Tested Windows sounds to heard those glorious little noises!
sfc (system file checker) is a magical utility that fixes some system file issues. It’s as magical as chkdsk /r
And because I don’t like dumbing down security protection, I reset the UAC level back to what it was by default, rebooted and re-tested successfully.
Who would have thought that sfc would fix a sound driver problem?
-SCuffy