FWIW, I used another computer, audacity and a piece of male-male mini-jack cable to "optimize" the volumes on my ThinkPad T41 :-) It sounds silly, but it worked quite well. It may not help you much, though, if you can't turn up your volumes any further.
My audio card: auich0 at pci0 dev 31 function 5 "Intel 82801DB AC97" rev 0x01: irq 11, ICH4 AC97 The resulting volumes: outputs.master=255,255 inputs.dac=159,159 Martin
