About a week ago, my laptop power cord apparently developed a short. I was using my laptop with it plugged in when the battery died. When I fiddled with the power cord it restarted, but there was a loud grating noise. I assume it overheated and this sound was the fan? I quickly unpluggled the cord, gave it a minute, and then put it back in and turned on my laptop. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary ... until I tried to play Audio. I realised that there was abslutely no sound at all, not even system sounds, since that had happened. I plugged in a set of earphones and played a file in Windows Media Player. Oddly, there was a tiny bit of sound, but so vague I could only hear it if someone yelled/there was very loud noise, and then only faintly. So there IS sound, it is just incredibly low. I tried reinstalling the driver from the Dell website, to no avail, I have checked all of the volume settings and everything is fine. There are no question marks in device manager. I am at a loss as to what it could be. I am basically computer illiterate, so if there is any information still needed let me know and I will reply immediately. Any and all help would be greatly appreciated....
ETA: my OS is XP.