Age and treachery...

chaoswolf: Dad, you're a genius!
mdlbear: No, I'm just old and crafty.

Neither of which is of much help setting up a WinXP laptop. And they say Linux is hard to use...

I HATE Windows

Still struggling with chaoswolf's new computer. It's not pretty. Somewhere along the way, sound stopped working. Completely. Wouldn't even play the startup sound when you rebooted. No obvious problems -- nothing muted, device working OK according to the device manager, ... Turned the machine off, thinking it might be a thermal problem. It wasn't.

I was all set to take the damned thing back to Fry's and get our money back, when I decided to try restoring it to its original configuration. Sure enough, sound came back.

OK, so it's a software problem, cleverly disguising itself as hardware. It's Windows XP; go figure. Now comes the more tedious process of reconfiguring the system.