No sound!!!!

[miriam_e]

What a relief! I was starting to panic. Sound had ceased to work in my computer. I've really needed a new computer for a while, but really can't afford one, and dreaded having to find the money (that is, borrow it) to buy one.

I keep several operating systems on my computer, so I booted into another one, to check. Gratifying surprise! The sound worked. So it was not a hardware problem... thank goodness.

So back to my preferred operating system. Why isn't sound working in it? I tried everything I could think of, but was reluctant to spend hours on the net searching, so I began with asking ChatGPT-4o if it had seen anything on the net about this particular problem. It spent a little while searching the net and came back with 8 suggestions gleaned from its search.

The first suggestion I'd already tried.

The second suggestion (to check that alsamixer was not muted) solved the problem. How it had got muted I have no idea, but now everything is okay again.

Whew! My relief is overwhelming. :(

Comments

[greylock]

I'll have to check that out, but I think, in addition to not having admin access, there's some software that sits between me and the work network I may not be able to get around.

(My old W10 latop was perfectly good, an only five-years-old, but went to eWaste. Infuriating).

There's almost no good reason not to at least try to Linux these days. The hurdles are minimal (hilariously, they're worse if you're a more advanced Windows user) and I think even the gaming hurdle is gone.

I've never been able to convince anyone to switch, but I've also never had a reason to do back to Windows at home in a decade? (I think there are some file recovery tools on Windows I needed way back, but that's it).