Ha! I actually like the noises that the computer makes. They are sort of reassuring. A computer that is always silent regardless of whether it idles or churns a lot of compute, is very creepy. Give me clunky mechanical keyboards and noisy fans!
I once put an LED in series on a long rs232 link so I could see them flash when I/O was happening. But they have the spare voltage to work with.
No thanks, I'll take all my computers and electronics as quiet as possible.
When a process stalls I would already know whether it's IO or computation. Depending on the chirping I may reach for either ping or top to investigate further. Sometimes I leave these chirps on for hours. It's nonintrusive feedback to me about background tasks and when they clear.
I actually worry that my next machine will not have this flaw. And now I'm thinking of a syscall-chirp generator to get an even better feel for the pulse of the machine :-)
Nullsoft (the winamp people) made something like this back in the day. I encourage you you to write your own :)
It’s a bad loud too. Old 160MB Quantum SCSI drives have that satisfying crispy whine and that sound like some tiny hamster is changing gears around inside of it when it does a seek.
But I can't explain why really. Could be the sci-fi nerd in me similar to the way we tend to like the feel of mechanical toggle switches.
It draws attention to an alternate sense (hearing) when it comes to systems monitoring & information delivery, Phones are the common culprit of obnoxious beeping, whistles and tones but this sound isn't an intentional interpreted interrupting noise, it's a direct line from the machine.
> The screen brightness was turned all the way down (not merely dim, but off).
Also upon boot, the bios makes its speaker emit a click. From that as well as the LEDs I can tell the computer is on. No need to listen for fan noise.
Nullsoft made an initial effort in the early 2000s: https://web.archive.org/web/20101031004813/http://www.nullso...