Good assumption... if it was Mac he'd just throw $500 at it and it would work, and if it was Linux he'd stay up all night researching and eventually end up blogging to the world about how unfair it is that his sound card manufacturer won't release their hardware specs for the OS community to work with... and still not have sound.
Not kidding about the google... if you take the exact text you're getting in device manager (or whatever the hell MS is calling it this week), quote protect it, and throw the model number as the second search term, you'll probably get a hit.