Dell 15n audio stopped working?

[bigkahuna]

Hi,

My wife has a Dell Inspiron 15n (edit: it is the same as an Inspiron 1545 with a Celeron CPU) running Ubuntu 8.10. Everything's been working fine for the 5 months she's had it, but the other day the audio stopped working. It seemed to happen after she was messing with installing the scanner (using Gimp), now the only audio you hear is a "crackling" sound when an audio clip or video is played. I checked the audio / volume settings and they seem OK. I also clicked on the "test" buttons for the driver settings and they emit the correct "tone" sound, but when a clip is played all you hear is crackling, so I'm pretty sure it's a software and not a hardware problem. What would be the easiest / safest way to fix this?

Thanks.

[leedsdevil]

i had some small issues with my wifes 15n and i found that the little things like that can be caused by the need to update software or even OS try 9.04 it works well on the 15n i suggest down loading Dells version provides better support making life that much easier Good luck hope to hear from ya

[bigkahuna]

The problem is that it worked fine before she did something with the scanner last week, so something must have been corrupted somehow. I have the Ubuntu 8.1 disk that came with the 15n, can I just have it "update" from the CD? If I do this will her files and data be safe or will she loose them?

[leedsdevil]

i suggest to back up all data then down load 9.04 and yes you can update from disk it will be easy enough to update to the 9.04