Here is my empty sound devices within windows settings: I restarted after 5-10 minutes and once I restarted again the audio icon showed an 'x' and I couldn't find any on-board audio device (playback and recording) anywhere in any dialog. I kept the computer on for a while and I believe at this time my on-board audio still existed. I clicked yes, and shortly afterwards the dialog said I'd need to restart for the changes to take effect. I clicked it and windows opened a dialog that said something like 'do you want to set up this device'. I went to audio devices and to my suprise there was a new option that said something like 'new audio device (unknown)'. I found an old analog microphone (really analog, just a small microphone with a standard jack from around 2004) and plugged into the audio jack on my Windows 10 laptop to see if it would work (presuming it would just do nothing)
I took an action which caused all of my onboard audio devices to be deleted by Windows, and I am stuck in getting them back:
