Once you’ve verified that the driver is actually there, go ahead and fire up a YouTube video or play your favorite song on Spotify to ensure that the driver is functioning properly. Go ahead and find the driver in your downloads folder and run it again. If it’s there, great! If not, the installation didn’t work for some reason. However, we here at TechRadar like to make sure software takes before we trust it.įirst, go back to Device Manager, and make sure that “Realtek High Definition Audio” shows up under “Sound, video and game controllers”. Uninstall any duplicates, restart your computer before moving to the next step.Īfter you restart your computer, the driver should be installed. This is just to ensure you don’t have any duplicate drivers. Once that’s done, at the top of the device manager window, click “view” and scroll down to “show hidden devices” and click it. Then, just follow the directions on screen until the device is uninstalled. Make sure you have the box “Delete the driver software for this device” selected and click OK. Once you do, go ahead and right click it and select “Uninstall device”.

Once you’re there, scroll down to “Sound, video and game controllers” and find “Realtek High Definition Audio”. To do this, go to the Device Manager by either right clicking the start button or typing “device manager” into the start menu. This might seem counterintuitive, but before you go looking to reinstall the Realtek HD Audio Codec driver, you’re going to have to uninstall all traces of your existing audio drivers.

Realtek microphone driver