Simple XP tip: Turn off your beeps

I have no idea why PCs still come with “PC speakers”. Especially laptops! My Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop has pretty good stereo sound (good enough for watching DVDs), but it’s still got a PC speaker. Of course in Windows it’s turned on by default, and it ain’t quiet.

What’s worse: whenever you use Volume Control to adjust the master volume, it nicely says “roger that” with a loud PC speaker beep. Yuck! Especially when it’s 11:30 at night and the baby’s sleeping right nearby, and you were turning the volume down …

Anyway, I finally did some searching and found a Smallvoid article showing that you can turn it off, but it’s not obvious:

  1. Load Device Manager (go to Start > Run, and type devmgmt.msc).
  2. Go to the View menu and turn on “Show hidden devices”.
  3. Scroll down to “Non-Plug and Play Drivers” and open it.
  4. Find the “Beep” driver, right-click and select “Disable”.
  5. Reboot your computer (yep, no kidding).
  6. Bask in the glories of beep-free computing.

6 October 2007 by Ben    12 comments

12 comments (oldest first)

klang 6 Oct 2007, 23:42 link

Simple and useful; the scenario you describe will be avoided now! :-)

Pieter Schutte 7 Oct 2007, 09:55 link

Thank you for the useful hint. Just did it and Windows wants to reboot. ahahahaha can you believe it?

Berwyn 8 Oct 2007, 07:34 link

I discovered that you can actually avoid rebooting your computer after step 4 by double-clicking the “beep” driver, selecting the “Driver” tab, and clicking the “Stop” button. Then simply say “No” when it asks you whether you want to reboot.

Bruce 9 Oct 2007, 15:53 link

Can’t you turn off the PC speaker in the BIOS setup?

Ben 9 Oct 2007, 20:58 link

Some BIOSes can do that (the work PC I’m using could), but my laptop doesn’t have any config for it.

Michaelk 14 Oct 2007, 21:39 link

In Linux, just

modprobe -r pcspkr

and add “blacklist pcspkr” to

/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

mike 9 Feb 2008, 14:11 link

Thank you very much. Appreciate your good humour too.

josh 22 Apr 2008, 08:32 link

just letting you know, still a useful article! My work computer did this whenever I went to change volume for my internet radio. Drove me crazy b/c the pc speaker came through the headphones at nearly full volume. OUCH!

Ben 22 Apr 2008, 08:51 link

Thanks, Michaelk, mike, and josh. This seems to be just one of those little annoying quirks that almost everyone runs across and tries to fix at some stage. :-)

Duane 3 Jun 2008, 11:03 link

Thanks a lot for this, my work mate had this issue it all of a sudden happened and i did a google search and found this! Once again thanks again for this!

Ginger 21 Aug 2008, 10:13 link

THANKS FOR POSTING THIS! YOU ROCK!! :::wink:::

PC BEEP wont DIE 29 Mar 2009, 04:36 link

Guys, this may come as a surprise, but this solution doesn’t work on all LAPTOPS or PCs. I did exactly this several months ago, and it DIDN’T STOP the beep. …frustrated, I gave up.

….what other solutions are there?