The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
It probably comes with integrated sound. That will probably be enough for the casual user, however if you need more performance, consider a USB-based sound card solution.
You can't configure a card because it's a notebook computer... that simple. You almost never can. Dell faked people out with a supposed Audigy upgrade for some of their notebooks, but it was just a piece of software that supposedly increased sound quality. Whatever sound codec comes on the motherboard the manufacturer is using is the audio "card" included on that notebook.
And some form or another of "HD Audio" is included on just about every notebook computer now. As for the conexant hd audio, spaceman2004 is right about the lack of driver support. The card is recognized and installed by Vista setup, but there are MAJOR driver issues. Hopefully, the system manufacturers jump on them and they put out a decent driver in time for the consumer release of Vista.
And yes, there are USB sound solutions that work quite well if you are connecting to quality external speakers (or headphone).
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
