Disable System Alert Beep in Windows

One of the most annoying things on my Dell Latitude D620 laptop is the system alert beep being extremely loud with no respect to my current volume settings. On the surface, there's no easy way to disable that feature as it's not part of the sound scheme of my profile.

A little searching on Google got me to this page. Step by step on how to do it within Microsoft Vista. For XP, I'm not certain if you can perform the same steps. However, I do know you can go into the registry and disable it that way. I do not recommend that for average computer users, so perform those steps with caution.

Vista finally working

After 7 months of full time use, I will say that my laptop is as good as it was with XP. I'm not sure what happened when, but I must have done some updates that made the sleeping/power management work. The machine is now living up to it's potential.

I still won't play games with Vista, though. The loss of frames per second is just too much, especially with a Dell Latitude D620 with the lousy Intel video card.

Vista is a Pain

I can almost not stand it anymore. There are serious issues with this OS and existing hardware out there. I have a Dell Latitude D620, a very common laptop, and I have a bunch of issues (listed below).

For the record, this is Microsoft Windows Vista RTM running business edition. Dell 620 Latitue laptop. Bios revision A06 (just released)

#1 Problem

Sleep - One of the most important feature for those who need to work on the road, shut the lid and it sleeps. My experience has been that it does "sleep", but when it wakes it's not the machine you put to bed. For me, the machine starts, but the monitor doesn't come up. I know the machine is working because it beeps when keys are pressed. Only a CTRL-ALT DEL and password shows activity.

So, I hard reboot.

I pray that these are just driver issues and will be corrected in the future. I know it's early for this OS, but I would almost expect a business laptop, like the D620, would be supported. I will note that Dell has barely anything on the support page for this machine. It's mostly just tools and BIOS. No drivers. So, I wait, hoping for a better experience. Thankfully, XP is still on the machine and if I think I'm about to cry, I can switch back.

Vista Sidebar Saves Husband

A buddy of mine was up late last night doing network maintenance at the office and didn't get home until late. When he got up this morning, he went about his normal routine, probably blurry eyed. He had breakfast with the wife and kids, gave the wife a kiss and took off for the train station (the typical beginning of a 90 minute, 70 mile commute).

So, he's resting there on the train, half awake, when another passenger sat next to him and booted a laptop into Vista. He decided to snoop the stranger's session as he has not been playing with the new OS much. Of course, Aero was on and the differences between Vista and XP were clear.

While looking over the different desktop experience, he was drawn to the sidebar. This user had the Calendar gadget up. If you haven't seen it, by default it's huge and very prominent (see pic). "The 7th, the 7th, the 7th. It's already the seventh?", he thought, "OH CRAP!"


He snaps awake, grabs his cell, dials his wife and sings "Happy Birthday to You!" A bunch of explaining was due, but much was forgiven. It was funny that such a non-necessary feature, on by default, saved his day.


Later during the day, I caught him burning a DVD of Vista and preparing to run GParted on his HDD...


Oh, and before I get in trouble, Happy Birthday, Sarah!

Moving to Vista & Office 2007 - The install

During the lul of a thanksgiving work week, I decided to make the switch to Vista with Office 2007 on my primary workstation. Unfortunately, my dependency on 3rd party connectivity and presentations (SSL VPN, ISA, WebEx) and the risk of not being able to function at work, I decided to dual boot.

My primary machine:
Dell Latitude D620
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0
1GB Memory
60GB 7800 RPM

Vista needs it's own partition to be happy, so I had to find a tool to split my hard drive into two partitions.. I wasn't about to shell out $70 for Partition Magic, so I found a great free alternative: GParted. It's in Linux and performs the functions I needed to re-partition my NTFS XP volume without losing the data within. The best thing about the tool is it's distribution options. I chose the bootable live cd iso route, which allowed me to boot from CD and run it without having to install Linux. It simply boots into Linux that's on the CD and launches GParted.

I split the disk in 2 (30 GB for each OS), which took about 2 hours to do. Then I installed Vista RTM Business Edition, which is the easiest OS install of any Windows operating systems to date. It's also fast, only about 30 minutes without much user input needed. After the OS was up, I joined the corporate domain and installed Office 2007. This was also a breeze, except for the warning boxes that darken the whole screen and pop up a request for elevated privilege.

I've been running Vista w/Office 2007 for a few weeks now and will post about my experiences later. I will say I like Office 2007 quite a bit. Vista is a pain at times due to apps I used in XP not working in it. I've even had to go back into XP a few times in order to do a few things (WebEx was one of them). These apps should clear up over the next few months I hope.

I'll stop here. More to come later.