Damaged sound device for laptop

[JWorld]

Hi, guys

I have a Gateway laptop that recently would not make any sound at all. I have reinstalled the necessary drivers, including that ones that came with my laptop and the updated version (on spearated trials, not installed together) on a clean-installed system, but wouldn't help.

I suspect that it is the hardware that has been damaged. I wonder instead of getting it fixed, is there any external device that I could just simply conncet to laptop via interface like USB and allow the laptop to produce sound(bypassing the built-in audio device inside the laptop)?

Thanks for any comments

 

[ski]

Make sure that the onboard sound adapter is enabled in BIOS.

If that's ok, then make sure the sound adapter has no problems in Device Manager.

If that's ok, and reinstalling drivers did not work, then it's probably a hardware problem.
If your laptop has a PCMCIA slot, then you can install a PCMCIA sound card.