I switch mine around when I get bored, but here’s what I currently use:
‘empty recycle bin’: The dwarven demolition squad from Warcraft II: “What’s that?” “Get yer finger outta that bunghole!” pop
‘application error’: The ‘personal assistance’ ahem robot from SWKotR: “Kill me now.”
‘system startup’: Haven’t set this back yet. I’m considering using (from SWKotR) Carth’s comment to your character after arriving on Dantooine, which is basically about how you look like hell that morning. It used to be from Return of the Jedi: Han Solo muttering about “How I’m out of it for just a little while, and everone is getting delusions of grandeur!”
‘system shutdown’: Haven’t set this back yet. I forgot what I used to have it set to.
That’s normally all the sounds I use: I find it annoying to have a sound every time I open a window, close it, whatever. I just want the audio to let me know if something important has happened.
Yay, I have the most obscure entry! (Well, next to “Blake’s 7,” maybe.)
This isn’t on my current machine; I hate most sound prompts and keep the volume turned down most of the time.
But on my old machine, I had a couple of clips of Bomb #20 from John Carpenter’s Dark Star. If you haven’t seen it, it’s an absolutely hilarious zero-budget movie about a bunch of losers who go around nuking planets out of unstable orbits. Partway into the movie, one of their nukes — which are outfitted with AI — suffers a power surge and decides it’s going to go off in their cargo bay without launching. It has a pants-wettingly funny snippy tone of voice, and many of the things it says are perfect for error messages.
You have to see the movie to understand why this is funny, but a nuclear bomb saying testily, “You are false data,” or “Oh, I don’t want to hear that,” puts me on the floor.
Now that I’ve got speakers that I manually turn on and off, I don’t bother with changing the sounds; I leave them off unless there’s something I particluarly want to hear. Right now it’s the standard Future sounds from WinME. But back in the day…
I too had a HAL theme, complete with the desktop image of the big box with the glaring red light right in the center. The startup was “Good evening, Dave. Everything’s running smoothly, and you?” The shutdown was a simple “Goodbye…” Fatal error was “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Before that, there was the Army of Darkness clips: “Well, hello mister Fancy-Pants!” “I’ll swallow your soul!” “Klaatu, Verata, Nicoughcoughtu.” Shut down was the post-faux-Necronomicon “Ooh! Ooh, you… I’ll be back for you.”
On my old machine I had Warcraft 2 sounds for everything, but my mother complained because a program she used consistently caused the long orc “WHAAAAT!” shout (it’s not my fault the program kept making the “dialog box” sound every time she changed pages!).
Now I’m reminded of the time I switched all the sounds in Duke Nukem 3d with WC2 sounds. It worked really well, too.
BraheSilver, my speakers are off 90% of the time too…but when they’re on I like my strange little noises.
I cannot FATHOM having sounds for open, minimize, maximize, and close. I’m constantly opening new windows, new tabs, shutting this, opening that, clearing my desktop, bringing it all back up again…it would sound like some strange cartoon junkyard in here if I had all of those toggled and my speakers on.
My bootup USED to be the (as lachesis says) old Battlestar Galactica Cylons saying “By your command,” and my shutdown was The Tick yelling something like, “Quick! To the secret superhero room!”
Tark’s shutdown for YEARS was HAL-9000 saying “This conversation can serve no purpose any longer. Goodbye.” Now he has some Linux sound scheme going on that has his computer sounding like he’s playing Mechwarrior - things clank and clatter and whoosh while he’s putzing around over there.
Now I’m thinking of changing mine again. Seeing what other people do has made me realize that I’ve had these sounds for a long time. Also, I’ll get an evil little thrill from watching the kids go, “What’s THAT???” when they hear something new scream from my speakers.
I use that for my e-mail here at work too. For our internal messaging system, I use a sound clip from “Pinky and the Brain” with Pinky saying, “Naaaaaaaaaarf!”
It used to be from Return of the Jedi: Han Solo muttering about “How I’m out of it for just a little while, and everone is getting delusions of grandeur!”