Howdy. My fist post here.
I've been running Ubuntu all this year on this laptop. The sound card is a consistent problem. I had everything working all summer, but needed to run sudo apt-get upgrade, because the movie players stopped working (for some unknown reason). I wanted to get the updated codecs, ect.
To run the upgrade, I had to increase the apt-get cache size.
After I ran the upgrade, the sound card is dead again.
The necessary line of text is still in the modprobe.d/alsa-base conf file. But no sound.
1) I need to get the sound working again. For communication purposes.
2) What can I do to prevent this from happening again? I don't want to re-install Windows. Can I change the sound card to be more friendly with Linux? Is there another Distro that works better with these laptops?
I will see about re-installing the ALSA drivers.
Your help will be appreciated.

Dell has many makes and models of laptops with different sound devices. Mentioning which laptop would probably be a valuable piece of information. Re-installing Windows will not help configure Ubuntu properly.

Thanks. I re-installed all the ALSA stuff. Drivers, libraries, etc. It works fine again now. Seems like I have to rebuild much of this machine every three or four months.

It's a Dell Inspiron 1300, with HDA Intel.

I googled the error messages from the movie players, and found more libraries necessary for the movie players to work. A puzzle why the movies were fine until a week or so ago.

All is well. Thanks much

A few months ago I could install Amarok and play my mp3s without any extra effort, then one day I couldn't play them anymore. Same thing here, I googled and found I had to install libffmpeg. I think it has to do with licence issues with certain formats where the required libraries come from a different repository and are removed from the dependency list for the media player.