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Fixing Sound and Video Problems on Desktop Computer

fix video sound problems computer pc

Sound and video problems sometimes can make your computer not have sound, or video, or slow and distorted sound and video which makes watching video impossible.

Most sound, and video problems are easy to fix in my experience. Sound, and video problems are usually related to the hardware drivers, operating system, and software problems. But, audio and video problems can sometimes be hardware related like a loose cable, bad video card, or sound card, broken monitor or speakers.

On some newer computers, the sound and video port/connector maybe the same port because they use a HDMI port to carry both sound, and video to your monitor or TV with speakers on them. A lot of video cards with HDMI ports also have a sound chip to transmit sound.

The first thing you should do is to check all your audio and monitor cables on your desktop computer to see if they are plugged into the correct port, not bent or broken, and is not loose. Sometimes with speakers, you may plug the speaker plug into the microphone, or line-in port when you should plug them into a green sound port on the back of your PC.

Next, check to see if your speakers and monitor are powered on, and the sound levels is turned up and not muted/off on both your hardware buttons or dials on your speakers, and Windows or other operating system Sound settings or your soundcard program. Also, check your brightness and contrast levels with your monitors settings buttons on your monitor to see if they are not set too low. In your video card drivers, and some programs like games, you can also change your brightness, and contrast settings without the need to use your monitor settings on your monitor, so you should check your video card, games, media player, and other video settings to see if the brightness and contrast are set to a comfortable level.

If you hear static or lose sound while playing back sound, it could mean your speakers are broken, or your sound card drivers are bad, and needs to be updated to the latest or previous version of a soundcard driver to fix the problem. I use an older version of Realtek sound drivers because newer versions don’t support 5.1 surround sound on my desktop computer, so my computer only can play 2.1 stereo sound on my 5.1 surround sound system when using the newest sound drivers.

If you use Linux, sometimes there are Linux drivers for soundcards which you can install to make sound work in Linux if your operating system did not already installed the sound drivers.

Bad looking video, slow moving video, and poor video card performance can also be caused by driver software problems upgrading to a newer version of your video card drivers, or back to a previously stable working version of the driver software may fix your video card driver problems. Newer versions of video card drivers are usually optimized to run newer games at higher framerates because the videocard makers added tweaks to the driver software to make it run new games better.

If your video’s picture is un-clear, very big, or very small, you may need to adjust your video’s resolution in the monitor and display settings in your monitor settings. Most monitors are now LCD monitors, so you need to set the monitor to its native resolution for the best picture quality possible. You can find the native resolution of the monitor by looking in your monitor’s user manual.

I recommend that you first uninstall your old video card driver before you install the new or previous version of the driver, or reinstall your version of the driver for the video card on your PC.

You can usually download the latest and previous versions of your video card driver from your video card makers’ official website.

Software like Windows, games, media players, and media editors sometimes release patches, and updates to fix video and sound problems with their programs, so installing the latest patches, and updates for your software may fix your problems related to video and sound. If your video is slow when playing games, and watching higher quality video, your video card is probably not fast enough to run games at faster speeds, so you need to replace your video card with a faster one. Sometimes slow video performance can be caused by having not enough RAM, and a slow CPU which makes games and programs run slowly. Adding more RAM, and upgrading to a faster CPU could fix your slow video problems in games. Closing programs which you don’t need running in the background could fix your slow video problems as well because you’ll have more free RAM, and CPU resources once you closed programs which you don’t need running in the background.

A virus, malware, and other software, or operating system problems may be causing sound, and video problems with Windows. Checking your computer for viruses, malware, and software problems may fix your sound and video problems. If you can’t repair your sound and video problem in Windows, doing a clean install of Windows may fix your sound and video problems.

Sometimes, broken RAM, motherboard, CPU, or other broken parts can make your computer have no video on the screen, or sound from the speakers. You can see if replacing the RAM brings back your video is. If your RAM is fine, it could be your motherboard, CPU, and other parts making your video blank on your monitor. A lot of newer video cards like the Nvidia Titan uses a lot of power, so it could be your power supply which is not supplying enough power to power your video card which is causing video and computer stability problems.

Sometimes, your motherboard settings maybe causing you to have no sound or video. If you have no video and can’t access your motherboard settings in the BIOS/CMOS, you would need to remove the silver battery on the motherboard for a few seconds to reset the motherboard settings, so you can access the BIOS. Before you install a new videocard, or sound card, you should disable the onboard sound, and onboard video which is built-into the motherboard, and CPU to prevent your onboard video and sound from having problems with your PC, and using computer resources like RAM, and CPU cycles which can slow down your PC.

If you still experience problems with your monitor’s video, and sound, you may need to replace your monitor, speakers, video card, sound card, or the cables which connect your monitor to your video card, and your speakers to the sound card.

Replacing a monitor is pretty easy to do since you just need to unplug the old monitor from your computer, and install a new monitor. Replacing speakers is also easy. You need to unplug your old speakers, and plug in your new speakers.

A lot of computers these days have the soundcard built-into the motherboard, and the video chip built-into the CPU, so you can’t remove them without replacing your CPU, or motherboard. But, PCI, AGP, and PCI-Express video and sound cards are easily replaceable by taking the old sound or video card out, and installing the new one. Sometimes, if your video card is overheating, it is easy to fix by using compressed air to blow out dust from the video cards heatsink, or installing a better case cooling fan on your PC case to move more air out of your PC case to cool the video card, and your PC internal parts.

Replacing a sound card, and video card requires more work. You need to uninstall the older soundcard driver on Windows, and disable the soundcard in your computer’s motherboard BIOS if you are using onboard sound before you turn off your computer to install a PCI soundcard. There are also USB soundcards which makes installing a new sound card as simple as plugging in a USB plug into a USB port, and installing the correct drivers in Windows if the USB soundcard needs drivers to be installed from a CD. After you are done installing your soundcard, you can plug in your speaker cables into the sound ports on your soundcard to listen to sound.

Replacing a videocard is more hard because if you do something wrong, you won’t have video which means you can’t go online, or read the help files in Windows, or which came on the CD for installing the drivers to search for help to fix your no video problems with your video card. Also, there are many different types of video cards like PCI, AGP, PCI-Express, and PCI-X video cards for different video card expansion slot types on motherboards. Most newer computers use PCI-Express for video cards, but you can also install PCI or PCI-X video cards if your motherboard has PCI or PCI-X expansion card slots. Both PCI, and PCI-X is a lot slower than PCI-Express. Computers made in the year 2000 and above usually use PCI or AGP for video cards. But, they can’t use PCI-Express or PCI-X video cards because most older motherboards don’t support PCI-Express and PCI-X video cards. Before buying a video card, you should check how powerful your power supply installed on your computer is because many newer video cards especially gaming video cards like the Nvidia GTX 980 need a powerful power supply like a high quality 600 Watt power supply made by a good power supply brand like Antec, Thermaltake and Cooler Master.

If you are upgrading from onboard video to a AGP, or PCI-Express video card on your computer’s motherboard like Intel 4000 you should disable your onboard video in the BIOS before booting into Windows to install its videocard drivers for Windows.

I once had to disable my onboard video while my monitor was still plugged into my onboard video port, and set my main video card to PCI-Express in the BIOS on my motherboard, and plug in my monitor’s video cable into my PCI-Express video card before I can use my new Nvidia GT 620 PCI-Express video card on my desktop computer.

For Ubuntu Linux, and other Linux distribution operating system users, they may need to download, and install third-party proprietary video card drivers from AMD, or Nvidia to play games, watch HD videos, and do video intensive tasks because the open source drivers for Linux sometimes are not very good at tasks like gaming. In Ubuntu Update settings, there is an Additional Drivers section which let you switch from the default video drivers to Nvidia and AMD video card drivers for improved video performance in the Additional drivers section.

Fixing sound and video on a desktop PC is usually pretty easy to do for most PC users. It can be as simple as re-plugging in a cable to the back of the video and sound port on the back of the PC, or re-installing the correct sound and video drivers. Replacing a video and sound card is not too hard to learn after you learned how to change an expansion card by reading a book on PC repair, or watching a tutorial video.

How do you usually fix sound and video problems on a PC?

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