Can't hear people on monitors

[we11er]

Now firstly, I'm running on a crappy latop with all the lowest settings.... well actually not the lowest since the game crashes when I click on the 'advanced' button.... so really I'm probably the only one with this problem... BUT

I can't hear people talking on monitors at all. I couldn't hear brean at the start, couldn't hear Dr. Kleiner in the interview/torture room with barney. Couldn't hear Eli in Kleiner's lab...

I actually could bare with that, but I've just got to:

(nova prospect spoiler)

Spoiler

Alyx finding mossman on the monitor

and I can't hear what they're saying! This is really annoying. I know there's a thread on audio but it's 40 pages long and I think it's mainly stuttering.

Has anyone else had this problem? Got any suggestions? Thanks

 

[MiccyNarc]

Turn on subtitles. Other than that, can't help ya :-\

 

[we11er]

Yeah did that but it's just shit. I want hear who is talking to the person on the monitor.

I'm defragging my hd just for general performance improvement, but i'll experiment with the speaker/headphones etc option, maybe it's sending the audio to a non-existant channel.