Corey Gouker's Machine Inside the Mind

I was in a team meeting thing the other day and had my laptop out taking notes. Unfortuantely despite the fact I always run with all system sounds off, I kept on getting the annoying system beep every so often. It was maybe coming from Outlook and holding down the backspace for too long. It happens even if you mute the sound on the system, and heck, even if you disable the "System speaker" device in Device Manager which is listed under the System devices. And man is the beep loud, amusing really, since the mono speaker on my Dell Latitude D430 is barely audible but that bloody system beep is loud as hell and definitely attention grabbing.

So here's how to disable the Beep, yes that's actually what it's called.

1. Press WIN+R
2. Type in devmgmt.msc and press Enter.
3. Click the View menu then click Show hidden devices.
4. Expand the Non-Plug and Play Drivers branch out.
5. Look for Beep and double-click the device to bring up the properties window.
6. Click on the Driver tab.
7. Under Current status, click Stop.
8. Under Startup type drop down switch the driver to Disabled.
9. Click OK

You'll now have true silence from your desktop or laptop PC regardless of whatever crazy error messages pop up or however much spam gets delivered to your Inbox. Though this won't help if you if you've got a bunch of 80mm fans running at 8000RPM still . But that's for another post... Tip though, voltage converters for fans or fans with a high CFM and low dB rating work amazingly well as do rubber gromets for fans and HDD's and not to mention that Dynamat isn't half bad for noise absorbtion as well.

So I was just talking to Mooney about how I used to have my PC audio hooked up. Which immediately led me to talk about the Creative DDTS-100. In this day and age I really have a bad taste from using most Creative products. They can't write drivers to save their life, their audio cards suck, their speakers suck, just about everything Creative makes these days suck. But it's not all bad for Creative, they've got one good product that I know about. They simply need to look at products like the DDTS-100 and then go to eBay and see how much those products go for used.

The Creative DDTS-100 quite simply is the equivalent of a PC audio receiver in that it'll take SPDIF, TOSLINK, PC multi-channel analog, and RCA and it will decode Dolby Digital as well as DTS and it even includes DD and DTS upmixing, I was especially fond of the DTS NEO:6 Music setting. Why would anyone need this? Well it was great, I had multiple PC's all connected via SPDIF and one via analog. I could switch between PC's and use a single set of speakers. I even had an Xbox connected to it as well. I sent out a nice digital signal and it decoded all my content awesomely. Sure it's not a real receiver/amp, but when you're using Klipsch 5.1 Ultra speakers it's perfect.

Like I said though. You know you have a good product when you can look on eBay over 3 years after you bought it, and it has actually gone UP in value! I buy a lot of crap, and usually after a while and some upgrades I buy better crap and sell the old stuff. The two things I'm very very reluctant to sell though is the Creative DDTS-100 and those Klipsch 5.1 Ultra speakers. The speakers, sure, maybe, but the DDTS-100, one day a year from now I'm pretty sure I'll need it.

That being said, it's questionable if the DDTS-100 would be worth as much a year from now. It does the job it does amazingly well. Yeah it's ugly as all sin and they could've saved a shit ton of money by cutting down on the LED's and silverness but as far as I know the product is the only one of its kind.

There's a reason why I could sell it for $200 tomorrow and take a $75 profit though.

Creative needs to learn something fast, which is that people want quality. There's a reason people even still would consider Creative products today, it's not because of the crap that's made today, it's because of the stuff that was made back when the word SoundBlaster meant sound on PC's.

Well I'm almost done migrating servers. I'll post more about it shortly. I'm exhausted though, I honestly thought it was Sunday morning, but no it's Monday morning and I have to get up in 5 hours to get to work. More on the jump from Server 2003 to 2008 and Exchange 2003 to 2007.