I had a weird glitch on the laptop. I have three media players, that up to now have worked perfectly well: Windows Media Player, VLC Media player and RealPlayer.
Well, suddenly Windows Media Player no longer works: "WMP encountered a problem while playing the file." As might be expected from Gatesware, it cannot tell me what the problem is.
VLC Player opens the file and plays it, but there is no sound. YouTube videos do the same: they look normal but there is no sound.
RealPlayer seems to work normally, though with MP3 files the sound is annoyingly soft, sometimes almost inaudible (not a problem with video files). I have had this same problem with WMP for a long time though.
WMP can still play MIDI files, and system sounds like the little clicks and bells and things still work.
Someone suggested that perhaps I should update VLC player's software, which I did: no luck. I then uninstalled it, and restarted the computer.
Things promptly went from bad to worse: there is now a persistent, massive noise, like a billion amplified cicadas, in the headphone speakers. WMP now opens files without error messages, but instead of music, just the persistent electronic cicada noise.
I can't work out whether this is some sort of software problem, or whether it's the computer's sound card that has given up the ghost.
Any computer geeks with any advice?