Can you hear me now?

So, I've had this Toshiba laptop for, oh, about three or four years now. (No, I haven't abandoned my Mac; it's just that most of the courses I've been taking at the community college are Windows-centric, so I got a Windows laptop back when my Mac wouldn't run Windows.) Anyway, when I first got it, I remember the sound working OK. You know, the little riffs that Windows plays when it starts up or shuts down. I had little occasion to play any other sounds, since I do all my email and web surfing on the Mac.

Then, somewhere along the line, the sound just... disappeared. Well, not entirely; but when I tried to listen to a web video for one of my classes, the volume was very, very low. All attempts to adjust the volume in the sound control panel did exactly nothing. I finally gave up, on the grounds that a) I could get along without the video anyway, and b) I could also get along without Windows' startup and shutdown music, which I realized had also faded to near-silence without my really noticing.

OK, then last fall I started my new job, and since February, most of the time I've been able to telecommute a couple days a week. Now, being a contractor to a government agency, I'm restricted to working on my government-issue office workstation, via Remote Desktop over a VPN with so many layers of security I practically have to provide a DNA sample to log in , and the client software is strictly Windows-based. No problem, I just use my otherwise underutilized and nearly mute Toshiba laptop, which is fine because that leaves my Mac free for accessing my personal email, which cannot be done on the same computer where I'm logged in to the VPN. (I told you they're security-conscious.)

The only thing that's been a bit annoying is that, because of the extremely low volume, I don't hear the Outlook "new mail" alert sound for my work email, and with three or four other apps open and obscuring the Outlook window, I have to periodically check to see if I've gotten anything important, like an email from the boss checking to see if I'm really working or skipped out for a two-hour lunch. So last Friday, I finally got fed up with the silent treatment and decided to do some troubleshooting.

I dug around in the Windows help files; tried the troubleshooting wizard; and attempted to update the driver for the RealTek "sound device" (as Windows so quaintly refers to it), only to be informed that I already had the latest driver available. Time to Google "no sound Realtek Toshiba laptop"... whereupon I stumbled into a plethora of forum posts from people who lost the sound on their laptops, with the same RealTek device as mine, after doing various upgrades (in the majority of cases, to Vista). Now, I haven't upgraded to Vista (and won't be), but it did look like I was on to something. I found advice to uninstall the driver and reinstall it; to get a new driver from Toshiba (but that was a Vista driver so that wouldn't help me); to apply a couple of Windows hot fixes from the Knowledge Base before (re)installing the driver (but when I read the KB articles, they didn't seem to apply to my problem); and lots more. And yet... and yet... it was nagging at me that all these folks talked about losing the sound completely, whereas mine still made some sound, albeit far too few decibels.

And then, I chanced upon one forum post that mentioned in passing that, of course, you should make sure your volume control scroll wheel wasn't turned down, if your laptop had one.

Volume... control... scroll wheel? Huh? Seriously? Surely modern-day laptops don't have something as archaic as a physical volume control that you, like, turn? OK, fine, I'll take a look just to be sure.

And there it is, right on the front, next to the mike and headphone jacks. Who knew? Thanks to the clever black-on-black design, I never noticed it. And sure enough, it was turned almost all the way down. After resetting the volume to the midpoint in the control panel, I started turning the volume wheel up, and behold: the sound now works once more. Nothing wrong with the sound chip, or the drivers, or anything really, except the operator, who is rather embarrassed to have owned a laptop for three or four years without ever realizing it had a real, honest-to-goodness volume control on the box.

So now I'll finally be able to tell when I get an email and reply promptly so my boss won't think I'm taking a nap.