Whenever I’m in the lab and mistype my password logging into my laptop, there is an insanely loud beep from the PC speaker. Why not use the actual speakers on the machine rather than resorting to the PC speaker, a relic from the times when computers and dinosaurs walked side-by-side and computers had to be loud in order to be heard over the rumbling of the earth? Tonight I was messing around on the command line in MySQL and entered a bad command only to have my ears blown away by this 270 decibel dinosaur-alerting screech.
So I went searching for a solution to my problem and I was willing to do anything — even if it meant opening my system and ripping out the little speaker’s still-beeping heart. I gotta hand it to Microsoft, though, they make things easy. Psyche!
Under Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager, you get a screen like so:
You would think that the PC Speaker would be under “Sound, video and game controllers”, but you’d be wrong. PC Speaker is hidden under System Devices. Disabling that does absolutely nothing. This is because Microsoft practices something called function obfuscation. Basically, if you expect something to do something because doing so would be intuitive, the actual function is performed by something else.
The Microsoft developers had this conversation:
Bob: Ok, we need to add the PC Speaker to the Device Manager.
Jim: I think we should add it to “Display Adapters” since it is displaying sound in the air.
Bob: Good point.
Jill: Wait, that is really messed up. People might guess that.
Bob: I just had an idea. People might guess that.
Jill: That’s what I said.
Bob: Be quiet, Jill, men are talking.
Jill: <storms out of the room>
Jim: I know, let’s make it a hidden option called Beep.
Bob: Brilliant. It’ll be years before anyone finds it.
To make a long story about a really boring topic that just totally pissed me off so I had to vent short:
Under View, choose the option “Show hidden devices.” This will reveal the “Non-plug and play devices” node in the tree under which is the “Beep” device. Click on the Driver tab and click “Stop” and under Startup choose the type as “Disabled”. Now wasn’t that easy?
4 comments
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13 December 2007 at 10:08:12
Melinda Weathers
hehe. I had a computer in college that I had to replace the processor fan on. (Still have it actually). So I bought the fan and put it on, but I guess I accidentally bought a fan for a Pentium and not a Pentium II. It fit fine, but it didn’t have the little cable that plugs into the motherboard and tells it the fan is working. And when the motherboard didn’t know the fan was working… you guessed it… beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. It would not stop. One long beep forever. So at this point I could have bought the proper CPU fan, but instead I realized that if I did something at the command line that caused a System Beep, the long beeeeeeeeep would stop. So now part of my startup involved doing something that would cause a Beep so that the thing would stop beeping.
I no longer have to do this, and I have no idea whether I went out and bought the right fan, or if I disabled the System Beep entirely, or if I added something to autoexec.bat to make it beep… Just hope that your CPU fan doesn’t go out because now you’ll never know! (Or maybe things have changed in the last 10 years… nah.)
13 December 2007 at 10:24:09
Jason Adams
Yeah that kind of long beep is the short path to insanity. Fortunately, I keep my laptop on my lap most of the time, so if the fan goes out, the increasing temperature will hopefully alert me to the failure with second degree burns to the thighs.
8 April 2008 at 07:04:08
jacob
just have to say that you are a life saver. My home office shares a common wall with my bedroom and my daughters room as well. My partner complains bitterly when this wakes either her or our daughter when i make a late night syntax error.
thanks.
8 April 2008 at 07:31:21
Jason Adams
I am very happy to be of service in killing one more pc speaker.