The world may never know, but if what happened today is any indication, she's pretty damned dumb. Hey, I'm not above letting you guys have a good laugh at my expense. Here's what happened...
Several months ago, my laptop computer suddenly and inexplicably lost all sound. It became so silent that I could not even hear the modem as it dialed. This left me baffled. One of the first things that I did was to click on the little speaker icon to see if the volume had been muted. It appeared that this was not the case. I downloaded new drivers for my sound card. Still, I was met by silence. Perhaps some program was sucking memory away from the sound card, I thought, so I stopped all but the most essential programs from loading on start-up. The great silence continued. A virus or spyware program being at fault was another option that I considered. I scanned for and removed both to no avail. I was at my wits end. My beloved laptop sat idle until another option was brought to my attention, a faulty modem could draw memory away from the sound card, causing me to lose my sound. In a last ditch effort to get my machine to function properly, I asked my son, Ray, to disable the modem for me. When this produced no results, he decided to do a few system diagnostics of his own. This is what he eventually discovered...
Although the speaker volume on my machine was turned all the way up, the system volume was turned completely off! It seems that the demon machine has two sets of volume controls, and I remained blissfully unaware of one of them! He turned the system volume back on, and suddenly sound was returned to my world! Then he showed me how to access the system volume. When he did this, I realised how I had managed to lose my sound. While typing in a darkened room, I had accidentally pressed the keys which turned the system volume off!
The moral to the story is...
Never let the world's worst typist operate a keyboard in the dark!
In my defense, I must say that Ray had checked the machine once before and not found the elusive second volume control. It's not like the machine came with an owner's manual, either. I bought it used, from a computer show. They didn't even reformat the hard drive before selling it, they just deleted most of the original owner's files!
