laptop sound was working fine a day or two ago, now I can barely hear anything when I play music cd or internet. The mute button is working ok, just don't seem to be able to increase the volume. any ideas? I checked control panel-hardware and sound.
Did anything happen or change in the meantime - e.g. laptop dropped, software changes etc.?
To see if it's the hardware you could use the manufacturer's provided diagnostics (if any - e.g. Dells normally have a diagnostic partition that you can boot from) or perhaps a bootable Linux distribution (e.g. http://www.linuxmint.com) and see if sounds works OK there. If it does then the hardware is OK and it's a (presumably Windows?) software issue. In which case perhaps rolling back to a recent system restore point might help. If it doesn't then it may be a hardware problem.