Stop / deactivate beep in Windows

If you found this post, you are tired of the beeping sound in Windows. Beep is the sound that is played as an audial errormessage.

It’s the sound that was originally played from the internal speaker of computers, so even if you haven’t connected any speakers to your computer, it will still be played. If you do something “wrong” often enough, it can start to get tiresome for your colleagues or family.

Lucky us… it can be turned off easily.

To turn it off temporarily (meaning untill you start it again yourself or you reboot) write the following in a command prompt:

net stop beep

To turn it off permanently, write the following in a command prompt as well (will not take effect at once. You need to reboot or use “net stop beep” as well to avoid a reboot:

sc config beep start= disabled

You can replace “disabled” with “enabled” to turn it on permanently again (reboot needed again or write “net start beep” to start it at once.

I have had problems on a laptop with no internal speaker and running Windows in a virtualized environment. The beep was VERY loud and even though the Windows soundcard was deactivated on the virtual server, it still played, but at FULL volume, disregarding host machines volume level.

I hope this helps someone.