How to Temporarily Disable System Beeps
Computers have a means of communicating without external speakers – they do so via hardware beeps. These are the main scenarios I’ve seen where a computer beeps:
- There is a problem when the system tries to boot, so it attempts to communicate what went wrong – via a sequence of beeps.
- Too many keys were pressed at once on the keyboard.
- The system is configured to beep whenever an alert dialog appears.
The last one I found particularly annoying when I was developing Visual Basic 6 applications at my day job. For some reason, Visual Studio 6 likes to communicate with you via alert dialogs. Visual Studio .NET corrected this – instead of a typical alert box, they list the errors and warnings in another pane. Despite this, some of our code was still in VB6, so I had to use it. Thankfully, there is an easy way to disable the beeps.
In Windows Server 2003:
1) Click Start > Run.
2) When the Run dialog appears, type “cmd” and press ENTER.
3) When the command prompt appears, type “net stop beep”, and press ENTER.
If you want to disable the beep permanently, here are some instructions.
A Chrome Extension That Does Nothing
Since it was first introduced, Google Chrome has been my browser of choice. So, when version 4 was released, I was particularly pleased to see the new extensions feature. When I went to view the extensions gallery, a particular entry stood out from the rest:
This extension does nothing.
Right there among the top rated extensions, I found one that did nothing:
When I viewed the details about the extension, it became obvious that many people were fueling the joke by adding supportive comments. Still, you see glimmers of confusion every now and then.
The last comment is my favorite.