What a throwback. I did have James Earl Jones on my PC, back in 1996 when I cared enough to customize all my sounds!
I have Worf’s (Star Trek) “Captain, incoming message!” for my new email alerts. Had it for years (The file date says 7/13/2004).
The only sound I put into my PC was stripped from an old AOL bit where Alyson Hannigan says “You’ve got mail!” I have it plugged into my GMail.
Can’t have her here in person to tell me :: sigh:: so it is the next best thing.
in my mind this would be an excellent exit windows sound for some reason
I must be odd, as I get older I’ve gone from whatever sounds were on it when I got it to wanting it to be “homey” or feel “lived in” far as computers go.
james, its a sad day, our babbage machine has been rendered obsolete by this new thing that looks like a damned light bulb
My husband’s a Dave. Naturally he had a bunch of HAL phrases. The default “bonk!” when you can’t something was, “I’m sorry Dave, I can’t let you do that.” And of course, “Hello, Dave,” on startup.
No James Earl Jones, but an old boss of mine had his email notifications set so that when he got an email from his boss, it would play a whipcrack.
Even without him explaining, the first time we heard it, we knew.
I used to have a sort of generic air raid siren .wav file as my Windows startup sound. I think I created it by cropping the beginning of a Future Sound of London song. Nowadays I just turn off the Windows sounds.
When I was freelancing I had Outlook set up to play a sonar ping - something like this. I had it set up to only play the sound when the email was from a client.
One day, I went to meet a client for lunch. I told my wife (well, girlfriend at the time) to check my email if she heard the ‘submarine sound’ (this was before smartphones & blackberries & the like). Anyway, off I went.
That day, one of my smaller clients’ email accounts apparently got hacked or something, because I started getting emails from the address every 30 seconds or so.
For over three hours.
When I got home, my threatening-to-be-exgirlfriend damn near shoved the PC speakers down my throat. She was scared that I’d get a real job email so of course had to keep running over to the PC to make sure there wasn’t a real email coming in. Boy, was she pissed <g>
Every now and then I’ll give her my best Sean Connery voice “Give me a ping, Vasili. One ping only, please” and play the sound. Cracks her up every time.
This is one of those things that sounds really cool to me on paper, but when I actually go to implement it I get instantly sick of it. I just can’t stand it when the computer makes sounds I haven’t initiated myself.
The only ringtone I’ve found acceptable for my phone is Harder Better Faster Stronger, which starts with some muted white noise. I love the song, but I always rush to answer the phone before it switches from white noise to an actual beat.
If you’re old like me, you probably remember Bumblebee Tuna jingle: “Yum, yum, Bumble Bee, Bumble Bee tu-una!”
I had a WAV file of that on my computer, and I edited it down so that it just played the “tu-una!” bit and set that as the default ‘error’ sound. Everything went fine until one weekend when we were out of town and my sister-in-law was housesitting; something went awry with the computer and everything she did started throwing errors. By the end of the weekend the computer had sung “tu-una!” at her about 3 gazillion times…she was less than amused.
Yep.
Two computers ago I discovered .wav’s and spent an afternoon finding them and loading them up. Used “What is thy bidding…” for the start-up. Never bothered with it again, though. My current computer remains on stock Windows sounds, and probably always will.
Teehee
I used to have Lords of the Realm II sounds on an old computer.Delete ‘Slaughter These peasants?’ ‘Noe problem, Guv!’ figured prominently somehow.
Then one day I heard ‘Right between the eyes!’ (that infamous windows has encountered a problem dialog, which occured often because that computer ran Windows ME) followed by an animal snarl from my dad, who had just lost some important work. I was asked to take the sounds off. 