NicJ.net

So there I am, sitting at my desk at work, and my computer explodes with the sound of BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP. Rats! I had to quickly smack the power button on my computer before my officemate got annoyed (losing all my work!).

Welcome to the world of backwards compatability — the Bell Character. A remnant of MS-DOS, many years ago. See, back in the days when there were just characters on the screen, no fancy-smancy graphical interfaces, programmers wanted to be able to add a little spice to their programs. So they decided that whenever this one particular character, ASCII code 7 (^G or if you hit control-G) was displayed on the console, it would also make the computer beep. Kind of cool, right? You could alert the user to something important if you needed. Your computer doesn’t even need to have speakers attached, all computers come with a small buzzer to make that ‘beep’ sound.

This ‘feature’ still exists today. I was searching through files on my computer (with ‘findstr’ on the command prompt), and it accidently searched a non-text file. And this non-text file had the character 7 in it, hundreds of times. So when findstr printed it out, it decided to make a hundred lound beeping sounds, in a row. There is no way to stop this. You can try it for yourself. Hit Win-R, type ‘cmd’, hit enter, hit ctrl-G, then enter. Your computer will beep.

I don’t believe there is any way to turn it off.