Resolved Function keys on ASUS netbook not working

DW has an ASUS netbook, running WinXP. It's maybe 4 years old. She's getting very ticked off by the audio capabilites (or lack of them).

Most of the time, neither of us bother with having audio on. It's a distraction and unnecessary 95% of the time.

On my desktop, turning audio on and off is really simple - there's a "Power" button on the (separate) speakers. On her netbook, you have to do it either through function keys or Control Panel Audio settings. For the first couple of years, the CTRL/function keys worked fine, one for audio disable/enable, one for louder and one for quieter. They've now all quit working. The other CTRL/fn keys still seem to do their thing.

Is there some software switch I don't know about that could have disabled the function-key audio selectability? DW is getting so ticked off with it that maybe a $500 laptop is going to be the only way to fix the problem.

Any help to save that expenditure would be much appreciated! BTW, I can't find anything in the ASUS handbook that addresses the issue.

 

On my ASUS laptop, which probably is the same for a Netbook, I keep the speaker symbol down by the clock (taskbar) and I can mute or turn the sound of when ever I want to. Go to Sounds and Audio Devices and put a check to show the Volume Icon in the task bar.

 

Click the little round Speaker icon in the System Tray/Notification Area
of the Taskbar, near the clock, in the bottom right corner (usually).

 

The audio program won't put the speaker icon in the taskbar. I think a re-install is probably going to be needed. For now, I'll flag this thing as "resolved ".

 

Sounds like the Audio Driver is missing. Look in Device Manager for any YELLOW ? or !.