The internal speaker works fine, but when I plug in the external speaker, (speaker plug + USB) it seems to mute the whole system. Anyone else with the same issue?
Yeah, they try to cram so much into laptops these days the jacks do double or even triple duty. My father had a very similar problem when he got his Acer Laptop. It supported Dolby Digital Surround Sound 5.1 out but only had the one audio out jack. To use normal speakers you had to switch the jack back to analog stereo out.