Tuesday, April 24, 2007

BEEP

Somehow my latest work laptop (Dell Latitude D620) has a PC speaker circuit that bypasses mute settings and the headphone jack. Windows loves to BEEP on certain events, whether it's just control-G ASCII characters in the console, or a bell in a PuTTY window.

The quick solution is to run the secret: "net stop beep". That stops the secret beep service from running.

But a more permanent fix is to go into the Device Manager (Control Panel -> System, Hardware tab, then the Device Manager button). In the View menu, pick "Show hidden devices". Now down in the treeview, under Non-Plug and Play Drivers, there is a "Beep" driver. You can change the properties on it to disable it and stop/disable the service. Ignore the prompts to reboot now.

That's it. No more beeps. Well, unless you run VMWare. See my other post about that.

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2 comments:

Unknown said...

Fantastic! This advice really helped with an irritating problem that even Dell Tech Support couldn't fix!. Thanks heaps Jon.

Unknown said...

Also, in Linux, at least Ubuntu, you can disable the beep several ways. A quick short-term fix is to run:

xset -b

You can also add that to your .profile etc.

But the real fix to kill of the PC speaker completely is to disable the driver.

In /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist add a line to blacklist the driver:

blacklist pcspkr

Yay! No more beeps. Now, Dell, please please please don't add a PC Speaker device to any more laptops.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=196539&highlight=beep+xset