Using external soundcard

Somebody Pleeease help! I have just started using cubase 5 on my laptop, which is quite old, on Vista OS. My headphone jack on laptop does not work, so I bought a basic usb external soundcard and driver, mainly so I can produce and playback my projects through my headphones, so I don’t disturb my girlfriend. This works fine on all my sound software except cubase! According to instruction Vids on Youtube, and several forums, cubase should automatically recognize the soundcard driver, but when i go into Device/Device setup and VST connections, my device is not shown. It will output sound to the laptop speakers, but not the headphones via the soundcard??!! Can someone please help as I’m getting VERY frustrated. Thankyou.

Brand & model, please.

The best chain of events in the last several changes in my computer have been a restart. That includes the upgrade of Cubase 7.0.3 and the elicenser . I gotta agree with Steve, it’s like even though the computer sends a message that it is finished doing something, it really isn’t done unless it restarts

In the last few weeks I have restarted routinely after any changes, deletions, additions, updates, anythng