Windows Startup Sounds and Shutdown sounds 3.1/10

[Homer J Simpson]

[james_s]

Funny thing is for as far back as Win95 one of the very first things I've done every time I install Windows on a machine is to go into settings and turn off all the sounds. System sounds were novel when Win 3.1 came out and sound cards were new but very quickly become annoying.

[rrinker]

 Glad I'm not the only one. I have systems sounds off on all my machines.  But back in Win3.1, I used to have all sorts of add ins and custom sounds, because it was fairly novel.

[Ampera]

I didn't mind system sounds, and still don't if an older computer has them, but now that I run Linux and BSD on my machines, there really aren't any system sounds unless you count terminal bell.

[Sam Hobbs]

Sounds? Do computers make sounds? Oh, I guess the reason I did not know that is because my computer does not have speakers. Well, sometimes I use headphones. But really, there are so many obnoxious advertisements in websites that I do not want to use speakers.

[james_s]

Modern browsers let you mute the tab by default. Of course with Adblock and noscript installed I don't remember the last time I saw an ad on a website.

[Stray Electron]

Funny thing is for as far back as Win95 one of the very first things I've done every time I install Windows on a machine is to go into settings and turn off all the sounds. System sounds were novel when Win 3.1 came out and sound cards were new but very quickly become annoying.

  Exactly!

[malagas_on_fire]

Till this day still turning off all sounds starting from windows 3.11 for workgroups  after instalation.

[Ian.M]

Heh.  Anyone remember the Microsoft Win 3.x PC speaker driver?  IIRC it was a 1 bit PCM output and the driver let it play down-sampled WAV files.  Even given a good chassis mounted speaker it was pretty horrible, with a choppy rasp at the timer interrupt rate, and if you were dumb enough to install it on a machine with a compact speaker mounted directly on the motherboard, it was slightly more irritating tan a room full of bluebottles!   IIRC it also worked under Win95.

[I wanted a rude username]

Anyone remember the Microsoft Win 3.x PC speaker driver?

Yep, still run that (presumably in real mode) under Windows 95 on a 486 laptop, occasionally used as a serial terminal. The sound has that harsh "crunchy" quality but is still recognisable.

[james_s]

I remember that, seems like it would slow the machine nearly to a crawl while a sound played. I also remember some games had a very similar thing they called "RealSound". Our 386 had a piezo speaker though so all that stuff sounded terrible. Even more terrible than usual that is.

[RetroSwim]

Heh.  Anyone remember the Microsoft Win 3.x PC speaker driver?  IIRC it was a 1 bit PCM output and the driver let it play down-sampled WAV files.  Even given a good chassis mounted speaker it was pretty horrible, with a choppy rasp at the timer interrupt rate, and if you were dumb enough to install it on a machine with a compact speaker mounted directly on the motherboard, it was slightly more irritating tan a room full of bluebottles!   IIRC it also worked under Win95.

It was also completely interrupt driven so the system was inoperable while a sound was playing. Impractical as hell, but cool none the less!

[Ian.M]

I doubt you mean that - if it was interrupt driven, there would have been some CPU time available for other tasks, but if it simply used software delay loops for the bit timing, it would use 100% CPU time and all other tasks would freeze.  That would also account for the rasp as it probably couldn't run with interrupts disabled for long enough to play the sound without crashing the system, so playback would be chopped up by any interrupts.

There were other drivers that tended to use 100% of the CPU time, e.g. floppy access would usually freeze early versions of windows  for as long as it took to access each track, making the system nearly non-responsive during a format.