Laptop downgraded to XP-SP3 - no audio?

A friend of me here has a Gateway ML3109 Laptop. It was running very sluggish, and after looking at the system specs I concluded that the Windows Vista she got with it was the main culprit. Its hardware is nowhere near capable of running Vista decently.

So, I downgraded it to Win XP SP3 for her... but then I got in trouble with the drivers. Gateway does not support drivers for this laptop for any other OS than Vista... Some searching resulted in me finding the Graphics drivers and the Wireless Network drivers... However, the audio remains out so far.

I have been looking into it and searching, but it seems very hard to figure out what I need... we tried installing like 6 or 7 different audio drivers for it but they all end up complaining that they arent compatible and wont finish their installation.

Also, the interesting thing is that it doesnt actually say it lacks audio drivers in the device manager, instead it lacks Ethernet drivers (I assume thats from the modem, which isnt really relevant because we dont use that anyway) and that it lacks a PCI device Driver. I am quite sure this PCI device will be the sound, but that doesnt seem quite right.

Now, I read something about KB888111 but that seems to be for SP2 and incompatible with SP3...

The motherboard is "4006148RMotherboard UMA w/ATI RC415MD w/o 1394 (FRU)" according to gateway and the soundcard on it should be a Sigmatel 9200...

So well, any help? I found a topic for the same laptop on this forum but unfortunately that seems to be for XP SP2 and I couldnt get the solution of that topic to work.

 

It can be really hard to find drivers in this situation. One way is to look at similar models that came with XP. Another way is to figure out the part # of the motherboard, then search Gateway's site for that part #, and if you're lucky, pull up a list of all the laptops that use the same MB.

However... it might not be a driver issue. It could be a resource issue. Try disabling ALL additional hardware and reset the IRQ's in BIOS (if possible). That might free up resources for the sound card.

 

post report from everest pls....thanks

 

Hello again all... I realize it has been a while since I posted this problem here... back then we got busy with some other stuff and I didn't get around to using my friends laptop to run this program... but well, now things calmed a bit, and the problem was still there, so we got back to trying to fix it... so I got her to finally run this Everest check. The report hereby attached, I hope it will be of use.

 

:wave Welcome to Major Geeks! :major

I downloaded the Vista sound driver from the Gateway web site (from this link). I extracted it with TUGzip and it looks like it should work for XP if you do NOT run the setup.exe and instead install it via the Device Manager and Hardware Wizard (more info at this link) and point it to the WDM folder. If not, try using the driver at this link. It should also be extracted with TUGzip and installed via the Hardware Wizard using the steps at the link I posted, and again point the Wizard to the WDM folder. Let us know how it goes! If you run into any problems, be sure to post and we'll do our best! Good luck!

[dlb]