external speakers

Question

my sister has a inspiron 1100 for school. It runs with xp and from what I have found a sigmatel sound card stac97 sys. Now I know nothing of laptops and little about computers, learning every day. I plugged in a old set of speakers and they wont work, have tested them, tested the headphone jack and spent a day navigating around to find the problem. if this is an intergrated sound card am I limited to what speakers I can use? or is there something else I should be doing, it says everything is running fine.

This all comes down to she wants speakers for christmas and when I type her service info into dell, they list only one pair of speakers that I can buy. Is this my problem? I can't beleive ther's only one pair of speakers that will work with this computer. thanks for helping me learn cjs

GreyMack · Answer

The headphone out jack is quite low power, so when I'm not using headphones I run the signal out to my stereo aux jack. If your sister is using a stereo system already, and it has an aux or other line-level input available, you just need the proper cables and adapters. There are also several models of amplified speakers on the market designed for this purpose.

GM

Inspiron 8100 / 866MHz PIII M / 815 Chipset
30GB Travelstar HD / 8x4x24 CD-RW
15" UXGA / nVida Gforce 2Go
ORiNOCO Wireless PCMCIA / RG-1000
Windows ME / Intermittent Explorer 6.0
Norton SystemWorks / ZoneAlarm / AdAware / SpyBot S&D
MusicMatch JukeBox / KaZaA Lite / JustCAD / 'n Stuff

19cjs68 · Answer

I figured it out. after reading your message a couple of times and it being a different day and all. I went and looked at the other jack and its a microphone jack. I plugged the speakers into the headphone jack and what do you know they work fine.

I wonder if I'm safe to buy any type of speaker system w/ sub and amp that I choose?

19cjs68 · Answer

she only has the headphone jack and a speaker jack.I took the laptop and hooked my altec 5.1 system up to her speaker jack and still got nothing. These are the speakers I have on my dell 8300. Thinking about it I know the one jack is a headphone jack, it has the picture of headphones. I assumed the one next to it is the speaker jack, it has a little picture of something. Its not color coded.                      cjs Message Edited by 19cjs68 on 11-30-2003 12:49 PM

GreyMack · Answer

I can't say 'any' amplified speaker system w/sub will work, but nearly all are designed to accept a line-level analog audio input. GM

titanup · Answer

I purchased a cheap pair of altec lansing ($15) speakers and they work great.

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external speakers

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