Old Dell Inspiron 4100 USB2 PCMCIA?

In order to work, the card you have must have drivers installed - did you install them?

Hi Gangzoo and other Forumers:

I have an Inspiron 4100 also and have been told by Dell that it was designed without a sound card (so even earphones don’t work) and that my alternatives (for getting sound) are speakers (kind of defeats the purpose for a Laptop) or a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card with multiple ports, one of which would be for an external Sound Card and a second would be for a Wireless USB 2.0 Adapter (and others for misc devices).  I don’t want to purchase the Sound Card and a Wireless USB 2.0 Adapter and the PCMCIA card only to find out the latter does not work.  So, I would really appreciate hearing from someone who has found a PCMCIA card that works or some other solution to the sound problem for this computer.

Thanks

The 4100 does have onboard sound support - if it's not working, either the driver is missing or there has been physical damage to the system.

Did you install the driver for the sound chip AFTER making sure you installed the Dell notebook system software and chipset driver?

USB 2 requires Service Pack 1, 2, 3 for XP.

Cardbus requires the Chipset driver be installed so that it can properly enumerate the PCI bus.

The Inspiron 4100 is an older laptop.

It looks like either the chipset driver is missing from Dell.com or isn't required for Windows XP since there are chipset drivers for Windows 98 and Windows 2000 and Windows ME.

The fact that there are audio drivers for Windows XP indicates that somehow there is damage to your laptop.

OK.  I went to Dell's Drivers & Downloads page and entered the Service Tag #.  Chose Windows XP (Service pack 3 is installed).  There was no Driver listed for "chipset" so I chose "BIOS" and added it to the list of drivers to download.  I did not see anything that said "notebook system software".  I downloaded all the drivers that seemed appropriate including the Driver Download Manager, NDP355P-KB963707-x64.exe,  MDAC.exe, R36338.exe, A13-I41.exe, and C5mua09i.exe (for the Audio Crystal Driver) and installed them in that order with no identifiable affect.  I restarted a few times.  There is still no sound and the Control Panel "Sounds and Audio Devices" still indicates "No Audio Device".  

Dell Support told me that the machine did not have a Sound Card; their recommendation was to install a USB 2 PCMCIA card (which I need to do anyway because the USB on board is a 1.0) and connect a USB external Sound Card.  Currently, there is a WiFi Netgear card in the slot now.  So, if I use the slot for the PCMCIA Card, I will get a USB device for the WiFi.  I would prefer not having to put out the money for all this but to have a laptop wo sound seems pointless.  Thanks for any advice.

So, what if anything does that imply re the likely success or failure of the strategy of adding a USB 2 PCMCIA card and and external USB sound card?

Thanks

So, what if anything does that imply re the likely success or failure of the strategy of adding a USB 2 PCMCIA card and and external USB sound card? Thanks

I have never had problems with PCMCIA cards in my laptops. I mainly use them to add wifi capability.

I once bought a new Adaptec brand PCMCIA card to add USB 2 to a  IBMThinkpad 570 circa 1998 running Windows 2000, and it worked just fine.

You can try Googling on this, but unless someone with the same laptop comes here to answer you, you are going to have to either give up on having sound or take a chance on this. It's up to you.