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.
Enabling Theme Support in Windows Server 2003
Microsoft’s Server operating systems are specifically aligned to offer, above all, top reliability and performance. It is therefore no surprise that Windows Server 2003, at first glance, seems to lack the standard Luna desktop theme that XP users have been accustomed to. Here’s the thing: The feature isn’t missing, it’s just “hidden” by default.
Solution
Here’s how to enable it:
1) Open the Services Management Console by entering “services.msc” in the Run dialog.
To open the Run dialog, click Start > Run, or press Windows Key + R.
2) Locate the Themes service, right-click it, and select Properties.
3) On the General tab, select the Startup Type dropdown, and choose Automatic.
4) Click Apply.
5) Click OK.
6) Right-click the Themes service again, and select Start.
7) Close the Service Management Console.
8) Right-click on the desktop, and select Properties.
9) On the Themes tab, select the Theme dropdown, and choose Windows XP.
10) Click Apply.
11) Click OK.
The Windows XP option, by default, is not listed as an available theme in the Display Properties dialog. When we started the Themes service, the option was added… and there you have it. You can now use the XP theme (Luna), in a Windows Server 2003 environment.
The default XP theme, codenamed Luna, will appear in the "Display Settings" dialog as the "Windows XP" theme.