I would like to thank Gateway for making it so hard just to have some f*cken audio on my laptop. About several weeks ago i purchased a Gateway Notebook MX 6455 for school purposes, well that same day i messed up the partitions while trying to install Ubuntu and erased Windows….yeah tell me about it.

So I reinstalled Windows with the recovery disk that came with it, and everything went fine until I figured out I was not hearing that “beautiful” Windows XP welcome sound (i knew something was missing from the windows experience). Then, I went to Gateway site and went to download the drivers and was downloading them and they kept saying FAILURE. I then figured out, after thoughtless hours, that I had to install the realtek audio drivers first. So I did that, then went back to install Gateway’s drivers and to my surprise….audio still did not work. So I ordered the Recovery Disk (an updated one) and the nice support person gave it to me for free, which arrived later on. And still they did not work, so I was about to sell this computer away until I did another google search for good luck.

I searched for who knows what and i came across this website, notebookreview.com . Where i was leaded to this topic , which the author sounded exactly like me.

For people having the same audio problem (Conexant Ac-Link Audio Drivers, Realtek) here is the fix.

“1. Install Realtek Audio driver (WDM_A380 or WDM_A381, doesn’t matter).
2. Reboot
3. Download and try to install the Conexant AC 97 audio driver. You can get the one from Gateway (D00245-001-001 driver), or any other manufacturer that uses this chip in the notebook. Pay attention to where it stores the files. For instance the Gateway driver uncompresses to c:\cabs\directory name.
4. Go to device manager, find the Realtek AC 97 audio item under “Sound, video, and game controllers”. Right click on it and select UPDATE DRIVER
5. Select NO if it asks to connect to Windows Update, click NEXT
6. Select “Install from a list of specific location” and click NEXT
7. Select “Don’t search. I will choose the driver to install” and click NEXT
8. DE-select “Show compatible Hardware”. CONEXANT should show up under manufacturer since you tried to install the driver earlier.
9. Click on CONEXANT on the left, then select “Conexant AC-Link Audio” on the right and click NEXTThe driver will install. It may ask you for the location of some files, point it to the directory the Conexant driver uncompressed to in step 3.

Reboot, and you should have working audio!”

 If you have amd64 bit processor you can visit planetamd64.com , they have most common drivers for windows64 and vista.