8600 audio not working after connecting to TV

My brother has a Dell 8600 (not the later c revision), he was trying to hook it up to my Samsung LCD TV to get the audio working using a 3.5mm to 3.5mm cable. The back of the TV is poorly labelled and designed, there's various 3.5mm ports and I'm fairly sure he plugged the cable from the headphone port of the 8600 to the service port of the TV which I believe is used to update the firmware or similar. Unfortunately this seems to have screwed up the 8600 - it all works fine but there's no audio, neither through the internal speakers or anything connected through the line out port. Within Windows it looks fine, the soundcard still shows up and you get a waveform. The machine dual boots Windows and Ubuntu, booting into Ubuntu shows exactly the same symptoms which seems to rule out a software problem.

I'm pretty stuck what to do - he already has a usb soundcard but obviously that's not very convenient when the laptop is on the move. The only other choice seems to be an Audigy pcmcia card which is not ideal as it sticks out and needs the dongle, it's extremely expensive (given the value of the laptop), and it doesn't allow you to use the internal speakers. As far as I'm aware the only possible hardware repair would be to replace the entire motherboard which is not really an option. Does anyone have any other suggestions? He's tried the diagnostic option on boot but it doesn't seem to do much, also the other diagnostic tool he's found from Dell seems to only work with a floppy which the machine doesn't have.

Any suggestions are welcome, although it's not my fault I feel responsible as I sold the laptop to him.

John

Thanks for the reply - the problem is the laptop itself, I can't get any sort of output from it either from the internal speakers or the headphone jack. It shows ok in device manager and you get the wave form but nothing else.

This all happened after he hooked up the laptop to the 3.5mm jack which is used for service on the TV, this was definitely not the audio in jack - the TV has around three 3.5mm inputs or outputs for different audio functions plus this one for service. I'm wondering if it's sent a power surge or something down the cable which has screwed up the audio card.

John

I'm not sure why you've not heard of such a thing, it's quite normal for TVs to have several audio inputs and outputs - Samsung seem to prefer 3.5mm single jacks rather than a pair of phono jacks, given the amount of ports on the TV I would assume it's to save space. This is not my TV but you can see two of the 3.5mm ports for service and audio in for VGA:

http://asia.cnet.com/i/r/2006/tv/39097620/sc006.jpg

The third one is round the side:
http://asia.cnet.com/i/r/2006/tv/39097620/sc007.jpg

Dell diagnostics claim the soundcard is fine, as do Windows and Ubuntu so I'm really not sure what has actually gone wrong inside the machine.

John

Whereabouts is this wire? If there's one that connects the soundcard to the other components then that sounds a good possibility but there's no way that the wire could have come loose at the exact same instant the speakers failed.

John

Unfortunately the machine is long out of warranty.

As a last ditch effort, I got an old docking station from work - the larger type with the PCI slot which are being dumped to be replaced by the smaller type. They all seem to work with the Latitude D series regardless of age so I assumed it would work fine with the 8600 since it has a compatible docking connector but I just get an error that the dock is not compatible. It's particularly annoying because at the least it could have taken a good PCI soundcard but I also wanted to be able to try the headphone port on the dock. I assume this is intentional since the 8600 is an Inspiron model, what docks could the 8600 use? Is there anyway to get around the dock error?

Thanks,
John

Hmm, sounds like it might be worth a go if the only implications are that the machine will claim it's a D800. Any idea why they left the docking port on there if it can't be used? Only reason I can think of is convenience, rather than go to the effort of removing it just disable it.

John