How to recover the volume or sound icon to your Windows taskbar

Posted on August 24, 2007 at 9:55 am

Make sure to read other posts from the Audio Tutorials series!

  1. How to capture, save, record or download streaming audio for free
  2. How to extract audio from AVI, WMV, MPEG, FLV, MOV video files for free
  3. How to rip an audio cd and convert WMA files to MP3 for free
  4. How to recover the volume or sound icon to your Windows taskbar
  5. How to record cassette tapes to PC/Computer

Don’t you hate it when need to adjust the volume on your computer only to find that the icon is missing from your taskbar? Here’s a quick tip that I thought I would write since it happens to me all the time! The process for getting back your volume icon is not very complicated, so here it goes!

First, click on Start and then Control Panel to get to the computer settings:

Next, click on the Sounds and Audio Devices icon in the Control Panel. If you don’t see the icon, you may be in Category View. Switch to Classic View by clicking the first option at the top left.

Personally, I like Classic View better since it’s easier to get to what you want quickly. Once you open the dialog, you should already be on the Volume tab.

You’ll notice the “Place volume icon in the taskbar” option is either checked or unchecked. If it’s already checked and the icon is not showing up, you need to uncheck the box, and then click Apply. Re-check the box and then click Apply again. Now your icon should appear in the taskbar.

That’s it! Sometimes this happens a lot, especially after you restart your computer or log off. If It it keeps disappearing over and over again, you need to update the driver for your sound card. You can do this by going to the computer manufacturer’s web site and downloading it from there, i.e. Dell support, etc.

Any questions, post a comment!

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One Response to “How to recover the volume or sound icon to your Windows taskbar”

  1. Rajesh G L said on : March 16th, 2008 at 10:59 am

    you need to copy the sndvol32.exe image from your commercial XP installation media (not a vendor-supplied “recovery” CD-ROM) to the system32 folder by performing the following steps:
    put winxp cd in the cd rom

    Start a command session. click start- run
    type command

    Navigate to the CD-ROM drive by typing
    :
    Navigate to the i386 folder by typing
    cd i386
    Expand the sndvol32.ex_ file by typing
    expand -r sndvol32.ex_ %systemroot%\system32

    if u done successfully… say thkx to glrajesh@yahoo.com


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