Recently we have seen an influx of users and clients complaining that their Lync audio is broken on their Dell laptops. The symptoms are all the same, after months of working just fine, Lync can no longer detect an audio device. This impacts not only UC enabled headsets, but even the onboard speakers and microphones.
I went through the typical troubleshooting steps, verified firmware, updates and made sure all devices were enabled. All were up to date. The other strange part was that all other software requiring audio worked just fine, only Lync 2013 was impacted.
I started to dive deeper into what was happening. I was able to install Lync 2013 and the same audio devices on other machines and virtual machines with no problem. It seemed to only be effecting my Dell 6400 series laptops. So I started looking at device manager as to what was different.
What I noticed was that these laptops had a specialty USB driver for their virtual hub called Intel WiDi USB. I tried disabling this but no luck. I then tried removing it completely and low and behold, Lync now detected my audio devices! I didn’t even need a reboot.
Myke Schwartz, PEI
