Sometimes when you’re running Windows 10 you’ll be offered an upgrade to a whole new version. It usually happens about every six months, and a new version has to be an improvement, surely, so why not accept the offer? Your current version won’t be supported for much longer anyway, so you might as well take the plunge right now and say ‘yes’.
Once you’ve accepted Microsoft’s latest generous offer, the process starts, but it doesn’t seem to be proceeding very quickly. Oh, it’s a 5 GB download, and your Internet connection isn’t very fast. That’s a pity if you were planning to do some work online. However, once the major update has downloaded, everything should be better than before.
At last the major update has finished downloading, and it’s even installed without crashing and reverting to the original version. Brilliant! What wonderful new things has Microsoft developed for us to play with? Oh, wait a minute, there’s a red cross on top of the speaker icon and the speakers don’t appear to be working any more, or the microphone.
When I came across a laptop with the sound broken in this way after an update from Windows 10 Home version 1809 to version 1903, the first thing I did was look up the problem on the Internet to see if anyone else had noticed it, which of course they had. It seemed to be a driver compatibility problem, but nobody from Microsoft or Intel was fixing it.
I started up the Device Manager and, as expected, the Intel(R) High Definition Audio driver had a problem. However, asking to update the driver didn’t work, and all I got was a message saying that the best driver was already installed. In the end I had to identify, download, and install the correct driver manually, then finally the sound was working again.