I have had a few people bring me laptops to work on.
I noticed that they break down more frequently than desktop systems.
I had one customer whose speakers stopped working. Speaker icon had a slash thru it.
The BIOS had nothing that controlled the speakers.
Since his O.S. was in Spanish, I was almost working on guess work in translating Spanish to English.
I started up System Information for Windows and then then speakers started working again.
Customer returned with the same problem.
Is there some freeware diagnostic that help me using English ?
I am thinking that the crammed up insides and the heat produced puts the "kapowee" on the hardware. :-)
Sounds like they are pressing the FN-Mute button. On my Acer it's FN-F8, with the volume controls on cursor keys. You could look up the laptop in question and see if there is a keyboard map on the internet if the keys have lost their legends.
(http://www.laptopmag.com//uploadedImages/Multimedia_Assets/Images/2008/Reviews/laptops/AcerAspireONE_0036g.jpg)
You should also be able to double click on the speaker icon, and either un-mute it there, or bring up the rest of the mixer sliders.
Thanks.
I forgot to post that is is running Windows 7.
:bg
Laptops, horrible nasty little things, expensive, underperformed, hard to fix and easy to steal. I like computers in Server cases with screwdriver free internals so they are easy to work on, terabytes of storage, as much memory as the OS will support etc etc ....
Have a 'squeek' over at the Acer website, They have drivers that enable the hardware on their laptops.
It'll require a bit of searching to find the right drivers, as they try get you to install a load of irrelevant garbage with the drivers.
There's also a technician's repair website (I forget the name) where you can buy repair manuals (legally) for just about any equipment.
I bought an Acer Laptop manual to repair mine as Acer were trying to 'scre.w' me. To 'thumb my nose' at them, I emailed them pics of my work done
Strangely enough, they didn't reply to that email :bg
I was a simple 5 minute thing that they wanted to charge me $$$$$$$ for. :tdown
:8)