Fixing Aspire 3680 - No sound on headphone jack

I have an old laptop laying around, an Acer Aspire 3680. It's been a thrusty companion for the years i used it. But about a year ago i replaced it with another cheap, slightly newer office spec laptop. And since then my Aspire has mainly been gathering dust altho it's occasionally booted linux, to avoid dual booting my main machines.

But now recently i found a use for this laptop as a Youtube watching station for my treadmill. And so i flushed my linux install and spun up Windows 7 on it. Installed drivers and all was good. Until i mounted it  by my treadmill and plugged it to the speakers with the 3.5mm jack.
... and nothing happened. No sound.

After reinstalling drivers, newer drivers and googling a bit i found the solution to be odd, but simple:
Simply putting the computer to sleep.
After waking it up again the audio jack will work just fine.

The headphone jack will continue to work untill you restart the computer. Then you will have to put it to sleep again in order to use the headphones again.

Way back when i used the laptop for work i never turned it off, just put it to sleep, so chances are i this issue has always have been there without me noticing.