I've done some mild googling and searching around at MicroSoft, but I haven't been very successful in finding exactly what I want.
I thought I'd pop a quick question up here- maybe someone has an idea what to do.

The situation-
I've got Windows 2000 on a laptop (Dell C840) in a dock, tied to a monitor and standard 104-key keyboard. Sound is run through the laptop's speakers. In order to change the volume I must click on the 'speaker' icon in the task bar, wait for the slider to pop up, and then adjust.
The request-
I'd really like to be able to instantly adjust the volume from a keyboard shortcut, but I can't figure out how to do that with the 104 (the laptop keyboard *does* have [func]+[vol+ or -], but that's not accessible when the computer is closed- as it is normally in the dock). Perhaps there's already a shortcut defined by MS- I don't know, they haven't documented it in the help files I've searched through.

I know I could get manual control over the volume by a few other means- adding external speakers with a knob, changing to a multi-function keyboard, adding some hack-software, etc.
If the functionality already exists in the components I have, I'd like to do it that way.

This is really a piddling, trivial pursuit and hardly worth the effort I've sunk into this post already, but if you have an idea for me, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks-