Thank you, Google!

Our laptop came loaded with Windows Media Player 10. A few weeks' ago the sound stopped playing for no reason. We hadn't made any changes to the settings or anything. The sound worked fine in all other applications except for WMP. Since this isn't our main machine and we have Real Player and Quicktime installed on it, I didn't devote too much time to fixing the problem. Tonight I finally got around to doing a Google search on the situation and a posting on the Hardware Analysis site yielded the answer. Apparently, next to the volume slider in WMP 10 there is a teeny tiny mute button. This button looks almost the same when it is on "mute" as it does when it is on "play". I never would have paid attention to it if several people on this site hadn't found the problem. As Mur Lafferty said in her most recent podcast, Google's greatest accomplishment has been to allow people to get their stupid questions answered without having to look stupid in front of someone.