If you are wondering what causes your sound card to stop working or makes problems, you should know that there are many things you can check by yourself.

See if the speakers are plugged into a power source. There are some old speakers that used batteries as a power source, if you have those check the batteries because they may be empty.

There is a big number of old sound adapters and laptops that have manual volume dial. You should try to position your volume dial in the middle and not to far on the sides, because it can turn off the volume.

Have you installed the driver for your sound card?

There are cases when people reinstall operating systems on their personal computers and they forget to install the drivers. Some motherboards have soundcards implemented on them and you can find sound drivers on installation disc for your motherboard. Sound cards that are not implemented on motherboards have driver installation discs too. Best way is to find most recent driver for particular sound device and download it from device manufacturer’s official site. Then you can install it and solve the problem.

There are cases when system plays audio files fine but it can’t play music CD’s. Look for a hidden mute in software, maybe someone muted it or you did it by accident, there are cases when it is auto/muted. Also check cables in your computer tower, maybe some of the cables are not connected as they should be.

If you only have built in integrated motherboard sound support you should check if it is enabled in CMOS. And if you are using a sound card you should check if the motherboard sound device is disabled, it can make a conflict and mute all sounds. There is a possibility when the system can’t recognize your sound card after previous steps. Try to unplug your sound card manually if it’s a plug and play sound card, and remove any other adapters except your video card. After those reboot your computer and let your BIOS adjust and configure. After that step shut down your computer and replace your sound card, just to see if that can get it going. If it works now, you might have problems again when you put the other adapters back in. If you do it one at a time you can know where the conflict appears.

If none of the above helps, it is advised to call some help and support center or a computer repair service. They can determine if the sound card can be fixed or you maybe need to buy another. These services are great and they can accurately find what the problem is and fix computer in no time.

Shut down your computer, restart it and try to play some media disc, or try to read its data. If you can’t eject the disc after this, reboot the system again, enter BIOS and check if your bios can register the drive. Sometimes you have to enter CMOS and enable the disabled drive. If bios can’t register it, it may be an ATA drive failure. You could call a computer support center and see if they have computer repair on site that could save some time.

Before you open the computer, make sure that your drive isn’t locked by some type of software. The best way to notice that is to reboot your computer and manually hit the eject button located on your drive before the system loads, right after restarting. Some media player software can lock the eject button in hardware, when that happens you can use the software eject button.

Sometimes whole personal computer trembles and makes noise when CD’s and DVD’s spin. Check if the drive is well mounted with screws if it is not, try to tighten them a bit. Try ejecting and reinserting your media disc, because it just can get of balance. Discs can shatter too, if they are not inserted how they should be, they can get of balance, shatter and destroy the drive too. If the problem appears only on one or a few of the discs, then it’s not the drive, if you have problems with every disc, then it is best to call a computer repair Service.

If your computer can’t even recognize your drive you should look for drivers on the disc you usually get with your drive when buying it. You can always call some computer support center and get information you need. You can download the drivers latest versions from the internet, just go to the manufacturers page and look for it.

Sometimes you can’t play your DVD movie on a computer, the problem usually is with CODEC. Usually media player displays error message connected to CODECS. You should look for CODECS on the internet, but beware there are a lot of people who will try to sell you CODECS, and you can get them for free. If you are installing CODECS it is best to find some good codec pack that has a variety of CODECS in one installation file.

If you have some other problem with your drive, it is best to call a computer repair service that can fix your computer or some of the components.