That’s a fairly common problem, and the reason for it is that your computer has a specialised sound codec that requires a specialised driver that’s not included with your copy of Windows. Windows might either have installed the best driver that it could find, which, it turns out, isn’t up to the job, or it can’t find a suitable driver, realises it, and therefore gives up trying to install any driver.

What is a driver?

A driver is a piece of software, specific to a relevant piece of hardware, that translates the instruction data from the machine in which it is situated into a command sequence that is recognisable by that piece of hardware. Without that driver the piece of hardware might as well not exist as far as the operating system is concerned, as it has no other way of recognising it or communicating with it except through the driver.

Imagine you came face to face with an alien: You have no idea what anything the alien says means, and the alien can’t understand your language either: Therefore, unless you can find an interpreter that speaks both your own language as well as the alien’s language, there is no way of you and the alien communicating properly. Now imagine that you are the computer, the alien is the piece of hardware, and the driver is the interpreter… You now get the idea.

Each is special

All drivers are hardware-specific, but Windows, particularly in the case of Windows XP, includes driver models that in many cases will just translate enough to allow your hardware to function in a limited capacity until you can download and install the proper driver. There are two other cases that could be possible too: Either Windows has the exact driver for the hardware, in which case it’ll install it and the piece of hardware in question will run properly from the outset, or the case may be that either Windows will attempt to install a driver that fails to install properly because it’s not the right one, or Windows will see that it doesn’t have the correct driver and won’t try to install anything at all in relation to that piece of hardware – With the result that when the operating system is fully installed and begins functioning, it won’t even see that the related hardware exists at all.

If Windows attempts to install a driver that it thinks might work but finds that it doesn’t it’ll, in the case of XP anyway, abandon attempts to try further and leave a bad driver in place at times:This will result in a similar outcome to not having any driver installed usually, plus a black exclamation-mark on a yellow background will appear in the Device Manager in relation to that piece of hardware, indicating that the operating system sees that a device is present, but the installed driver is the wrong one and thus there is a fault somewhere. The device may show up as something like “PCI Multimedia Device”, indicating that Windows knows what type of device it is, but no more. In short; without the drivers Windows has no way to control the hardware so it treats it as if it’s not there.

In such cases the right thing to do would be to totally uninstall the device in Device Manager, and install the correct driver(s).

How do I find the correct driver(s)?

Drivers come from one of two places; those being either your Windows installation or your hardware manufacturer.

The good news is that it’s usually not too hard to find drivers; particularly for recent versions of Windows from XP onwards.

Manufacturer-specific hardware drivers can be obtained from places such as the HP support site, if your machine was manufactured by HP.

Other major computer vendors like Dell and others also take advantage of the internet to have support sites that provide the latest software drivers and updates for the machines that they sell. And most also have fairly active support forums these days where you can get specific help for your computer and hardware from other users as well as, occasionally, the vendor’s staff too.

In some cases you might need to actually determine what specific piece of “driverless” hardware is in the computer, and then visit that hardware manufacturer’s site to download the latest updated drivers. That’s very common for custom built machines, or machines from smaller vendors: ‘Not as common in mass-manufactured machines, such as Dell computers, for instance.

Once you’ve found the correct driver(s) for your piece of hardware, you’ll probably find instructions for installation from the manufacturer either on their website or in a readme file within the installation-package itself. – Usually it’s a pretty straightforward case of simply running the .exe file and an installation wizard takes care of the rest of the process with minimal user interaction.

In your particular case you may find that you have a particular specification of Realtek driver required to operate the onboard sound hardware on your motherboard, perhaps, or something similar.

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Windows 7, at time of launch, appears to have either a proper a driver or a substitute-driver that’ll make the hardware operate at reduced-level for almost every piece of hardware imaginable at the time. – Another thing about Windows 7 is that it’ll search Windows Update for drivers that aren’t included on the DVD during installation, so it’ll possibly7 be quite rare to discover that a driver is missing after installation in the case of that operating system. Having said that, though, there will no doubt be new drivers produced for new hardware over time that neither Windows 7 nor Windows Update will have in their respective driver-arsenals.

At the end of the day; the best place to go for drivers is to the manufacturer’s website; particularly in the case of graphics card drivers. See this article for more on that.

Have you anything that you’d like to add to that? If so then please do comment.