Static Noise from Speakers

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Seems to be a hardware problem because I booted into XP SP2 and it exhibits the same behaviour. Still any tips are welcome, checked power cables and none are near the audio part of the motherboard.

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I've recently installed Vista Ultimate (x64) onto my machine and all of a sudden all I get out of the speakers is static. What lead up to this was I left an album playing during the night and the PC automatically hibernated after the music finished playing (WMPlayer). When I switched it on in the morning every time I try and play a sound I just get static with sometimes the sound coming through in the background.



If I test the speakers etc in the control panel then the test sound does play but is overshadowed by static noise. I have tried a different set of speakers and cable to the same effect.



Thinking back to any updates I did before hearing the sound the only ones I can remember that occurred before I heard the static but after I heard the correct sound was deleting the Adobe PDF printer and repairing Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional. I also applied the 8.1 patch and an update mentioned in a KB article from MS to do with 64 bit printer drivers.



Hardware:

ASUS M2N-E SLI Motherboard (onboard audio)

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+

120GB Seagate IDE HDD (System)

500GB Seagate SATA HDD (Data)

LITE-ON DVD±RW DL

aBit Wireless PCI-e Card

nVidia 8800GTS 320MB

 

Sounds bad, you say this happens in xp as well?

As it is recent, a system restore is your best bet, it will change everything inportant back to what it was before it stopped working. If problem persists, then I'm worried your onboard sound is f**ked.

Oh one more thing, check your volume settings, if your turning your speakers up to max volume you sometimes get static, with the faint sound from your computer.

 

I have the exact same problem with static sound over top of my normal windows sounds and music sounds. I also had a update of Adobe Reader so I thought about what you said and uninstalled my adobe reader and suddenly my sound worked just fine.

Turns out the adobe reader update was conflicting with the normal sound.

That should fix your problem too.