Microsoft listens: Startup sound optional in Windows Vista

Yay!

Can we get them to put the 'go to parent' button back into Explorer now? :-)

It seemed like such a little thing but it isn't.

Since then I actually took notice on how many laptops around me are firing up in a public environment - interestingly there where even more laptops around me than I thought.

So, good choice.

Though it is too late, they listened to the people's voice ( at last ? ) ...

What astounds me is that they EVER thought this was a good idea, and the reams of asinine justification they made for it. Audio leveling and the rest. Asinine and insulting too. "We think you're too stupid to see past our BS and not realize it's just a stupid marketing idea".

Thank god they pulled their heads out, as that would have been a real reason to delay Vista deployment.

Wow, common sense, or rather the masses at the castle gates with torches and pitchforks, do bend the ear of the giant. Had they left it in, they would have almost single-handedly surrendered the Media Productional market to Apple. And if the bloggers were any sort of metric it was nearly 800 to 0. Good thing they killed it before such news went wider mainstream.

@5: why would a sound delay an OS deployment??

By using the word deployment, I assume you mean in the corporate rollout sense, you never hear home consumers talking about "delaying deployment".

I don't know of any corp that would consider a sound a reason not to deploy. App compat yeah, but sounds? Maybe the 'influentials' are the guys who need to pull their heads out...

#7

40 computers in an open air cube farm. Start them all at once with mandatory startup chimes. Toss in a few reboots a day.

Annoying the crap out of people with no way to turn it off other than external speakers or a cut off jack? Yeah, that's a reason to delay things.

#9

So tell me how exactly is this different from the status quo whereby you get a logon sound? Or an email? Or you log off?

When exactly have you seen an entire office boot their machines at once???

It is way more likely that you get a higher level of concurrent logons in an open air office than you do concurrent boots. The next (first?) time you go to do an enterprise corporate rollout or audit (which 90% of the time relies on boot rather than logon) you will very quickly realise that most users do not reboot their machine - they lock it... or the admins autolock it via technology such as GPO.

Also I can count the number of corporates who have PC speakers as part of the deployment on 1 finger. This, across dozens of projects in the past decade. And before you mention the built-in speaker - well if it was a corporate Vista rollout then this would probably be disabled in the AD anyway by using one of the new GPO settings.

So I ask again - how is a startup sound a reason to delay a corp deployment? It seems to be more a reason for a small bunch of enthusiasts to spout their inaccurate presumptions. The term 'influential' really needs some scope applied to it I think.

"And if the bloggers were any sort of metric it was nearly 800 to 0. "

I really don't think bloggers are much of a metric for anything. "Snakes on a Plane" bombed at the box office.

Regarding this trivial Vista Startup Sound issue, maybe 100% of bloggers were in an uproar over it, but I'd bet that 99.99% of the general population couldn't have cared less. I think bloggers (particularly tech bloggers and posters of comments to such blogs, which are probably the most arrogant subset of all mankind (not guys like Scoble (who seems to be a fan of all things tech), but the self-proclaimed know-it-alls)) spend a lot of time talking and listening only to each other, so they're deluded into thinking that their opinions are that of the population in general.

And the nonsense about, "Imagine 100 computers booting at once, OMG the cacophony!!", give me a break. I've been around computers for 20 years, and have never had occasion to hear 100 or even a dozen or even 3 computers all booting at once. And even if this were a common occurrence (NOT), the same happens with Macs too. How many Mac users do you think turn off the chime that Macs have had for years? Two? I've never turned off the chime on my Macs (if it's even possible), and haven't done it on my Windows computers. I don't know anyone who has turned off the chimes. Hardly anybody cares about this issue!

But I'm glad MS did this, it's one less thing for Welch to bitch about (not that he wouldn't find some reason to bitch at MS anyway).

"40 computers in an open air cube farm. Start them all at once with mandatory startup chimes. Toss in a few reboots a day."


Good stuff. Of course you'll need a few reboots.

I've got a Macbook here.. can't remember the last time I booted it up... the Airport update doesn't count..;)

Welch's comments are a load of bs which underwrite how out of touch these perennial commenters are. Step away from the keyboard and get out and get a life

Laptops, Smoi. They're out there. They're in here. You wanna cut the PC board trace and disable everyone's speakers? Go for it.