No Sound Advice

Purchased a used Gateway with O.S. Windows Vista Home Premium. Signed on and connected and decided to update Vista. Before I searched for upgrades Win Media Player was playing and sounding great. Anyway I had to re-install Win Vista to get upgrades w/out purchasing a new OP Sys. Well the Laptop ran more efficient but there was no Sound and diagnosis said drivers were correct. I go and click on volume icon and it "says no audio output device is installed". Go to play my music on Win Media player and it states; (Windows Media Player cannot play the file because there is a problem with your sound device. There might not be a sound device installed on your computer). Now I know there is a sound card installed because I was listening to it earlier. So I'm wondering if those upgrades and drives messed up the configuration. I've tried to sync togeter end turn on sound and nothing seems to work. I believe a Sys Restore - taking it back to before the upgrades - should work but the Systems performing great other than the sound. ('') Any suggestions. ('')

You should not be punished to live without sound because Microsoft updates are horrible.
First things first, we need to find out what motherboard you have, once we find that we can google search our way to finding out the type of audio device you have, then we can get the driver.

http://www.aida64.com/downloads
This is Aida 64 extreme, it used to be known as EVEREST, one of the best hardware detection softwares and the only one I've used for ages.

Install, run, then goto Computer>Summary scroll down to where it says Motherboard Name, get that information and post it here or do your own google search for the specs.

Also, see if it can tell you what device you have for your Multimedia>Audio Adapter in the same list there. If lucky, we can skip searching the motherboards specs and just go from there.

Let me know what you find, I'll be checking this forum daily.