Questions for any computer savvy people..

[andmill11]

My brother was on the computer a while back while i was at work and i came home to about 40 something pop-ups, a fake Winantivirus, zango, and a myriad of other viruses on the computer. I booted up spysweeper to only find that he tried to update it normally (its um.. not able to do that *wink*) and it disabled my subscription. So i rebooted the computer since it froze only to find that the internet will no longer turn on and no matter what i tried it always said 'limited or no connectivity'. So finally i gave up and formatted the harddrive and reinstalled windows xp.

Heres my problem. It wasnt per-say MY version of windows it was a friends since i lost my disc and it is a UK version. My keyboard types characters differently now and i would like to know how i can install an American Keyboard driver and a website maybe where i can find it.

My sound card/driver im not really sure what its called isnt automatically pre-installed like it was before so now i dont have any sound. When i look at the configuration thing all it says is 'no audio device'.

Any help/suggestions would be appreciated. It is cool now that i can type £ for where my Shift+3 key should be.

[Kawigi]

For the keyboard part, you should be able to change your "Regional and Language Options" from the control panel (at least that's what it's called on Windows Vista, it's probably similar for XP), and change or even add additional keyboard layouts. It's not a driver issue at all, just a configuration issue, and you probably had the option to change the default during the installation :-)

Other hardware is hard - if the sound card is the one that came with the computer, then you can probably track it down, and if it isn't, then hopefully you already remember what it is :-) If you have printed documentation that came with the computer, it might tell you what you have, but your best bet might be looking up the model of computer on the manufacturer's website and finding drivers for the computer - it will likely give you a place to download all kinds of drivers for obscure parts of your computer you didn't know existed, hopefully including the sound card.

[schedar]

Oh, and get BitDefender. Its an anti-virus that updates itself every hour. Pretty handy, I have it :D

[andmill11]

Holy snap the gateway website where i bought the computer had a drivers section where all i did was type in my serial number and it gave me a driver scanner that installed the default sound for mine and it worked. Yay for music again... oh and INTERNET! which now includes XBOX LIVE! I was without the two for 3 days and a power outage which added another 2 to it..

Attempting the keyboard thing now.. If anyone lives in the UK where the heck is the backslash key!! i cant type in any dang commands! All i get is ~ and the ~ key is a ¬. Seriously wth is a ¬ for?!

*edit* haha i just realized my clock says its 23:55...

*double edit* Hurrah! ~~~~~\\\\\|~~~~\\\\\\~~\\\\

Thanks kawigi :)

When i installed this "version" of Windows xp it came with sygate firewall and avast! anti spyware. I dont know much about avast! so i think im just going to delete it and put my Ad-aware professional edition back on