No sound issues

Hey everyone.

So, I was messing around with an old family PC today. For some reason, it needed an upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7 Ultimate, so I went ahead and pulled the trigger on that.
Unfortunately, just like the title says, there's absolutely no sound. 😢
I've been banging my head against the wall for two hours now trying to fix this, and I'm getting nowhere.
There's a little red circle over the speaker icon in the taskbar down in the corner.

I tried updating all the drivers, but nothing. There aren't even any of those yellow exclamation marks popping up in the Device Manager, so everything looks like it should be working perfectly fine—except it isn't.

If anyone here has dealt with this exact headache and actually found a fix, I would be incredibly grateful if you could let me know what worked for you. 🙂

Let's just assume for a second that Windows 7 actually did its job and installed the right audio drivers...

You’ve got the speaker icon, which is a good start. You mentioned there's a red circle on it. What happens when you hover your mouse over that icon? You should see some kind of status message pop up...

When you click that icon, a volume slider should appear along with the speaker icon and that red circle—which basically means the sound is muted. If you click the icon so the red circle disappears and then crank up the volume slider, do you actually hear anything?

Look, sorry if this sounds condescending, but I can't see you and I have no clue what your tech skills are. Besides, anyone can overlook something simple; I’m the first to admit I do it all the time. I once spent way too much time troubleshooting audio only to realize my speakers were turned off. 😬

If you still aren't getting any sound, right-click the speaker icon on the taskbar. A menu should pop up; you're looking for "Playback devices"...

That'll open the Sound window. Right-click somewhere inside that window to bring up another menu—usually, you'll see two options: "Show Disabled Devices" and "Show Disconnected Devices." Check both of those. Now, a speaker icon should show up in that window. It should list which device is playing the audio and have a little green checkmark next to it to show it's active. If it doesn't, left-click the speaker icon, right-click it again, and select "Set as Default Device." You might have to disable another device first if something else is currently set as the default and stealing the audio signal.

That should do it, provided my opening assumption was correct. If you're still stuck, tell me exactly what you see on your screen and any error messages that pop up while you're following these steps...

First off, I really appreciate you putting in the work here. 👍

Turns out, it was definitely a driver issue after all.
The macOS driver updates are a complete disaster—just a total failure.

Using DriverPack Solution fixed everything right up.