[SOLVED] Audiodg issues in Windows 7

[vkatsarelias]

My brother has Windows 7 installed on his Ryzen 3 PC as he tries to avoid Windows 10 at all costs. He knows his configuration is not fully supported, without modified drivers at least (Gigabyte A320M-S2H, Ryzen 3 3200G, 240GB Kingston SSD, 16GB (2x8GB) G.Skill Aegis DDR4 3200MHz RAM). And yes, he has an antivirus installed.

Recently, he started having problems with audio, where it cuts off for no apparent reason. For example, any YouTube video he is watching stops immediately with the buffering animation showing and every audio-related process freezes. The shutdown process even stopped once with a status of "playing logoff sound" in the "waiting for background programs to close" screen.

We have narrowed it down to the audiodg.exe process, so he created a batch file to kill it and then restart it. It restores the audio most of the times, but not always. The weird thing is that Windows 7 was functioning totally fine before this issue, with the same audio and graphics drivers installed (and re-installed at one time), so the OS might not have anything to do with it. Plus, Gigabyte themselves supplied Realtek HD audio drivers for Windows 7 in the driver disc that came with the motherboard.

He has asked the same question elsewhere before, but they just told him to "upgrade to Windows 10" without any speculation on what the issue could be.

As upgrading to Windows 10 is not really an option (because he can be pretty stubborn sometimes), is there anything that can be done with his current Windows 7 installation to restore audio functionality back to normal?

 

[Colif]

audiodg = Windows Audio Device Graph Isolation

have you tried running sfc /scannow in a command prompt with admin access

most of time that driver causes problems the actual cause is the sound drivers. Have you checked the Gigabyte website to see if any newer drivers than what were on driver disk, it can help.

 

[vkatsarelias]

audiodg = Windows Audio Device Graph Isolation

have you tried running sfc /scannow in a command prompt with admin access

most of time that driver causes problems the actual cause is the sound drivers. Have you checked the Gigabyte website to see if any newer drivers than what were on driver disk, it can help.

The drivers on Gigabyte's webpage are the exact same that were supplied with the disc. As for the SFC scan, I told him to run it. I'll post the results here.

 

[Colif]

realtek likely changed their drivers to the win 10 versions which are a different beast to the win 7 versions. Win 10 realtek drivers come in 2 parts, driver comes from Realtek, Audio console that lets you change things comes from Windows Store.... so they might not be changing the win 7 drivers ever again.

its odd the drivers would cause that problem and not bsod as well.

 

[vkatsarelias]

audiodg = Windows Audio Device Graph Isolation

have you tried running sfc /scannow in a command prompt with admin access

most of time that driver causes problems the actual cause is the sound drivers. Have you checked the Gigabyte website to see if any newer drivers than what were on driver disk, it can help.

UPDATE: SFC did find some corrupt files, but it will repair them during the next reboot. ...Which may take a long time, since my brother is playing a game right now and cannot reboot.

 

[Colif]

no rush, its his problem

 

[vkatsarelias]

no rush, its his problem

He rebooted, but since the issue did not occur at a specific time, he is going to take his PC for a test drive for the whole day and then I'll post a second update.

 

[vkatsarelias]

no rush, its his problem

Hey, sorry for not replying to you. My brother wanted to test his PC for another day, just to get better results.
He says that the SFC scan did not fix his issue. Is there anything else that can be done?