Solved! How do I manually disable speakers but not 3.5mm headphones?

[cr1088]

The speakers on my old Toshiba laptop no longer turn off when I plug in 3.5mm headphones. They'll turn off briefly if I fiddle with the input (fundamentally a hardware problem), but won't stay that way. It plays audio through both devices, the speakers just aren't getting the message to turn off.

I'd like a way to manually disable the speakers without also disabling the headphone input. I've already tried disabling them in the device manager and they are the only 'playback' option available in the control panel. Turning them off in the control panel turns off the headphones also.

The computer uses IDT, not Realtek, so using the Realtek audio manager is not an option. The BIOS offers no options in this respect. All drivers have already been updated but that wouldn't make much difference.

This is obviously a hardware issue but I'm not going to replace the sound card on such an old device and I have no desire to go out and buy USB headphones just to turn of my speakers.

Effectively I need to manually tell the speakers to shut off as they would when 3.5mm headphones are plugged in.

Anyone know any tricks or good freeware to solve this?

Thanks in advance.

 

[hang-the-9]

If the computer can't tell the difference between the headphones and speakers (going by the fact you only see a single playback device when both are used, which is the speakers) your only real option is to unplug the speakers physically from the motherboard. There are cheap USB soundcards you can get if you want, then you will have two audio sources to pick from and can plug in the headphones to the added card and use that card as the main audio source.