My cat loves to lay on my computer. Once she walked on it and toggled off my wireless connection. It took a call to Gateway to figure out what was wrong. Now I always close the lid on my laptop when I leave it.

My Lizzie walks carefully around the computer but so far not on it. We've only had her for a few weeks, so maybe she's trying to build my confidence in her so that I will leave it open sometime for her to check out the LOL cats while I'm away.

On this old Toshiba laptop, the sound off/on button is in a row of other buttons along the top edge above the function keys. My husband's Acer keyboard is quite different, and the one I have with the desktop that is not currently working is different in other ways. Even some of the function keys have different functions, which I find rather annoying. I hope you figured out where it is on yours.

OK, clearly I'm not a cat person ... I thought you had a musical cat ... get it, piano keyboard? Don't know how my mind went there first but then as I read on I realized you were talking about your computer!

However, I do have a dog who likes to lick my laptop and if that doesn't work he tries to stand on the touch pad because I'm not paying any attention to him.

It's been a very long, very irritating, draining kind of day at work today! Hence the reason I'm taking a Quilt Forum break in lieu of a coffee break!

I didn't really figure it out. There was a circle with a line through it where the volume (on the screen) should have been. I clicked on that and the sound came back on. I still don't know what my function keys are for.

Here's a list of what function keys do: http://www.seniornet.org/index.php?o...=111&Itemid=45 About the only one that I consistently use and rely on is F11, which gives you a full screen view of a webpage. This works in Firefox, too. There are several others that I'm sure I could use if I'd trouble myself to learn them. They are convenient shortcuts, but only convenient if I can remember them. Some of them will be different with different computers or software, but for that you can usually google something like "function keys in Microsoft Word" or "function keys on Toshiba" and you will almost certainly find what you need to know.