Not literally. But the dreaded yellow exclamation mark next to “Realtek Audio” in Device Manager told him everything he needed to know: corrupted driver, generic Windows fallback, zero output.

That’s when his fingers, moving faster than his conscience, typed: into a search engine.

He’d tried everything. Restarted twice. Rolled back updates. Even begged forgiveness from a few dubious driver booster free trials that only made things worse by installing adware and a cheerful toolbar he didn’t ask for.