When I use Windows virtual machines, sometimes the system beep gets annoying to my neighbors.

When I use Linux virtual machines, it goes through my laptop’s PC Speaker, which makes me have a heart attack, and annoys my neighbor.

Find your Vmware preferences file

Windows: Application Data\VMware\preferences.ini

Linux: ~/vmware/preferences (you could possibly do it in the system wide config as well)

Add this line:

mks.noBeep = TRUE

All beeps should be gone.

Windows itself

If for some reason you use some other Virtualization product that does not allow you to disable beeps, just create a Group Policy on your test domain (you could do it local as well). Configure any non critical service in the GPO to be DISABLED. (I use the print spooler).

Once that is done, browse to the sysvol, find the GPO’s folder, and edit the security policy text file. Replace the name of the service you disabled with “beep”.

The reason we have to do that is because you don’t see the beep service in the list of the GPO editor. But this effectively disables the beep service that Windows uses, well, to beep ! I deploy this on test domains where I “beep” often.