A relative of mine bought a PC used. The person put in a new hardrive and said he'd updated all the drivers. He didn't. It was in like negative four bit, preAtari graphics mode that would give you a display error if you tried to play pong.

Anyway, got all that taken care of. But the speakers built into the monitor aren't working. The sound comes out of a built-in minispeaker inside the case but when we put in the speaker plug (that connects to the monitor) the sound stops. I've set the audio to Monitor Stereo Speakers but sadly enough, I don't even know the type of monitor it is to check to see if the sound part has drivers.

I'm at a loss.

And yes, the plugs are properly positioned.

you have probably taken care of this, but,
1) is the speaker cable from monitor in the Green socket on the sound card?
2) does the monitor have a volume control on it which needs turning up?
Let us know make/model of monitor in case someone here knows something specific about that model

Speakers don't have drivers, sound cards do.
Check under system hardware, sound card and see if it has a yellow sticker on it, it may require a driver.
If you have a pair of headphones, you could plug them in instead to check that sound card is working.
The monitor speakers could be faulty and need to be replaced with stand alone speakers.

It sounds like none of your drivers were installed. You need to install MBoard chipset drivers and drivers for integrated hardware like sound, modem, network, etc.

Go to the Dell site and enter the number on the case to get all the correct drivers.

If the monitor does not have a volume control, that means it probably does not have an amplifier. In that case the audio card/adapter in the PC needs to have an amplifier, and a 'speaker' output. Most audio cards do not have an ampilifier and therefore have an unamplified 'line' output.