An episode with the dreaded "Windows doesn't recognize the headphones" problem

Just over a year ago, I bought a Dell 7400 i7 laptop at my university and paid over $1800 for it, which included a two-year technical support contract.  This is the most money I ever paid for a computer in my life.  And as often happens, after about a year of use, the laptop developed a problem, in that the machine stopped recognizing the headphones.  The audio still worked fine--out loud--but in 2020, this year of the pandemic when I'm living as a shut-in with a spouse trying to work in the next room, having no headphones became a real hardship.

I tried the usual things.  I Googled, I looked in Dell tech support forums, and I pursued various possible "cures" carefully and diligently.  This was terrible too, because I was using three monitors and a hub to interface with a scanner, an external drive, an external fan, and an external keyboard etc.  And the problem is, one of the monitors also had an audio jack in it, and the monitor's audio jack actually worked.  But that audio jack was located on the back of the monitor so it was impossible to reach it to plug in or out.  Nor was this remote monitor jack good enough to satisfy web-based music collaboration software such as JamKazam which I was hoping to be able to use, but had been unable to use throughout the pandemic due to this stupid headphones-not-being-detected problem.

Weeks went by, then months, and all my efforts failed.  Meanwhile, I had removed everything docked to the laptop, and all external audio drivers, in case they could have been the problem.  And finally I was pissed off and desperate enough to telephone Dell Tech Support.  Having purchased Dell laptops for over 20 years, I know what I'm talking about when I say having to telephone tech support is a crap shoot.  Dell has always tried hard, but it is a large company, and its help lines are outsourced to overseas firms with a frankly mixed record.  And Dell has, or used to have, multiple tech support systems, one for corporate customers, another for academic customers (me, this time), and yet another for home consumers.

Dell support seems to have improved, though.  I had bought this machine through a university discount program, which gets even better tech support from Dell than normal people get, and the machine was still under warranty.  And this time, I immediately got sent to the correct part of the support chain. There was a long wait online, then I got to speak to a person in the Phillippines, but she had really good English and furthermore was smart and empowered to get to the bottom of an issue--which was not always the case in past years.  

So I made my report, and assured tech support that yes, I had tried multiple times in software to uninstall the audio devices in software, rebooted to let them reinstall themselves, and then rebooted twice more to install the very latest drivers from Dell.  Yes, nothing was disabled.  Yes, I had tried multiple headphones and I knew those worked elsewhere.  After these long discussions, they eventually agreed with me that possibly the physical audio jack had simply failed, because audio jacks are dumb physical devices with little wire parts in them that can get bent from stress.  And--guess what?  The audio plug was not modular but was fused into the motherboard. Thus, the entire motherboard would need to be replaced.  And I was warned that if that did not do the trick, then the next step would be to have to wipe the Windows operating system and start it over, because then the problem would definitely be proved to be software.

I really, really did not want to start my OS over; that would cause me to lose literally weeks of effort getting everything I need for my work reinstalled.  And I had already been thoroughly inconvenienced by this problem.

Meantime, Dell tech support got a little confused, and it's left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing.  One Dell manager emailed me that the motherboard would not be available until nearly 2 months in the future, and would I accept a replacement system instead?  I responded yes, if that was the best they could do, I'd deal with the replacement rather than wait.  But on the same day, I started getting texts and calls from another stream indicating that a tech repair person wanted to come to my house the next day, which was looking to be during a major snowstorm, and would I please indicate whether I'd be home and make sure no one in the household was sick.  I answered, yes I would be home and no, no one was sick.

Two days later, as it happened (there was a snowstorm after all), a Dell tech support person did indeed show up at the house after reaching my phone to make an appointment.  It was not a convenient time for me (I had to miss yoga class) but I wasn't going to delay it for any reason.  I locked my spouse and cat into a bedroom, met the tech at the door wearing a mask, and he came masked into the house and labored busily over the laptop for about 30 minutes, after which the headphones still did not work.  Nevertheless, he advised me to call tech support again "and try some things."

I felt depressed.  Would I need to wipe Windows after all, and would even that fix the problem?  But after a few hours of moping, I rallied and tried all the usual shenanigans once again--removed the audio devices in the control panel, rebooted, let them reinstall themselves.  Still didn't work.  Went to Dell's support site, downloaded the latest drivers and installed those, requiring two more reboots (one to remove old drivers, one to install new ones). And--it worked!  My headphones are now detected when I plug them in--for the first time in maybe 6 months!  There is a god.

And it makes me wonder why in the world something as dumb as an audio jack would not be designed to be modular.  It should be plug and play.  Just like a vacuum cleaner part that customers could change out themselves.  But no, the entire bloody motherboard had to be changed, involving a house call by a technician.  Any other year, Dell would probably have made me ship the computer in and get it back three days later via overnight shipping, but in this 2020 pandemic year, shipping is so buggered it would probably take three weeks to ship instead of days.  So thank you, Dell, for having decent tech support even if they got a little confused about what was going on and two different people were emailing me about two entirely different repair strategies.

And thank the universe that I didn't have to wipe the operating system, and after spending only maybe 40 or 50 hours total on the problem (on my part, including the searches and failed attempts to troubleshoot before calling tech support) it does appear to be solved.

Bottom line is, based on all my experience, it is typical for a laptop to have something fail, and that can be anytime within the first year.  So it is probably worth it to purchase a tech support contract.  For this reason, I sometime advise friends to shop at a local Best Buy so that, when that failure does occur, they can run the laptop in to the Best Buy Geek Squad for repair.  Dell is also, I think, still a decent vendor if you buy a support contract along with the laptop.