I need your help, no sound for acer aspire 3002lci

Hi guys, Ii just bought a laptop acer aspire 3002lci and installed windows xp sp2, the problem was that after i installed the cd for win xp i tried to listen to some jams but it said i needed to download some drivers for it
so i googled the specs of the sound card i have and suppously its the REALTEK AC97 so i downloaded it from acer which is the manufactor of the computer, but my surprise was that, this freaking site is a mess, it takes forever to take me to an american server, and when it does it downloads the drivers correctly, but when i tried to unzip the file it says it is corrupted(this file size is 17.8m) , now i tried the europe server and they had it but the file size wax bigger it was 24.5m, so i thought it was the one, but oh my surprise it did unzip it and installed it right but theres still no sound coming from my built in speakers, i tried headphones but nope, so i when to sound and audio devices properties and it shows that my default sound device is realtek ac97 but underneat theres another box that reads device volume and i can see theres a setting for the volume to ligh or low but its blury and i dont have acces to move the seeting from high to low or viceversa, and underneath this theres a third box that reads speaker settings with two more boxers that read speaker volume and advance but so are they blury and dont have acces to them, all this was on the volume tab, but when i go to audio tab my defaul device for sound playback, sound recording and midi music playback is realtek ac97 wtf,,,,same on the voice tab it says my default device is ac97, how about hardware tab? i checked it and it shows my devices like the cd-rdvd, realtek ac97 (which is working correclty PCI BUS 0 DEVICE 2 FUNCTION 7)
Continuing with the list.....audio codecs, legacy audio drivers, media control devices, legacy video capture devices, and video codecs and they all work right. Now i tried downloading the newest version realtek mdw 4.2 because suppously it says that it fits any soundcard and any windows and it did installed right but when i checked the audio properties it said i didnt have a default device so i checked the hardware tab and cheked the new realtek and it said that it couldnt start, wtf am i being ripped offf by acer and was given a different sound card???? or whats really my problem i would really appreciate your help, eddie