Have I blown my soundcard????

[igorbiscan]

Hi all,
Stupid me,I think I have blown my soundcard,is this possible through audacity?,,I am new to this program,had plugged an electr-acoustic into my laptop through my mic socket (no amp),Just direct connection. So I recorded a couple of tracks and everything worked great,then I was messing about with the settings on audacity and think I upped the gain setting for the mic. After which I have no sound at all on my laptop!! Tried a couple of reboots,device manager isn't indicating a problem.To be clear, there is no sound from any program,windows media player,nero, youtube,,etc,,have checked the speaker settings and all seems ok,,just no sound,,also plugged headphones into headphone jack and no sound output from there either which seems to suggest soundcard problem.Any info would be very much appreciated..

[steve]

It's possible that you have a hardware fault, but I think that it's more likely that you have accidentally muted something.
How do you normally control the sounds on your computer? Is there a loudspeaker icon in the bottom right corner (the Taskbar Notification area)? If you have a loudspeaker icon, double click, or right click on it to open the sound card mixer and check the settings.