Help!..no sound...this is not an easy fix..ive tried eveything

[GuyJay]

ok...heres what happened and what i did...i had to go away for a week and when i came back i had found out my gf's friend tried to hook surround sound from my comp to the surround itself..she had one of those audio cable with red and white on one side and a headphone jack on the other...and when she hooked that up the sound went and never came back
ive tried reinstalling drivers and chipsets and stuff like that...
ive tried reseating speakers...tried other speakers..tried disabling and
enabling,uninstalling and reinstalling in device manager
was on support.dell....got all the right drivers and shit for this pc
......checked bios for the right config....even updated the bios.........
then i put vista ultimate (clean install) on here and did all that shit agen....still no sound...no wait..actually there is a little sound but way too low to comprehend in my headphone jack....there is no sound card..its an integrated controller and the only thing i can think of doing now is to reseat the integrated sound controller...can the sound controller be removed...i have a dell dimension c521
i dont know what else to do...can someone plzzz help me!!!..its been a week now and i want my sound back..any help will be greatly appreciated!!

 

[Glliw]

The sounds controller probably incurred some kind of shortage. Couldn't power what she was trying to make it power. I don't know if its removable, but you should be able to get a fairly cheap pci sound card from walmart, and test it out. if it works, great. If not, return it.

 

[The_Other_One]

Have you tried a few different sets of speakers/headphones in it and tested all the jacks; both front and rear? Sometimes sound can bleed over to other jacks and be very quiet.

I don't think I've ever heard of a sound card getting shorted out, but I suppose it could happen. About all I could suggest is try another OS first (say a Linux LiveCD; Ubuntu or something) and see if the audio works there. If so, you know it's something to do with Windows. Yeah, I know you reloaded, but still couldn't hurt...

I also go along with Glliw's idea of simply getting another sound card. You should be able to disable the onboard one then use some nice sound card. A few bucks could probably get you a pretty decent one.