Hello. What happened, the audio was working fine and you installed SP3 and it immediately stopped working? Or you reinstalled XP completely?

I reinstalled the O/S completely, but before I did that the audio wasn't working anyway after service pack 3, so I decided to reinstall the O/S to see would that fix it but to no avail. As I've said I've tried numerous drivers  but none work. Do you need to know service tag? Thanks for reply.

Don't need your service tag, thanks. I have not heard of SP3 by itself disabling audio, so there could be a hardware problem. If you still have the original hard drive and have not formatted the diagnostics partition, run the Dell Diagnostics audio tests. Chances are that you formatted the entire drive in which case the partition will be gone now, but you can run the tests from the Utility (Resources) CD.

If the hardware is okay there is no driver-related reason why the audio would not work if the correct driver was installed in the correct manner. After the OS installation, these should be installed in this order or else the audio driver will not install correctly:

a. Dell Notebook System Software (in the System Utilities category). Download, install and restart.

b. Intel Mobile Chipset software (in the Chipset category). Download, install and restart.

c. Install the drivers including the Sigmatel R171789 audio driver (in the Audio category).

If not installed in that order usually you will see an error, but not code 10. There are some Windows problems you could look into, but I would not expect them to occur right after a Windows installation.

Audio Service. This has to be running to get any audio. Go to Start>Run and type "services.msc" (without quotes) then hit the 'Enter' key (or click 'ok'). The Services window will appear. Scroll down until you find "Windows Audio" towards the bottom of the list. Check that it is enabled, set to automatic, and running. If it isn't, double click on it and change the Startup type to Automatic, then click Start, Apply, and OK.

Software Device Enumerator.  If you get a message like "no audio device detected" or "driver is enabled but has not been started", go into the Device Manager and check that 'Plug and Play Software Device Enumerator' is installed and running. It will be listed alphabetically if there.

Lacking any problems with the driver or Windows I would suspect the hardware.

Okay thanks, I'll give that a go later on when I'm home and I'll let you know how I get on.

The sound card is okay, but still no sound.

Yes and works but no sound as the driver is missing hdaudbus sys.

If you are missing system files then something must have gone wrong when you installed Windows. Any file necessary for audio would have been installed at that time except the audio driver..

That file is in the Microsoft hotfix for SP1 & 2, but you said you have SP3 which does not require the hotfix.

support.microsoft.com/.../888111

Okay thanks, I'll try and download service pack 3 again.

Hey, if you still have SP2, download the the hotfix and then try to re-install the audio driver and see if that works.

Unfortunately my laptop has died, when I power up two green lights come on for about 10 seconds and then turns off, I'm safe to assume that the motherboard has died.

Sorry to hear that. Maybe someone on the Laptop General Hardware discussion board can help.