my computer ,not very old and was working fine but the last week the sound keeps stopping working it will stop in all my games and in windows will say....media error:cannot play back audio stream:no audio hardware is available......now if i restart the computer it comes back working as normal but then, if theres no sound on computer for 20 min it stops working again....reinstalled drivers and updated amny times but no change.....pls hlp me its drivin me nuts. Also i play a game called world of warcraft and since this startred happening, everytime i log into game i get the user agreament page which your not suppose to get unless youve just installed the game or downloaded a patch, very odd. I have a pcchips motherboard with onboard sound (realteccAC'97 audio controller). I even tried a new pci soundcard but same result. Ive checked device manager for problems but was find except one time when yellow question mark next to audio controller i updated driver it went away but still having same problem

This will sound strange... but sometimes the best way to troubleshoot driver issues-- and I think this is still a driver issue-- is to go into device manager-- and click on the offending hardware's + sign-- go to properties/driver page-- and click uninstall . You will see all kinds of warnings-- ignore them. Click on yes to finish uniinstall-- but before you reboot-- go back to the makers site-- download a new copy of the driver files to an easily located place.If zipped unzip them to a new folder.

After reboot go back to dev mgr follow the same steps ... when you get back to the driver tab for that hardware... scroll down to update driver and use the wizard-- to find the drivers you downloaded.

What this does is to force your OS to re-recognize your hardware and should repair any bad files. Drivers can be a pain