Someone once quite accurately described The Cat’s Miaow as a band who whisper their songs into the world. Our laptop suddenly makes everything sound like The Cat’s Miaow, which is a lot less nice in practise than it may sound in theory. It turned itself off earlier today –quite probably due to an overheated processor– and did not have any problems starting up again, but the audio volume has lowered significantly. And yes, we did check all the obvious and less obvious internal and external volume settings and set each of them to their maximum. We even re-installed the soundcard’s driver, but that did not make any differeny either. Now I understand that things break and I could accept, albeit grudgingly, the sound being broken completely, but this just does not make sense.