Missing or corrupt legacy audio drivers are perhaps one of the more common problems that you may be encountering with your home set up at any point of your computing experience. Just a quick look on the various tech forums reveals that this is indeed quite a problem for many people out there and the extent of Microsoft's technical support will be to ask you to uninstall and reinstall the product, which in most, cases is not very helpful.



True, some of the time, you can solve this problem using this method but more often than not, the problem lies much deeper than just removing and adding the product back to the device manager field. The common visual marker of this problem happening to you will be that the ‘Sound, Video and Game Controllers,' category will indicate to you a yellow exclamation mark, which is telling you that there is a problem with your legacy audio drivers. What you will hear is essentially nothing, because there will be no sound coming through your speakers no matter how loud you turn the volume knob up.

The problem is down to the fact that Windows was unable to load the device driver because either it is corrupt or missing or some of the device profile aspects will show you that the device is not even installed in the first place. This means that your legacy sound card is sitting inside your PC inert and not functioning, with the motherboard unable to activate it with the proper use of software drivers.

Even using the PC Doctor will result in it telling you that the drivers are possibly not installed properly. You can use diagnostic tools like DriverAgent, which is a software that runs through all your legacy drivers and tells you where and what file is the problem, and may even give you a solution to the problem. AC'97 Audio drivers are one way to fix the problem, by replacing the legacy audio drivers that are corrupt or incompatible with the motherboard or OS of your system.

Before you think about replacing the drivers with universal ones, you also might want to try and get a copy of the drivers that have been given to you on CD, as sometimes, they are incomplete and corrupt due to the CD being damaged or a bad data transfer process. Use the second option first, and then if that does not work, try to replace them with universal drivers.

Another possibility could be an internal conflict within the Windows environment itself, and all you might need to do is to go online and key in your product and the problem it is giving you. 99% of the time you will be able to find other people who have encountered the same problem as you have, and you would then be able to resolve it rather quickly.

Your last resort would have to be sending the product back as there may be a problem with the hardware itself. With these simple steps, you might be able to resolve missing sound from your legacy audio device.