Another urgent question

[ritaxis]

Say you have a relatively well-functioning (except some of the keys on the keyboard are a bit resistant to suggestion) six year old Fujitsu Lifebook laptop which is sadly running Vista, and the sound has cut out on it suddenly while you were clumsily trying to type on it..  The "volume mixer," which isn't a mixer in a real sense at all but only a

Comments

[carbonel]

Two things, both kind of obvious, but based on experience.

1. Have you tried rebooting? My desktop computer sometimes loses sound entirely, and rebooting fixes it.

2. Is there a physical "sound off" switch somewhere on the outside of the computer? I encountered that with my boss's computer.

[ritaxis]

I've turned it off and on a couple of times since then, no dice.

I looked for an external sound off switch because I had read that there might be one, but I can't find something that looks like that. I had thought it was pretty likely that if it was there I had bumped it while trying to type on the thing.

[pyrzqxgl]

I have an 11-year-old Fujitsu Lifebook myself, among others. I don't know what your model is, but you should be able to find manuals for it at http://support.fujitsupc.com/CS/Portal/support.do?srch=GUIDES

I'm not clear here on whether you're only talking about external speakers, or if you were using the internal speakers when it first cut out.

Does your model have function keys that decrease and increase volume? (With mine I can hold down the Fn key and then press F8 or F9 to do these things -- volume bars appear on the screen, and the F8 and F9 function keys themselves have little volume icons on them.)

If you look at the volume icon in the computer system tray (lower right), does it have the circle with a red line through it to indicate that it's muted? This is set independently from volume. For all I know your model may have a function key or multimedia button or something for muting, that you could accidentally hit while typing.

[ritaxis]

Just the internal speakers. I have increased and decreased volume, and I've muted them and unmuted them. No change.

[pyrzqxgl]

Well, you can go through the different tabs on the Control Panel Sound window, checking properties and configuration and using Test buttons and so on, to make sure everything seems to be set correctly.

You can use the Control Panel to get to the Device Manager, to verify that things like audio controllers and system speaker are enabled, and have it look for updated drivers for them. For that matter you could check for various updated drivers on the fujitsupc.com site as above.

If you want to totally reset the computer (not meaning to wipe its settings, but to possibly get it out of some weird mode it's gotten into), you can shut it down, unplug the power cable, remove the battery, and then hold the power button down for a minute. Then replace the battery and power cable, and restart.

[ritaxis]

I was just about to check all those, but this last rebooting seems to have done the trick for some mysterious reason.

Thank you!