I have a Pavilion g7-2010nr which I purchased late 2012. From day one this laptop has been less than reliable whenever I want to use headphones or any other audio device beyond the standard speakers. It would frequently take me more than one reboot to make the headphones work. Four days ago I had to flash the BIOS with the most recent version provided from the HP website and, ever since, not with 5 reboots can I get the headphones (or other audio devices) to work: there is simply no sound output from any connected device, no matter what I try to do through the "headphones and speakers" button on the Windows taskbar.
This is clearly neither a hardware issue nor an issue with the BIOS update, because I also have a Linux partition installed on my hard disk and everything works smoothly on that partition (headphones, guitar amplifiers, earphones, you name it); it's just the Windows 7 partition that's giving me trouble. So it has to be an issue with the Windows driver. When I searched for the driver version through the Device Manager I found out that I actually have the latest version of the audio driver provided by HP for this laptop; version 6.10.6392.0 (available for download from here).
I find myself at a loss about how to fix this and would appreciate any assistance.