Sound issues with my laptop

Hey guys. I just bought an Alienware Aurora m9700, an old laptop running on Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit right now. Everything's working fine on the OS, except the sound.

Inside, it uses an audio processor called SoundMAX, which is the audio driver for the laptop. It'll install, but about mid way there, an error will pop up saying: "streamci.dll cannot be found" or something like that.

streamci.dll is a file in the System32 folder that's involved with audio. The only thing about it is, the legitimate/full file is in the folder, but windows isn't recognizing it being there. I've also done a scan for all the system 32 files from cmd and it showed nothing wrong turning up, even if I took the .dll file out of the folder. 

I did also delete the old .dll file after seeing what windows was doing, then copied the one from my desktop and put it on the laptop. Still nothing happened and windows read nothing was wrong. Any way to solve/fix this issue?

(( Note, i'm very inexperienced with audio and software, so if I said anything wrong, then please correct me x3 ))

If you go to device manager and look under 'sound, video and game controllers' what is the status (icon) of the audio device?  Are you able to roll back the driver?  Or maybe just uninstall, reinstall it?

It looks like someone has had the same issue with that laptop and found a solution to the problem.  Here is a link to the thread page: http://www.sevenforums.com/sound-audio/1736-alienware-m9700-audio-problem.html

Sadly that's not the case. It just brings you to download SoundMAX off of Alienware's website again, the vista 64 bit install. Also the '6051' thing isn't there anymore since Alienware updated their website and all. I mean heck, it's been 6 years since that post on there.

Another thing about that. In device manager, there is no icon of the audio device which means windows isn't even detecting anything present from the core. I was wondering about that when I went to device manager. 

I would personally delete all the audio drivers in device manager, then manually run windows update several times.  I would then try to reinstall the SoundMax driver, if I still had no audio.

Like I said, there is no audio icon or anything in device manager, so it's not possible.

Scratch that. I did find something in device manager that was in 'other devices' which was where the audio controller was. So I uninstalled and ran an update with windows update and such turned on. It didn't find anything sadly.