acer aspire 5 mic permanently muted and F4 key not working

pcas

I have an Acer Aspire 5 515-55, I recently had windows re-installed and now I’m experiencing an issue with the F4 key (microphone toggle).

There is a small light on the f4 key, and before I reinstalled windows the light would turn on once I pressed the key (without fn), and the icon of a strikedthrough microphone at the top of the screen would indicate that the microphone was off. Pressing the key again would make the key light turn off, and the icon of a normal microphone (no strikethrough) would appear at the center of the screen.

Now, the light on the key is permanently on, when I press the f4 key I get two strikedthrough microphone icon on top of each other (see image below). The microphone does not work and nothing in the control panel or device manager says that it's deactivated.

Having noticed the issue of the two overlapping microphone icons, I tried pressing the caps lock key and noticed that in this case too, two overlapping icons of a locked lock with a upper case 'A' appear at the top of the screen. However, the caps lock works fine (pressing the key again will turn off caps lock)

I tried disabling and re-enabling the microphone from the device manager but it didn't work. It seems that when windows was re-installed, perhaps the wrong microphone driver was installed and this created some kind of incompatibility. However, when I try to update the driver from the drive manager, it says that "Windows has determined that the best driver for this device is already installed".

Thank you for the guidance!

Puraw

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/716692/acer-aspire-5-mic-permanently-muted-and-f4-key-not-working

Hi, there is no driver for the internal microphone that is managed by Windows. Disable Acer Care Center and AcerSense in Windows Services (accSvs, acsSvc, accAgentSvc) or uninstall these apps in Windows "Add or remove programs", If you don't have Acer Quick Access installed download that from Acer Support for your model and install. Make sure you have Windows11 23H2 as your 2020 laptop and BIOS version 1.13 is for Windows10 /W11 23H2.