Realtek 97 dead, USB sound card possible?

I have a pretty old Toshiba A75. It had the regular heating problem that killed the board. I got a cheap used board that, for God knows whatever reason, has no sound. I have the heat issue under control. I updated the driver and it passes all the troubleshooting I've tried. I think I'm just giving up on figuring it out.

I just got a new Lenovo, and I was hoping to use the A75 as a dedicated machine for Reason 4 (music production software). I have a 160gb drive in it, and 1.5gb of RAM. It's a good candidate for running only Reason and a few other essentials.

Problem is, of course, no sound. The integrated sound sucks anyways, so what about a USB sound card? Is there anything available hardware-wise that may suit my needs?

(also, this is very strange, but If I hook the headphone output to my home stereo and crank it to 10 you can just barely make out whatever music I have playing on the laptop. It's almost inaudible. Under normal circumstances this would destroy my speakers.)

 

Their are USB sound cards on the market,
Here is a list of sound cards you may be interested in:

For USB:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2000290057%201102608535&bop=And&Order=PRICE
For PCMCIA:
http://www.google.com/products?q=pcmcia+sound+card&hl=en
For Express card:
http://www.google.com/products?q=express+card+sound+card&hl=en&show=dd

I would try and go for a PCMCIA or express card solution as they will have much better sound quality than a USB one

K-TRON

 

You know, just wondering:
But does the Lenovo have a manual volume control? Our olod Asus had a little wheel ont he CD/DVD drive for sound - I was once wondering why I wasn't hering anything/why it was so quiet - turned down via that thing...