updated drivers, lenovo laptop, w11, lost audio, services running, no devices
Try using the “+ Fix a Problem” in the Driver Updater to see if it can roll back the Audio driver(s) for you.
If CCleaner can’t roll back the driver then as it’s a Lenovo I would try using the Troubleshooter in Lenovo Vantage which can find and fix driver issues.
If you don’t already have Vantage then you can get it from Lenovo: Lenovo Vantage | Lenovo US
It’s also in the Microsoft Store: Lenovo Vantage - Free download and install on Windows | Microsoft Store
PS, I never update drivers unless there is something wrong with the one(s) I have already.
Updating a driver unecessarily can cause things to stop working properly, as you have found.
Great advice. None of that works at all. I did a Windows Restore to my last point prior to the driver update, and still has grayed out drivers in Settings|Sound. I rolled back all the drivers but they are still not (apparently) seeing the internal hardware. I did Lenovo Vantage and its driver updates fail and sound diagnostics are useless. I just need to understand how to get the displayed drivers to not be gray. I tried “scan for hardware changes” on everything and rebooted multiple times.
Since this appears to be a common problem when CCleaner updates sound drivers, I am pretty pi$$ed. Decades of CC use and this is the first time I bothered to do driver update, and got screwed totally..
Greyed out drivers is usually an indication that a device is disabled.
Open the old Control Panel and click on ‘Sound’ in the window that opens right click in empty space and select both of the ‘Show …’ options.
Then in Device Manager check in ‘Audio inputs and outputs’, in ‘Audio Processing Objects (APOs)’, and in ‘Sound, video, and game controllers’ for any disabled devices.
Try the suggestions in the second post here - Particularly Step 3 regarding getting the drivers for your specific model:
This is an old problem, which doesn’t seem to have been fixed. I suffered the same & had to restore via disk image as reinstalling the latest driver nor rolling back the driver worked.