No sound

I'm relieved to know I'm not the only one. When I installed the latest Ubuntu version on my Compaq Presario CQ40, I later found out that my sound card wasn't recognized—in which case I had a silent laptop. Ironic, when you think of it, because the owner­ can get unbelievably noisy.

Naturally I searched the forums, and it was a comfort to know that I wasn't the only one suffering from acute laptop speaker deafness. Misery loves company, they say. Apparently, I had to do some configurations. The kind people in the forums have posted numerous tips, but some of them were rather too technical for me.

So imagine the thrill I felt when I learned about this tutorial. It didn't work at first because I forgot a fundamental rule: after tweaking the computer and finding out nothing works yet, a restart may do wonders. And restart I did, and, for the first time, I'm hearing my laptop speak.

I knew this couldn't have been genetic.