Please help, This problem keeps coming back

Hello,
I was having a repeated problem with the sound disappearing from my laptop This was happening in all 3 of my browsers) and Googled the problem. I found myself at this sight:
https://ccm.net/forum/affich-722068-no-sound-on-youtube-videos-in-any-browser

and found this link in the answers section:
http://ccm.net/faq/10383-no-sound-on-youtube-or-any-video-audio-site

I then followed the instructions and all seemed fine. The next morning when I turned my laptop on I got a blank grey screen, after several attempts it occurred to me that maybe I could try the trick that works with my cell phone. So I took out the battery and waited a couple of minutes; put the battery back in, turned it on and everything was fine (sound and all).

For 2 days. Google Chrome then updated. Now I am back to the same problem.

I am a little concerned that maybe the second information might not have been intended to work with Windows 8 and I got lucky. That is why I have not used the link above again.

Can anyone tell me more about this? It did seem to help once I "rebooted" my laptop. I am so tired of going to Chrome://plugins doing the disable/enable thing then shutting down everything to restart my laptop, just over a sound issue. I will be so grateful if someone can help me.

My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 17 3721
The OS is Windows 8

I have applied the fix again. It only works until the next time the laptop shuts down. Using the chrome://plugins way works the same. I have found that this problem is affecting all sound.

In thinking back, I noticed this issue after I had used the music app that came with my laptop. After that when I would look at a Youtube video a pop up add would tell me that I was missing something (I don't remember what it was now).

Please, can anyone think of something else that might work. I would be so grateful if someone could help me.

Is more information about my laptop needed?