My Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop's speakers have recently stopped working. Sound still works through the headphone port, and the microphone port still records, so it isn't the sound driver. Likely the speaker connection has come loose. Is there a guide or diagram for opening this laptop model and accessing the speaker connections? In lieu of that, any guidance with re-connecting the speakers, or other possible causes for the sound loss would be useful.

Speakers can be plugged directly into the headphone jack and work.

This is exactly what I do with my laptop!

Yes It is. You can check them either in COntrol Panel > SOund or Start > Run > DXDIAG.

WIth regards
FIXYA team

Fred if you get sound to your headset from the same port you get no sound for your speakers, it is the speakers and not your headset. Are there any speaker lights on at all? If not maybe your power supply for the speakers is bad.Try a different set of speakers in the same computer and see what happens. If they work, the speakers are bad. Otherwise you have some strange connection problem.

may not be compatable with windows 7.

maybe you have a piece of your head phone jack stuck in the port, does the sound still come through the headphones if you re insert them? or have you tried control panel sounds to see if your default speakers have changed ?

Sounds like the sound card on your laptop may be bad. Your laptop may have an integrated sound card on the motherboad or a seperate sound card. As part of the motherboard you have to get a new motherboard. First check your drivers and go through the trouble shooting section.

Apparently this bug has been fixed already, you can apply patch if you're advanced user or just simply update to newer Ubuntu (e.g. new 9.04, out yesterday). More info here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/309512

There are only certain soundcards that allow this (for obvious illegal music reasons mostly) although it wouldn't stop you from using a microphone against the speakers. Some media players like Winamp SEMI support soundcards being able to record like that (directly from the AudioOut)
There are some work arounds, for example, if you're listening to a file on the web, then that file had to have been downloaded to your computer, so you would look in the temporary internet files folder to find the music.

Sounds like your audio plug in is damaged

You should have sound from the speakers at all times until headphones are plugged into the jack, the jack then overrides the speakers and allows you to listen using the headphones. If the speakers aren't working, it's because they're being overridden by the damaged jack. The only way to correct this is to replace the faulty jacks. You could get a set of external speakers, the con is they're bulky and inconvenient.