I have a problem that sometimes my sound doesn't load on my Toshiba laptop, and I get this error:
"sound module (snd-atiixp) Fatal: Module snd-atiixp already in kernel
FATAL: Error running install command for snd-atiixp"
Thing is, the sound doesn't always work on Windows either (I have both on my laptop, and the sound in Windows seems to be affected by whether I plug the battery in or not, and usually rebooting the computer makes it all good). Is this a hardware problem I won't be able to fix, or would it help if I installed the latest driver or somesuch.
Thanks

Did you set up the kernel yourself, or was it automatically installed? It might be worth trying to disable the loading of the sound kernel module. Try looking in /etc/modules.conf or /etc/modprobe.conf or /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 (which file is present in your system depends on your distro) and see if you can spot the line that refers to snd-atiixp. If you can find it, try commenting it out and see if that helps.

It was automatically loaded. I'll try what you said. But (and I know this is a stupid question, but I'm not all that brilliant with computers) will this fix the problem with windows as well?
Thanks for the help.

Sadly, whether or not this helps your Linux install, it will do nothing whatsoever to your Windows install. I'd try looking for a more recent driver in Windows, and checking that there are no hardware problems.

It was a slim hope that it would magically fix windows after all, and I've tried to fix it, but no luck, one of the reasons I'm trying linux.
Thanks.