On Thu, 29 Oct 2015 12:11:39 -0400, songbird
wrote:

p.s. check your mute settings for the global sound
and for the speakers themselves. sometimes things
get clicked when you're not looking...

That was certainly a problem in XP. I posted in the XP group about
the .wav sound getting muted several times even though I did nothing.
It turned out to have something to do with closing Skype. iirc

But that's why I asked about the OS. With Vista and higher, double
click on the speaker in the systray and you can see the volume going
up and down in the little box that opens.

In addition, right click on the speaker and open up Playback Devices.
Each device has a volume/amplitude meter, but only one will show
sound. If he's lucky, that will be the one that has the speakers
plugged into it, but that's not guaranteed. If somehow it changed to
other output, no sound will come out of the speakers.

songbird