Blessed by the Potato

I’ve been fiddling with all the settings I can find, and I can’t for the life of me properly adjust volume on YouTube videos. There’s the little slider in the player that I can use to turn the sound down, but for the most part they’re far quieter than anything else on my computer. So of course, I turn the volume control on my speakers way up to compensate, just to get blown away by the intensely loud sound of an incoming email or MSN message. Does anyone have any ideas of what to do? I’m tempted to just keep my speakers turned up, and try to turn all the other sound settings down, but then there’s always some damn thing that won’t get turned down with the wave control and something else might come blasting out… plus things usually sound better when the hardware (speakers) don’t over-amplify noise…