My computer has recently taken to making a pwanging “ta-da” sound sporadically and with no apparent prodding. I’ve done nothing, but occasionally my computer will apparently be proud of the space it’s taking up and pwang “ta-da” as if looking for praise.
What the heck is this and should I be concerned?
If you’re running Windows XP, it makes these sounds for a few reasons. One is that new updates have been downloaded and are ready to install (check the tray, bottom right hand corner of your screen), that new hardware is has been found and it’s looking for drivers, or that an externally connected hardware device (firewire hard drive, USB card reader, maybe a printer) has been disconnected or reconnected.
Generally, it’s not serious, just something the OS thinks you should know. If it really bothers you, I guess you could assign no sound to those kinds of events, in control panel | sounds.
If you’re not running windows XP, I have no idea, tho I think MacOS does a similar thing.
HTH
abby
Check your sound settings. See where “ta-da” is set up. That should help to narrow the scope of what background operations are running which trigger the sound file.
It might even be that your sound settings assign the “ta-da” sound to notify you of incoming mail. Have you noticed any correlation?
It’s definitely unrelated to anything actually happening on the computer. I should have specified, and I apologize, that this is purely a mechanical sound–it does not come from the speakers; it’s as though one was holding a thin piece of metal and flicking it, producing a ‘pwang’ sound.
AFAIK, I have Windows 98.
Well, then that’s bad, because it is most likely means that your hard drive is about to fail.
I do sincerely hope you’re kidding…don’t do that to me; I’m very paranoid.
new hard drives are relatively cheap, you should pick one up…
if money affords, try to get a 7200rpm drive with an 8mb buffer
http://www.pricewatch.com/ is a good place to get cheap computer equipment.
click on hard drives, you can most likely find something great for really cheap. most places have free shipping too.
Start copying important docs off of it NOW.
I’m not sure if I believe the claims of urgency, Revtim and bruntilda. It’s been doing this for weeks with little to no problems; the occasional error message, but nothing worse than “IE5.0 has made an error and will be shut down.”
But it couldn’t hurt to make backups, correct? Why not play it safe?
Yeah I agree I’d make some back ups if I were you just in case. Those Scouts don’t say be prepared for nothing you know
If your hard drive does crash, take note of something clever’s post. He is right, pricewatch.com is probably the best place to buy cheap, good parts. Mad props, yo.
This happened to my computer recently. It made ocasional metallic pinging and clicking noises and over the course of a couple weeks became much slower as it was having trouble reading the hard drive, to the point that it took nearly ten minutes to boot up. After a replacement drive the boot time went back to about thirty seconds. This article may help.
Of course, do check to make sure its not something else, like something hitting the fan, before you go out and buy a new disk.