Have the drivers necessary for whatever sound hardware is present on your laptop. I’m guessing that’s the issue you’re running into here: wherever it came from your Windows XP installation media simply doesn’t The HP disks may well includeĪdditional drivers for HP supported hardware that the Windows disks from other vendors would not include. This is one of the very common differences between installation media provided by different OEMs like HP, Dell or others,Īnd one way that they differ from the retail versions of Windows you might buy in the store. I have no idea where you got your Windows XP installation media, but it’s fairly clear that it doesn’t have the drivers

On the Vista installation media you hopefully got when you purchased the machine, the fact is that they were pre-installed, as we While they may, or may not, have also been included Installation that you began with clearly had the drivers for your sound card. The reason I said that not all Windows installation CDs are the same is that not all have the same mix of drivers. In fact, that’s exactly what Windows deals with it: without the drivers Windows has no way to control the hardware so itĭrivers come from two places: your Windows installation, and your hardware manufacturer. If you don’t have the software driver that goes along with a particular piece of hardware then that hardware might as well notĮxist. Rather than have Windows have to know about every possible sound card ever madeĪnd could possibly be made, drivers are provided for each that perform that translation. One sound card’s hardware might be controlled in aĬompletely different way than another’s. “If you don’t have the software driver that goes along with a particular piece of hardware then thatĪnd I do mean “specific to that hardware” quite literally.

My sound card manufacturer site