startup sounds in Vista

Posted on September 1, 2006 by ward

So; you will not be allowed to change or turn off the startup sound in Windows Vista. This has taken Microsoft months to decide, and the decision has involved lawyers, marketing, engineers, and no doubt countless managers. If you were ever wondering why Vista is so delayed… It’s also a good idication of the path Microsoft has chosen – it’s all about you can’t rather than you can. I’ll take my GNU/Linux distribution, thank you, where I can do simple things like disable or modify startup sounds. And where that decision has not taken up countless hours of time that could have been spent on improving the product.

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2 Responses to startup sounds in Vista

  1. jag says:
    September 1, 2006 at 4:21 pm

    while i totally agree with you about the absolute complete and utter waste of resources, this is not totally unheard of, and in fact i’d say microsoft is following a trend here. apple computers have had sounds you cannot turn off during startup for a decade — my powerbook with linux still makes the apple chord at startup. many other laptop manufacturers — sony, toshiba — do the same thing. granted, though, i’m not sure i know of another system that forces a sound to you upon the login dialog.

    -jag

  2. ward says:
    September 9, 2006 at 2:30 pm

    Well – it’s true, others have done this before. But all the examples you give are hardware manufacturers. Microsoft just writes software. What if every proprietary software vendor decides that they need to have a startup chime for their product that can not be disabled?

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