Audio on a dell with windows 8

hello everybody, for the last couple of days i have been having issues with my laptops audio. first i was playing a movie on vlc but noticed the audio wasn't playing. i reset the preferences and still nothing. so i then switched media players and used a default one on the comp. still no audio. then i tried the windows media player and it would not play anything. so i thought maybe it was the driver on my computer but it plays computer sounds. then get this, i logged onto my hulu and it played the videos on there sound and all. right now i have looked all over the internet for an answer, even retried what had already been tried and i am having no luck. any help would be greatly appreciated and thank you for your time