Techos- Sound starts working- why?

I have an older computer which is in good shape. When I got it back from the workshop a year or so ago it worked fine except no sound. At that time I had spent a bit of money on it- it was about 3 years old so i upgraded to a newer comouter and put the older computer aside.

New computer had a problem which meant it was offline for a week not long after I bought it. I hooked up the old computer and it worked fine but again no sound for a few days I could live with that- even though I tried all sorts of driver d/l’s to see if that would help.

Old computer went back under the house. As i said- quite a good machine- Pentium 4 (2,93), 2 GB Ram, 512 video card. And it has XP which I need for a few programs. So today i decided I would buy a cheap sound card and install it but also get a wifi system.

I installed the wifi system and despite my lack of skills it works. I was about to try and install the sound card when I got a message saying new settings were detected and (PCI) and to connect to the Internet and it would find the drivers.

It d/l some for Realtek and I now have sound (and a brand new sound card I don’t need).

But I can’t work out why. It has been connected to the Internet before and this didn’t happen.

The only thing I can think of is in between I played around with the device manager and may have disabled sound devices (or requested updated drivers) and when I started this up again it found them on the Internet.

Does this sound logical?

it may simply be that the existing drivers it had installed were allegedly the right ones, but in fact didn’t work. Newer drivers have since been released which it has (naturally) upgraded itself to and these do work.

This isn’t totally uncommon - in fact i’ve just finished sorting out an issue like this on my work computer, which was having an issue with Vista and some soundcard drivers that were incorrectly marked as “correct” by dell.