Sound Very Low

[CAM]

After the old PC in the front room blew up, I was being driven insane by "I want to check the speedway results and potter about my Hotmail account on your PC" requests so I bought a new machine off Dell thinking it'd be quick and no hassle for me. Inspiron for about £500, was it easy? Like hell.

Having never used Vista before, I spent a while getting accustomed to this glorified E-Mail terminal before realising the sound is very low, not good in the days of YouTube. The computer uses 2 unpowered satellite speakers cannibalised from a machine a while back and they worked perfectly fine on XP. I can barely hear things and cannot hear some sounds at all. Any ideas for how to fix this? I need to get the volume higher as the owner is hard of hearing.

It's a fresh system that arrived a few hours ago and not happy with Dell! And they didn't come with OEM speakers as I was planning on re-using these cheap ones.

[cookie_monster]

It doesn't sound like a Vista problem it soulds like a hardware problem. We have a room full of PC's with low output onboard soundcards on and they're a pain, you'll probably need to buy some powered speakers. Alt you could contact Dell and mention it it is possible that there's a hardware problem but i'm suspecting a low power budget soundcard that won't power 'unpowered satellite speakers'.