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Turn Off the PC-Speaker

Intended For
Windows XP
Windows 2000
Windows Me
Windows 98
Windows 95
Most of us who are irritated by the beeps and sputters of our sound cards and the good 'ol PC Speaker have turned off most of the "event" sounds using Sounds in Control Panel. However, on some computers, turning off all of the WAV files, means that the internal PC-Speaker is used instead for the default beep. When I asked a Microsoft representative, I was told that it was a bug in the motherboard - um, yea.

There is no way to permanently remove the PC Speaker driver from the Device Manager, nor is there any way of turning off the PC Speaker for good, short of yanking the thing out of the computer (several users have written to say how truly satisfying this is). Furthermore, the Volume control utility doesn't seem to have any affect on the PC Speaker in this case.

There are two solutions:

Solution #1

  • Use Sound Recorder to record a silent sound clip (by turning the microphone volume all the way down), and save it into a new WAV file.
  • Associate one or more sound clips with this new WAV file, such as the Exclamation and Question events.

Solution #2

  • Obtain and install TweakUI.
  • Choose the General tab, and turn off the Beep on Errors option.


Written by: Annoyances.org
Last updated: Saturday, August 11, 2001

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