I have been hearing alot of buzz about that Ubuntu, sounds like its time i go check it out.

well i am back. i got the cd-rom in the mail yesterday, installed windows xp, professional edidtion, with service pack 3 this time not two. i installed the chipset drivers, rebooted. installed aduio drivers, rebooted. nothing. I am totally baffled now. The only thing i can think of is that i have the wrong driver, or the onboard audio is lost. What is the proper way for completelly uninstalling a driver anyway?

If the driver installed into Add or Remove programs remove it there.

Generally this will only be either NVIDIA or ATI.

For other drivers use the Device Manager.

You can also use driver cleaning programs but that should not be necessary.

At some point you will have to consider a possible mechanical fault with either your audio chip or speakers. Does the laptop have ports for external speakers?

yes, it has external ports, i have already ordered a internal card for it, but this morning i was playing around with it and the sound worked after i installed the driver!, so dummy me never created a restore point, i rebooted and no more sound! i have no clue whats going on with it.

Were you using external speakers? Is there a BIOS setting to switch from internal to external?

no i'm using internal, and there isnt a single setting in bios for anything related to audio.

See it external speakers or a headset work.

they wont because nothing will even start up because it says it cant start the hardware, but i just realized that system restore was turned on! so i am going to try to find the restore point when that driver worked that one time. hopefully i can find it and i wont need a card just to have sound. i will post back shortly with my findings.