What if the sound card does not work?
You need a functioning sound card and properly connected speakers to play music with Windows Media Player. Later in the booklet we will look at installation of new hardware, but let me briefly describe the sound card. In practice the sound part (as it is called in Windows XP) can either be built-in in the pcs motherboard (like in portable computers), or it could be a plug-in card (a real sound card). In all cases Windows XP has to determine during the installation that there is a sound card in the pc, and you have to install a driver for the sound card. The driver installation can go awry for different reasons; that happens sometimes. In that situation you have to install the driver yourself (you can read more about that later). But often the installation works automatically, and then the right drivers are installed. You can see than in the control panel. Select Sound, speech and sound units and then Sounds and light units like here: Then you should see the name of your sound card (or
