No sound, please help!

Hi i have recently rebooted my pc, but now have no sound, a few people have told me that i need to download the sound drivers?????? Can anybody advise me on how to do this please, i use my pc for making music, i have a dell dimension 4600 windows xp i think the sound card is, Unimodem Half-Duplex Audio Device

Yes installing the driver for it is a good first step, as it's a Dell you can get the driver from them, go to This Page, enter the info, or let it auto detect your system (thats on the right if you click on the enter your tag option), then you will be able to get the sound\audio drivers for it, download them, I suggest saving them to your desktop for ease of finding, then install them, the system may well ask for a reboot to complete the install, so allow this, and all being well when you load to your desktop again you will hopefully have your sound back, heres hoping.

sorry i went to that page added my tag downloaded the audio analog driver, but once downloaded, i click to open it and it brings up win zip, i have no idea how o use that! should it open with that? or should i jus be able to click and run or install it????? i would really lik this sorted asap as its stopping me from doing music!!!!!!!!

Right, this is common place for files to be zipped, it makes them smaller so downloads are faster for the end user, all you do when you get a compressed file is to extract it, there are several formats people use, WinZip and WinRAR are the most common, but I use 7-Zip, it is free, very lightweight and easy to use, it has better compression and can handle pretty much any format used to compress files, so what I suggest is uninstall WinZip, it sounds like you have that installed by what you've said (the default compression program launches when clicking compressed files), then get the 32bit version of 7-Zip and install that, unless you have a 64bit OS then get that version.

Once you have that installed extraction couldn't be simpler, just right click on the file, and select "Extract Here" and it will put the files where the compressed folder is, there is one point to note, sometimes files are many and when extracted they are overwhelming, when you first see this you will understand, so it is good practise (for peace of mind) to create a new folder on the desktop, right click on an empty space of the desktop and select create new folder, no need to name it, put the compressed file inside that folder, then right click on it and select extract here, thats it, just identify the file to run to start the install and your sorted, if there is no .exe file, then we will show you how to do it that way if needed, but hopefully this will see you right.