Last week I was online and my PC sound just quit working. It was working when the computer came on but at some point while I was working it stopped. At first I thought it was the connection so I made sure everything there was ok, which it was. Then I made sure the mute was not on, the speakers were on, the volume was high enough, etc. Everything was fine. I suspected the speakers might not be working, but I took them to another PC and they work just fine. I even took another working set of speakers from another PC and set them up on mine - but still no sound. So obviously it's not the speakers, but something with the computer itself. A guy built this PC for me, and it has Advance AC97 sound, which if I understand correctly is just a chip on the motherboard? I realize I will probably have to take it in for service, but I was hoping someone might have seen this problem before or could help me out with it. Thanks

You're right about it being a chip. You may have a driver issue. Go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com and see if there's a driver update for Advance AC97. I'm pretty sure I saw one there the other day. Check in the drivers section of the three. Try and track down when your sound quits working. I met a computer once that decided the sound card wouldn't work as soon as it went online. The modem and sound card were using the same resources. That'll usually show up in device manager. Go to control panel, system, hardware tab, and click device manager. If you see exclamation points you'll have to reconfigure resources.

Thanks for the suggestions, I will try that out.

un-install your sound card from device manager. Re-boot your computer and XP will pick up the sound card and install the drivers for it automatically. The drivers for the AC97 are within the driver package of the XP operating system. Depending on your computer and it's speed, the sound card may take a minute to get re-detected on the re-boot. Once it is re-detected, you'll see a message that says "found new hardware, AC97, windows is installing the drivers needed for this device" then it will tell you when it's been installed successfully. If it's a drive issue, this will solve it. If this doesn't solve it and there is an explanation mark in device manager like mentioned by Air_run above... you may need a new sound card. Give this a try though, it should fix you up. Good luck.

Thanks MacDude, I never thought of that.

Just wanted to say that I tried MacDude's suggestion and it worked like a charm. Thanks!