I held my breath. The screen went black. The laptop restarted.
My laptop didn’t scream. It just… stopped speaking. The little speaker icon in the system tray sprouted a red X, like a wound. I clicked it. “No Audio Output Device is Installed.” accidentally deleted audio driver
“You uninstalled the audio driver because you thought it was bloatware ?” I held my breath
My cat, alarmed by my descent into madness, meowed. I didn’t hear him. I saw his mouth open, but the world was a mime show. My laptop didn’t scream
I tried everything I knew. I clicked “Scan for hardware changes.” Nothing. I downloaded a “driver updater” from a website that looked like it was designed in 1998, and it tried to install a toolbar instead of a driver. I even dug through my closet for the laptop’s original driver CD—a relic from a time when laptops had CD drives.