I've had a Compac laptop since December of 07. Recently my sound hasn't been working properly to the point where if I play a song and I'm across the room I can't hear it. I also tried to plug in speakers and that wouldn't work either. Both my brother and I have looked through EVERY setting possible to change the sound, but maybe we missed one. If anyone has any info. That they could give me, this would be extremley helpful. Thank you! - Sarah :(

One of the sweetest parts about owning a laptop is the ability to "start over" at virtually any time. If you can't go into the Control Panel and reinstall/update the drivers and get your sound back, there's always the recovery CDs.

Save off your documents and irreplaceable files and use your Recovery CDs to reinitialize your system back to factory standard. It should only take a couple of hours to reset the system, reinstall your favorite programs back on, then copy your data back.

Along with fixing your sound/hardware issue, your resulting system should be noticeably peppier, too.

That's my two cents. You can blow a lot of time hunting down these random things, and the set amount of time you know it takes to reset/restore the system makes it a viable option in my opinion.