I've got a laptop computer that periodically drops sound.  The mixer still shows activity on the level meter, but no sound makes it out of the speakers.  Changing the main volume, either through the mixer, or using the volume up/down keys on the keyboard, though, brings the sound back immediately.

Neither a driver update, nor a Windows reinstall fixed the problem, which I've finally diagnosed to an odd, possibly heat-related hardware interaction, requiring a motherboard replacement to repair.

So, since this is a computer that's used by my kids to watch movies, and play online Flash games, rather than replacing the motherboard for a few hundred dollars, I wrote a simple program that simulates volume up/down key presses on a frequent basis.

A casual mention of this program on a tech support board resulted in someone contacting me with the same problem on their own computer, and inquiring about source code availability for what I'd written.

It's actually very simple; written in Visual Basic 2005, it's less than 30 lines of code, including comments and blank lines, in a single form file, plus the standard VB required support and build files.

I've decided to release it under the GPL version 3, and if it's of any use to you for a similar problem, by all means, use it.  Whether there are more computers out there with this problem, I have no idea, but there's obviously more than the one I have, which I figured would be pretty much unique when I first wrote this.

I haven't even bothered to build an installer for it, as it only builds a single EXE file, that I've pinned to the start menu on the problem computer.  The source code, which includes both a debug and release binary in the standard VB2K5 folder location, and a binary executable-only build for those without Visual Basic 2005 or newer is available for download here:

Source Code

Executable