Beg pardon but this is I hope a well worn topic with a well used fix. I just reinstalled XP Home on a DELL Dimension 8200 (yet again, an older unit and OS disc) and not only have no sound but the vid and sound cards (Nvidia/Santa Cruz) are not even recognized. I believe I am running through the intrinsic VGA and only the error beep comes out of the tower for any sound at all. I have read that XP comes with no sounds, but before the virus attack that preceeded this reinstall, the sound and vid card were being used with no problems. And no tool can steer me to drivers since the hardware is not seen. No sound or graphics DEVICES show up in dxdiag either. Would another reinstall probably fix this? Would a new copy of XP likely take care of things? I am really leaning toward the latter because I am getting worn out installing an OS so out of date that it takes two days to crawl my way up to the present. And no, I don't want to try stuffing W7 on this old thing, I do believe it would roll over and DIE. THANKS in advance for any help or advice.http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/driverslist.aspx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&ServiceTag=&SystemID=DIM_PNT_P4_8200&os=WW1&osl=en&catid=&impid=

I'd download the CORRECT drivers from dell support linked here and install the drivers needed replacing whichever ones are already there. I thought that was the ticket too but do I need to download every sound driver and hope something will take? I will give that a try regardless. Any thoughts on if a reinstall is a valid thing to do? I had forgot to say that the speakers were not plugged in until well into the updating phase so I can't say if the sound was there at some point then lost. There was also the struggle to connect to the net that perhaps corrupted some OS software. Is that possible? It's puzzling that the The Santa Cruz sound card that the previous owner installed had errors installing from it's disc. Does that suggest that some MS infrastructure software is missing or corrupted? Again, another install is the way to go? Other searches often mention a sound enable section in the start BIOS but there is no such option on the BIOS that I see.
Thanks for the reply.Go to the Dell Website and enter your Service Tag number. Download and install all appropriate drivers for your system starting with the Chipset Driver.