AUDIO DISSAPEARED ??

I have a Dell XPS 8930 that I have had for a number of years of which is my primary PC. Lately, my audio has quit working & I cannot seem to find out why.
I use Winamp for mp3 type music & VLC for video type sound (movies, video music etc). The video sound works great, but the mp3 or whatever sound it's called,does not.
When I try to use Winamp, I get this error msg: Bad direct sound driver or error code 80040154. If I try to use VLC in a similar application, I get this msg: Ooops:VLC media player crashed, would you like to send a bug report? In Device Manager, all seems to be OK. I've tried running various trouble shooters to no avail. My widows 10 is UpToDate also. However, Microsoft keeps hounding me to upgrade to Win 11 of which my PC is eligible. At this time, I would rather not. I would like to know why all of a sudden my audio quit ?? Thanks for your time....

Microsoft may have helpfully "upgraded" your audio drivers. Try downloading (and SAVING), and reinstalling the Dell audio drivers.

https://www.dell.com/support/home/en...esktop/drivers

Thanks jdc; I installed an older version of the audio & now it's working ok.

Razor:

Jdc is right! I had the same problem every time Win 10 got updated. I went to ever increasing lengths to shut down Updates but they kept getting through. Eventually, win 10 updates killed my audio driver altogether.

I have one suggestion: Create a cheat sheet containing all the steps to get back to normal, in case it happens again. In my case, I had to reinstall the driver and configure the software that came with my audio interface and set the bitrate. If you ever notice you're getting a different Playback speed, you need to set the bitrate in Windows to match the bitrate your audio interface is using. To do that, you go to the Properties of the default audio devide and look for a drop down menu containing the various options.

rev

The disk is a 4TB external I use to put drive images on. I get the 'USB not recognized' message, I try different ports, I update the driver - and all is well. But only until I reboot, then I get the same message again. I just tried to create an image and store it on the the troublesome disk but I got 'USB not recognized' half way through the operation!

The disk is a Western Digital HDD model WD40PURZ, how do I get it to stay recognized?

Thanks - rev

How to prevent Windows 10 driver updates:

https://www.howtogeek.com/263851/how...cific-drivers/

https://www.minitool.com/news/disabl...in-10-009.html

https://windowsreport.com/block-wind...driver-update/

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ho...pdates-windows

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/...ce-driver.html

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-d...tes-windows-10

Thanks dude. I decided to wait for my new audio interface and its Win 10 driver. Then I'll make sure once and for all that nothing gets in. I can save profiles in the IF software and get back to normal relatively easily now since I've been through this a number of times. Last time I tried to shut updates out, I needed to change policies which meant I needed to know how to reverse all in case I didn't want to consult Updates for something. It wasn't an easy switch back and forth.