One of the first things you may notice when dealing with Virtual Server is that it ports the windows critical stop sound to the host computers system speaker. However, if you have ever heard this beep you know it is not a standard system speaker beep. As a matter of fact, it is a loud, one second, obnoxious beep that is comparable in annoyance to that of a car horn.

The best solution for getting rid of this annoyance is to completely disable the system speaker on your guest operating systems. To do this, simply go to the start menu, select run, and type:

sc config beep start = disabled

There may also be situations where you only want to disable the system speaker temporarily. If that is the case, you will open the start menu, select run, and type:

net stop beep

This will disable the beep until the next restart, or until you go to the run dialog box and type:

net start beep

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Chris Sanders is the network administrator for one of the largest public school systems in the state of Kentucky. Chris's specialties include general network administration, windows server 2003, wireless networking, and security. You can view Chris' personal website at www.chrissanders.org.