My father runs a basic dell he bought for about 500$ a few months ago, last week he got virus'd or something (not quite sure I was out of town) and his OS failed to load. We reformatted it with the service pack disc DELL includes. Since the format, his sound doesn't work tho it says the drivers are installed and working fine, he can't connect to the router (DHCP?) and I did a ipconfig/all command and theres no listing of any numbers whatsoever. I popped in a music disk to check the problems, and when media player opens up says theres no hardware installed, even on the BIOS flash it reads no keyboard present, yet it still functions. This is just the start of it, I was wondering if anyone had suggestions, also on the format it gives you the options of a NTFS format or FAT32 which option would be the beneficiary? I'm pretty new to this stuff so before I hire someone for 120$/hour I'd like to hear some options. Thanks a bunch

Check the hardware in the control panel. See if it's listed with question marks.

Format with NTFS unless you want to use DOS boot disks.

Sounds like several problems:

1. Sound doesn't work.
Almost definitely a driver issue. Perhaps the "service pack disc" from Dell has installed the wrong drivers. You can probably get the right sound drivers from dell.com if you know the exact model(?) of the computer.

2. Network doesn't work.
There could be a few reasons for this:
- Wrong/not present NIC driver? Again, you can probably get this from Dell.com, or from wherever if you know exactly what NIC it is. Most regular (10/100, PCI) NICs should be picked up fine by Windows, so that probably isn't the problem.
- Misconfigured router/DHCP turned off? If you know the router's IP address, try configuring the network statically. (For example, if the router is 10.0.0.123, try setting your computer to 10.0.0.1 and see if it works then.)
- Badly installed TCP/IP stack? (This happened on my dad's laptop recently, dunno what could have caused it...) If you try to go into "Properties" for TCP/IP and you get an error, reinstall the TCP/IP protocol stack.
- Physically damaged network card? Physically damaged router? Better hope not ;)

3. The BIOS says there's no keyboard, but the keyboard works.
Err... *confused*
If the keyboard works, the BIOS *must* see it. No idea about this one.
Also, on Award BIOS (which many or most PCs use, though dunno about Dell PCs), if it can't see a keyboard, it asks you to press F1. How do you manage this?

Btw, in Award BIOS, you can disable the keyboard warning. Somewhere there's an option called "Halt on:", which defaults to "All errors". You can change that to "All but Keyboard" or something similar.

4. You don't know whether you should use NTFS or FAT32.
Simple: Use NTFS. This is the best option in almost all cases.
If compatibility with other OSs (including DOS, Win9x, Linux...) is important to you, you'll have to use FAT32.

First off what o/s did you reformat too... Then trouble shoot from their.. dell gives some funky shit sometimes i run a few servers here of theirs... You might wanna try their tech support on the model of the machine.. did you try ipcfonig/renew also?


as for your sound...... sounds like something may conflicting try uninstalling your sound card then reinstalling again.

In all cases if you reinstall to ntfs without the dell disk on win2k or xp or win 2003 everything should install automatically and should work.

windows is generally good at allready haveing the drivers that you would need

and one last thing.... every try linux? hehe

As odd as this sounds, my mom had a toshiba laptop. My brother took it to college for a semester and brought it back. After I cleaned all his stuff off of it, the sound and network didn't work. I tried installed the NIC driver several times but to no avail. Finally I looked at the toshiba manual, and this is a real eye opener:
(paraphrase)
[quote]
Prerequisites for installing the driver for your network card:
--The (Insert Model Here) Sound Drivers must be installed.
[/quote]

I mean, what?

So, the network card drivers use something from the sound card drivers?

Err, that sounds way weird. But who knows, it might be true.

Just an update, I took a few looks at some of the CD's DELL sends you and it turns out theres a ResourceCD which has all the drivers on it. I reinstalled those drivers and everything seems to be back in to order. So thanks for the tech advice everyone.