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Comment by sorbus | Hacker News Reader

"This is an indication sent to the PC speaker from the computer's BIOS that the CPU fan is failing or has failed, or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance."

I can't help think that it might be more useful to play a short recording saying something like "The CPU fan is failing. The CPU fan has failed."

On the other hand, this is undeniably awesome, and would perhaps make people feel a bit better about having to repair their computer (I know that it would make me feel better).

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If anything, what we need is more musical cues indicating system health. From the forboding opening strains of Orff's "O Fortuna" when the system first starts to overheat, through to Debussy's "Clare de Lune" while the CPU goes through a tearful montage of the many documents and applications that it's helped during its short life, before whispering its last goodbyes to an ocean-like plane of blue screen, the system could increase the user's empathy with a musical journey through its struggles.

With innovations like this, I might even shed a tear when the host lays itself down to die, rather than hammering the keyboard in futile rage.

I remember running a small Windows app that would sit in the background and pipe sound of various frequencies through your speakers depending on system state. I think I had mine set up to rumble at 30 or 40Hz at 50% CPU and slowly increase the volume as it got past that point.

One night after I turned the volume up for a particularly quiet movie I fell asleep and let folding@home go. I woke up a couple minutes later with my subwoofer rattling the entire room and my roommates knocking on my door to make sure the place wasn't falling apart.

Similar experience here. My old roommate's name is Khanh and he found a clip of William Shatner yelling "Khan" from a Star Trek movie that he put on his voice mail and as start up sound for his PC. Every so often he would leave his speakers turned up and in the middle of the night his computer would restart due to a windows update. I'd just hear William Shatner yell KKKKHHHHHAAAANNNN randomly in the middle of the night.

The program I remember fondly along those lines is Nullsoft Beep:

http://www.nullsoft.com/free/nbeep/

It essentially makes your computer sound like something from Forbidden Planet, hence instantly bringing you into the future of the past.

That's the one! Now someone needs to port it to Linux...

Of course after it has been fixed it should play Also Sprach Zarathustra: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/71/Richard_Straus...

And for a RAM failure, it should play A Bicycle Built for Two.

And when the speaker fails it should play Imperial March on the HDD

I think a simple rendition of "Daisy, daisy... " might be more appropriate.

Just as a note, I think the song is named "bicycle built for two"

But it woud be very funny.

This is a great idea. And when you sell/toss out your computer there should be a "shut down, for the very last time" button you can press that would play something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbN0g8-zbdY

Although after the first minute you might be tempted to just yank the power cord out.

Just think how much better it would be to hear "Rhapsody in Blue" along with a BSOD. Or perhaps just Joni Mitchell's "Blue". :)

I assume the PC speaker actually means the one connected directly to the motherboard, not whatever is connected to the sound card (which may be part of the motherboard). The voice recording would probably sound something more like:

  Krrfhrhfhfbhorg.  Krrfhrhfhfbhord.

Which would still be more useful than classical music, if your objective is to tell the user that something is wrong.

I don't know... we really made use of the PC speaker before sound cards were the norm. Remember the nice PC speaker sounds of the combat in the original Battle Chess? The only question is how much raw sound data you are allowed to store in your chip.

This webpage has some nice musical examples.

http://www.oldskool.org/sound/pc/#digitized

Actually, in ~1987 on our XT clone, my dad or I'd found a little program whose sole purpose was to play a short snippet of something like "Mushroom, magic mushroom" - I think from a commercial or something.

It was grainy, but not only was the speech intelligible, the music wasn't overly painful (i.e. it was grainy, but only a bit more than a bad record).

I remember that...

I had a copy on a 5.25" floppy, copied it to the both the school librarie's XT machines and made it part of the boot batch file. Apparently I was the only one who found it amusing :(

especially if you don't speak English.

I came home to my crashed PC one day and it was very quietly playing a sound over and over. I turned the volume way up and it was saying something like "The CPU has failed!" over and over. It was more freaky than awesome.

At least it wasn't saying "Look behind you" or something.

This is great. If a customer calls up saying that their computer failed after playing a certain song it idiot proofs the detection process (assuming the user was there to hear it.) It transcends languages and even if the user can't identify the song, they can hum it (again, assuming they aren't tone deaf.)

even if the user can't identify the song, they can hum it - I've always wondered what a computer equivalent of NPR's Car Talk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Talk would be like

http://www.webisee.com/2008/10/17/best-ways-to-just-hum-a-tu...

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