Levlg said:
A beep noise is heard from computer speekers spontaneously from time to time
(approximately every half hour). The sound do not resemble a sound from a
program.
Can somebody give me a hint where to dig?
Thank you
Lev
From the audio speakers plugged into the green Lineout port ?
Or from the computer case speaker connected to the motherboard ?
The computer case speaker is typically used for "beep" type sounds.
On some prebuilt computers, there is a piezo speaker (round shape and
black in color) located on the motherboard. It is perhaps 1/2" in
diameter, and takes the place of the computer case speaker. It
saves the HP or Dell assembler a few seconds to hook up the wires
of a speaker, by having it soldered to the motherboard.
Some tests you can try. Open a Command Prompt window. Type
echo ^G
That is control-G, made by pressing and holding the Ctrl key, then
typing the "g" key. When you hit return, you'll hear a beep through
the computer case speaker.
Another test, is to press the shift key five times in succession.
That will make the StickyKeys dialog box pop up (which you can cancel),
and it will be accompanied by a rising tone from the computer case speaker.
If, in the Command Prompt (DOS) window, you type
net stop beep
then try the "echo control g" thing again, it will fail to make
a noise. Similarly, StickyKeys will stop making its sound as well.
Type
net start beep
to turn the beep service on again.
I wasn't able to figure out, whether there is a discrete device
of some sort for the beep. If there was, you could use one of
the Sysinternals programs, to catch a process doing something
to the device. You could experiment with that, using the above
two stimulus cases.
A complicating factor, is sometimes it seems the BIOS is also
capable of using the case speaker. For example, some people
have received the high-low ("donkey") siren sound, caused
when something is out of sorts as measured by the hardware
monitor. And apparently it can happen while the OS is running.
Another source of noises, is the hard drive. Weaker beep sounds
can be caused by activity on the drive - like perhaps some kind
of SMART test. So when you hear a sound, it is important to
trace down exactly where it is coming from. And that can be
difficult.
Sorry I couldn't provide a better recipe for tracing the
source. If I had a theory as to what the device name might
be (like /dev/beep), then it might be worth trying to trace
it. But since it is a service, I don't know how you'd go about
detecting a program using a service. Presumably there is a
protocol for it, but who knows what diagnostic program
can trace something like that.
Paul