sound card??

I'm having an issue with the sound on my laptop. SOMETIMES I will start the computer and the sound will work just fine. Other times I will get sound from certain things (windows messages, etc) and NOT from Instant messengers or music. I am so confused here. Is my sound card biting the dust? As of now, when I click the "volume" icon on the task bar, I get the message "there are no active mixer devices availiable. To install mixes devices......this program will now close" Now when I try to play a music file on my computer, I get this message: "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, it might be in use by another program, or it might not be functioning properly". any thoughts guys?

Go into device manager and update the driver. You should have a disk that came with your laptop for drivers/utilites, see if the sound driver is on that if Windows Update dosn't pick it up. Otherwise the manufacturer of your laptop should have it listed on their site for download.

i didn't get a driver cd with my laptop...lousy HP!. I did, however, go to HP's website and found some availiable drivers that had to do with sound. I'll try to download them tonight and see if that helps. thanks.

If all else fails you can try deleting your sound card from the device manager tree and reseting you laptop. It will reset the configuration for it, sometimes this works like a charm along with new drivers.