Vista Startup Sound to be Mandatory?

Toreo asesino writes "There has been lots of debate in the past few days over Microsoft's plan to make the startup sound in Windows Vista something that can't be specifically silenced by changing the sound settings in the control panel. Users would be able to avoid hearing it by manually turning down the speaker volume, but then they would have to turn that volume back up to hear anything else."

Comments

Horrible idea, but thats par for the course for MS

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a typical case of product-focused vs. user-focused thinking.

Has it occured to anyone that a user might just wake up early morning and wants to turn on his/her computer without waking up sleeping family members?

For this very reason one of the first setup steps I always do on a new machine is to turn off the startup sign.

Bottom line

[Spazmania]

Here's the bottom line: If you have to ask the question, "Should the user be able to change this?" then the answer is: YES.

Re:I hope this debate is a joke

[TrekCycling]

I think the fact that Microsoft considers this a feature worthy of pushing shows how trivial "enhancements" to Windows have become at this point. They're not bothering to fix what really needs fixing.

It's my computer, let me silence it

[amigabill]

It's my freakin computer, you better let me silence it if I wish. Maybe I don't want to irritate people in a cafe, lobby, waiting room, whatever with noises coming from my laptop. Maybe I just don't want an "I'm ready to be used" noise. Maybe I don't care if you think it's convenient. Maybe I dont care if you think it's cool or pretty sounding. Maybe I just want the stupid thing to be quiet.

And Xbox or Playstation are not good excuses, those are for a different market. There's also a number of people out there using mod chips to regain control of those things if they don't like some decisions from the manufacturer. Just because my Xbox makes a startup noise doesn't mean that I want it to. And just because some Engineer at Microsoft or Sony decided their toy for kids should make a startup noise does not mean I want to hear it on my laptop, tower, or anything at the office in the morning.

Re:How to turn it off..

[FLEB]

File?

No, I imagine it'll involve subtly hacking a grafted-on Windows 2000 version of NTOSKRNL.DLL while fending off the frothing-at-the-mouth system-file protection and changing HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\SystemEnhanc ementLayer\{0092-02D1-26E5-0990}\Security\Initiali zationProtocolIsTrue to 210 (decimal), then making sure never to install any patches.

Re:I hope this debate is a joke

[ozmanjusri]

I think the fact that Microsoft considers this a feature worthy of pushing shows how trivial "enhancements" to Windows have become at this point.

It's just a marketing exercise.

Quite smart, really - you generate a lot of hype about something absolutely trivial and get the user community, blogs, forums etc all hyped up. Then you implement the trivially pointless feature you've managed to convince people to really want, and proudly announce that you're responsive to your customers needs.

Then you can get quietly back to locking them out from their own data with proprietary formats and DRM.

Re:Horrible idea, but thats par for the course for

[Aeiri]

Has it occured to anyone that a user might just wake up early morning and wants to turn on his/her computer without waking up sleeping family members?

Just today I walked into the "Maximum Quiet Study Area" for our univerisity's library, and popped open my laptop and turned it on. My gkrellm instance sounded my "alert" sound (which is actually very rare, the load was too high from the boot apparently), and I rushed to hit the mute button.

The startup sound on Vista would be before any multimedia keys are registered if it's at all like XP is, and that wouldn't have worked. Laptop speakers don't have volume control!

If Vista does require this, and I hear someone turn on their laptop with "welcome to Windows Vista!", I'm going to throw their laptop out a window, no pun intended.

Re:that's only the half of it

[the_womble]

The last thing MS (or anyother proprietary software company) want is for anyone to read (or hear) the EULA.

If people knew what was in them they might object.

Re:Horrible idea, but thats par for the course for

[NaDrew]

I still check in on those boxes. One has 994 days of uptime, and the other has, as of last week, 1190 days.

I know you said you worked, past tense, for the company that owns those servers. But you must realize that however spiffy those uptime stats may be, they also mean that critical updates and service packs have not been installed. Most of the security-related patches require a reboot, and 2003 Service Pack 1 certainly does.

Re:Oh FFS

[asuffield]

We're all capable of swapping the startup.wav for an empty file, should we so wish.

Unless, of course, they tag it for WFP. That means, whenever you change it, Windows promptly changes it back and then displays a dialog telling you off for being such a naughty boy. In current versions of Windows, it's possible to disable WFP, but there's no particular reason why that should remain true.

They're currently talking about whether or not to do something like this.