Another 'Microphone not working,' thread...

Hello everyone,

Anyone want to take this on?

I have a Lenovo P72 laptop. As soon as I got this laptop (about 4 years ago) I turned off the microphone out of my paranoia. Within a day or so I could not reactivate the microphone. Now, no matter what I have tried (like removing and reinstalling the driver, reinstalling Windows 10...), I could not get the microphone to be recognized by Windows or turned back on. Does anyone have any ideas as to what I can do to remedy my situation? (Below are screenshots of my Device Manager and Control Panel>Sound>Recording windows, respectively.)

Device Manager:


Control Panel Sound/Recording:



Kind regards,

tecknot

In Device Manager, try selecting View > Show hidden devices. If the microphone shows up (ghosted or greyed out), select it and delete it. Then, at the top of your device tree in Device Manager, right-click the computer name (Cosmo) and select Scan for hardware changes

Let me know if that helps or not.

tecknot said:

P.S. When I disabled the microphone I used the Function key with the F4 key. Now the F4 key is permanently lit up and will not change after toggling off (or would that be on?).

Ah, okay. That makes a big difference. So it was disabled via a hotkey function of that computer. Do all the hotkey combinations unique to that system work? For example, adjusting screen brightness etc.?

Have you tried reinstalling the "Hotkey features integration" software for your system from Lenovo? Looking at the downloads for your computer I see this:

hsehestedt said:

Ah, okay. That makes a big difference. So it was disabled via a hotkey function of that computer. Do all the hotkey combinations unique to that system work? For example, adjusting screen brightness etc.?

Have you tried reinstalling the "Hotkey features integration" software for your system from Lenovo? Looking at the downloads for your computer I see this...

Hi hsehestedt,

The hot keys are working, for instance volume control, screen brightness, trackpad, etc. I download and installed the software you suggested and rebooted my system. Still nothing.

Kind regards,

tecknot

Might be worth a quick call to Lenovo support. I'm a bit stumped at the moment.

The last idea I have for the moment is to check the BIOS. On my Lenovo laptop I can disable many hardware features in the BIOS. You might want to see if there is a setting in the BIOS that has the microphone disabled.

hsehestedt said:

Might be worth a quick call to Lenovo support. I'm a bit stumped at the moment.

The last idea I have for the moment is to check the BIOS. On my Lenovo laptop I can disable many hardware features in the BIOS. You might want to see if there is a setting in the BIOS that has the microphone disabled.

Thanks for trying, hsehestedt.

I'll try Lenovo support. My BIOS does not have an option for the microphone, but thanks for that too.

Kind regards,

tecknot

Hello everyone,

I have finally solved my dilemma. I found that the setting to enable my microphone was in the BIOS setting under Security, which I never would have thought of.

Kind regards,

tecknot

tecknot said:

Hello everyone,

I have finally solved my dilemma. I found that the setting to enable my microphone was in the BIOS setting under Security, which I never would have thought of.

Kind regards,

tecknot

LOL, yeah, that's not really intuitive is it?

TIP: Any time I get a new machine, I comb through every single menu in the BIOS to make myself very aware of what might be hidden in the BIOS. Frequently I will discover little gems worth making a note of.

hsehestedt said:

LOL, yeah, that's not really intuitive is it?

TIP: Any time I get a new machine, I comb through every single menu in the BIOS to make myself very aware of what might be hidden in the BIOS. Frequently I will discover little gems worth making a note of.

You are right! Next time I am certainly going to go through the entire machine and get familiar with it as much as I can.

Kind regards,

tecknot