Friday 14 August 2009

Disable BEEPS during the terminal session.

Hi everybody,

Yesterday, I had a complaint from a client about a weird sound coming out of the computer during a terminal session. I was a bit surprised as the sound redirection was disabled by the group policy. I have connected to that Terminal Server and found out that it was the BEEP service sound. For example when you receive an e-mail, Outlook tries to notify you, but as the sound was turned off, you get a beep notification.

There are few workarounds for this, I would say, inconvenience.

1) The simplest one is stopping the BEEP service on the client’s local machine.
If you issue the following command in the command prompt:

net stop beep

this will stop the BEEP service on the local machine, but after restart the BEEP service will start again. So if you want to get rid of these beeps forever you have to disable the BEEP service by issuing the following command:

sc config beep start= disabled

This will stop the BEEP service from starting automatically.

2) The second solution is to disable BEEP on the server, so that no signal is sent to the Terminal Services client. To do this you have to perform following:

- Open the Registry editor by issuing regedit command

- In the registry editor find the following subkey KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server

- In this subkey create a new DWORD value and name it DisableBeep

- Modify the DisableBeep key and put 1 in the Value Data box.

As you have already understood by entering 1 you are turning on the DisableBeep key, in the future if you decide to turn on (i.e turn off the DisableBeep key) the BEEPservice on the server all you have to do is to enter 0 instead of 1 in the Value Data box for the DisableBeep DWORD key.

The only disadvantage of the second option is that you have to restart the Terminal Server, which sometimes can be a very difficult task as loads of user accessing it 24 hours a day :-)

Take care,

Kudrat

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