Thanks,
I got the driver from Dell. It is the correct driver but it doesn't seem to work on my computer. I keep going to add new hardware, windows doesn't automatically find my sound card, so I manually pick "sound and game devices", then it asks me what driver to install, so I direct it to the driver I downloaded, and the driver installs.
However, nothing happens after install. When I try to play music, windows media player tells me I have no audio hardware
I tried one other thing but it also didn't work. I have a 2nd exact laptop with the english win xp from dell and sound works there. So I went there to control panel and then to sounds and it had "Sigmatel High Definition Audio CODEC", something the other laptop without sound no longer has. So I clicked on properties of "Sigmatel High Definition Audio CODEC" --> driver --> driver details. Then I had 10 paths to driver files in the windows system32 directory. I copied those files to the laptop with no sound. But still does not work...
I actually think the problem is that the laptop thinks there is no hardware audio device at all. Perhaps newer windows OS has some files that older version of windows OS doesn't have and the old non-english windows cannot recognize the audio hardware? What to do?
I installed everest and it says my sound card is "Intel 82801GBM ICH7-M - High Definition Audio Controller [A-1] " but I cannot find a driver for that anywhere.