Keep losing sound, comes back sporadically

I have sound sometimes, and reboot and it goes away. Same with the USB port my printer is connected to. I have spent hours today going into device manager, deleting the nvidia, rebooting, having sound back and then having to reboot again and the sound goes away. In the control panel under sounds and audio devices it says no audio device then I do the deleting in device manager and it reloads the hardware and I have sound. Wha tis wrong with my computer, and what do I need to do to fix it. I feel somewhat comfortable doing things on the computer but clueless as to what to do to fix this. I have windows XP service pack 1. Any ideas? Thanks for your help.

 

sorry forgot to include this stuff...

AMD ATHALON XP 1466 MHZ
ASUS A7N266-VM
NVIDIA NFORCE 220 (DDR)
480 MB RAM
BIOS TYPE AWARD MEDDALLION

Need anything else??

 

First thing to look at is updating your motherboard drivers to the latest compatible ones.

 

How do I do that?

 

Easiest way is to download and install Everest from HERE.

That will tell you what hardware you have, and provide links to the manufacturers site for drivers.