Ok, here is another idea. Some computers have a power button somewhere near the numeric keypad.
I had an irratating keyboard where it was easy to tap this button instead of the up arrow. When you hit this button it would beep from time to time. I have no idea WHY it would do this, but there ya go.
So, two things, try another keyboard to make sure this key isn’t sticking (assuming you even have such a key) or it can be your motherboard (even if you have no such key) not handling the power management correctly.
I do have to admit, that my first guess would be a loose card, though.
My computer had exactly the same problem. BEEEEEEEP, BEEEEEEEEEEEEP, entirely randomly.
Every fan worked. Nonetheless, it kept beeping. So I took the case off and redirected my room fan to blow towards it. Problem solved; it beeps no more. Evidently it was overheating anyway. I cannot imagine why.
Handy, as you may have noticed on other threads, it seems your logic and mine are very different. I cannot for the life of me understand your logic here. Let’s see…
I did not forget you are deaf. I never knew you are deaf and I cannot see how this would have any relevance to the matter at hand. The person asking the question is not deaf and is hearing the beeping sounds. She did not ask how to avoid hearing them but rather what they might mean.
Even if she had just asked how to mute the beeps, I think anyone with knowledge would advise her they might mean something that needs to be looked into.
As I said, saying that the solution to the problem is to unplug the speaker does not seem like a good answer to me. But I see it does seem like a good answer to you so we might as well leave it at that.
sailor, well Im guessing too from what she said that shes got some heat. Its summer, its hot right now. The person who worked on it might have used a nice air conditioned room. But her room might have been hotter. With no pattern to those beeps, it would most likely be heat related. She changed her CPU & its probably going too hot for one reason or another.
I have some updated info from my techie friend. He feels very responsible for this problem, and wants to talk me through troubleshooting it. I will take it to a shop if these attempts fail…we will see. He suspects that it is a BIOS setting problem, though. And he’s no newbie or wannabe techie. He’s generally quite adept at this (just not infallable!)
I was under the impression that the PC came out of the box beeping. I wanted to blame UPS. But my friend said that he cleaned all the furballs (I have lots of cats) out of the insides of the PC case, then turned it on, and THEN it started beeping. So he thinks something got a little out of whack during the cleaning. But it was beeping in it’s un-upgraded state.
It is too hard for me to understand, but he says he will talk me through looking into the BIOS and seeing if any of the settings need to be adjusted there. He thinks the problem could be fixed via the BIOS. If not, I will be more than happy to take it to the shop. He did a great job otherwise, and I don’t anticipate repairs being THAT much. (If indeed it needs to go to the shop.) My friend didn’t charge me for labor at all, just for his out-of-pocket costs for parts. So I’m not about to bitch to him about this, or give him a hard time. I know he did his best, and I KNOW he is a skilled techie guy. I am very appreciative to him for his help. (He also reinstalled Windows, and did all sorts of custom things to my PC. I’m really pleased with his work, except for the BEEPING!!!)
By the way, my place is well-cooled, as is my friend’s place, so it’s not the matter of the PC being in a hot environment. And it’s not a keyboard problem, because it beeped while using both our different keyboards.
The Beeping Computer Problem seems to have been solved.
Several issues were resolved:
It was a heat alarm, for the CPU. Techie friend helped me find this out, through the BIOS. I can turn off the beeping (if I so wish) by disabling the CPU temp. sensor in the BIOS.
Techie friend still does not understand why the damned thing beeped to begin with. He speculates that some setting or calibration got screwed up. The CPU was set up according to AMD specs, there would be no reason for it to overheat. (Like it would, say, if it had been overclocked.) But, it’s possible it was actually overheating. However, he said that the PC started beeping before he took the old CPU out. (So that would mean the old CPU was “overheating” too.) He had just cleaned out the interior of my PC, which was (blush blush) full of cat hair. After that, the beeping. Maybe the cat hair-cleaning process messed something up? We may never know for sure. (Anyone here have any theories?)
Techie friend advised me to direct a fan towards the PC, to cool down the CPU. This helped quite a bit, but not enough. Techie friend then gave a shareware program to me, “CPU Cool” ( http://www.podien.de ). Somehow, it optimizes the way a CPU works, especially (so my techie friend says) AMD CPUs. Well, it did the trick! Wonderfully! No more beeping! Before CPU Cool, my CPU sensor would read (when I went into the BIOS and looked) at about 61 degrees C, going up to 65+ C at times. (My particular AMD chip can only go up to 65 C, so I assume the “beeping” started at 66 C.) Now with CPU Cool, the temp stays around 35 C, going up to 55 C at times. What a difference.
So, that’s it. I thought this information might be of some interest to someone, anyway! I highly recommend CPU Cool.
The heat is registered with a thermister (essentially a thermocouple). This opperates on the electrical potential created between two wires, each of a different type of metal. The electrical potential changes as the temperature changes. Whatever the particular set of different metals used in the thermister are, they have a known response to temperature changes, and the temperature readout has thus been calibrated to that known response. At work, I use thermocouples daily, and have experienced severed thermocouples, which always results in the temperature readout’s display showing the maximum temperature. I would assume that a damaged (not severed) wire could result in the display of higher than actual temperatures. This damage could have been the result of the cat hair cleaning.
That being said. I used to have an AMD-K6-2 CPU, and it always ran hot (~70 C), so I don’t really see your temperature as necessarily high for an AMD-K6-2 CPU. It sounds like your temperature alarm is just set too low. If you are not seeing any noticable performance hits on any of your applications though, it sounds as if your better off running CPU Cool though, as your processor will last longer running at the cooler temperatures anyway.
Thanks Steve! Wow! Bless your heart for telling me all about that!
I had checked the AMD site for the max. temp for my AMD CPU. It was a 450 HMz, and the max temp was supposed to be 65 C. My “old” CPU (the AMD CPU that was in the PC before the upgrade) could go up to 70 C.
I do think you are right about the cat hair cleaning damaging something. Because the beeping (temp alarm going off) started right after the cleaning. With both CPUs. I doubt that’s a coincidence. Two different CPUs, all of a sudden both overheating? Doubtful.
However, before I used CPU Cool, I did notice that my CD-RW burning software would freeze or crash after burning a few CDs. It seemed to coincide (sp?) with the beeping. More beeping, more of a tendency for the software to crash. But other than that, I never did see anything that would be considered a “performance hit”. I am glad to have CPU Cool, since I can burn CDs endlessly (well, as much as I care to) with no software problems. And CPU Cool is so inexpensive ($13) why the hell not use it?
'It was a heat alarm, for the CPU. Techie friend helped me find this out, through the BIOS. I can
turn off the beeping (if I so wish) by disabling the CPU temp. sensor in the BIOS. "
No one made the suggestion that it’s some sort of program that randomly beeps! I wrote a program like that a few years ago that would just beep randomly. put it on my bosses computer and would anoy him! I wanted to get the CD to open and close but I couldn’t get it to work right.
Yeah, handy! But rather than just stopping the beeping (which I was able to do before I got CPU Cool) I also wanted to stop any performance hits, (like the CD-RW software crashes)and not have to worry that I was shortening the life of my CPU.
