Since most of your questions have already been answered, i'll just try to help with the sound problem.As the first guy said, make sure you have PNP os disabled in the bios.Now for the sound,slackware should have support for your card,use pico, or your favorite text editor to open /etc/rc.d/rc.modules,and find the sound card section,uncomment the line for your card, I think the regular /sbin/modprobe sb line will work fine.
If you cant get that to work, try
www.opensound.com, and download oss.Its shareware,and limits you to three hours of sound unless you pay the 20+ bucks, but its easy, a simple download, untar, and ./oss-install should pick your card right up.But I would recommend trying to edit the /etc/rc.d/rc.modules first, so you can have full sound, with out paying