Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with beeps

I wish I could run my BIOS in a debugger.

mindsound — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:24:01 -0800

Help me guess which part of my homebrew PC is causing my POST video failure. I built this box six months ago. Its stability has been flawless. Now, suddenly, my POST keeps doing a <long>beep</long> <short>beep beep</short> which for my BIOS is a video failure. It then boots sans video. If I unplug the power and fool around for 15 minutes or so (that's as precise as I can be after a couple evenings of despair) it will boot with video again.

This is my parts list; here it is on Newegg with moar linkies if you have a login there. The proc is a 45W Athlon X2 and I dual-boot XP and Ubuntu. There are a few vaguely related prior questions but I couldn't find any love for my particular crisis. I'm having the same POST error as phrontist here, but he had a notebook.

Is it the:

Video card? It's a fanless NVIDIA 8500, which is allegedly somewhat fail-y due to the passive cooling. However, the system has never had any instability or lockups in six months and when it boots again after fiddling it's rock solid.

Motherboard? The fact that the system is stable once it boots makes me wonder if maybe the BIOS is somehow flaky.

PSU? It only boots now after the system has been unplugged for a while...

I talk big but I am fairly ignorant about hardware and haven't built a system since like 2001. All of the above is (I think) returnable but the software developer in me wants to know what is going on. What do you think is wrong? What would you do in my shoes?

What was World Service beeping at?

samstarling — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 16:15:01 -0800

What did I hear on BBC World Service last night? I go to bed listening to Radio 4, which after broadcasts end simulcasts BBC World Service. I woke up in the middle of the night (about 0230 GMT) to hear what sounded like intermittent dialup modem noises coming from my radio. These were definitely being broadcast by World Service as I could tune out and in - but does anyone have any idea what they were? It wasn't the 'pips' for the top of the hour.

What's that beeping?

brain_drain — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 16:09:20 -0800

What's that beeping sound I hear everywhere? It starts with one long beep, then 6-8 short staccato beeps. (I.e. BUUUUUH, BUH--BUH--BUH--BUH--BUH--BUH) It happens sporadically, but frequently. I hear it everywhere -- phone calls, my stereo speakers, computers, the car radio. I heard it for the first time a year or two ago.

What do these strange beeping and clicking sounds from my computer mean?

mr_roboto — Sun, 25 Jul 2004 19:21:06 -0800

Strange sounds from my computer: a beep, followed by a click, followed by a beep. Not at startup, but while I'm booted into Linux (but not Windows!). A brief description of my system: It's an MSI motherboard, running an Award BIOS. The CPU is an AMD XP 1800+ (or something like that...). There's a 450 W Antec power supply, that, while only about a year old, is occasionally noisy. All of my fans seem to be functioning just fine (I have a window in the case), and, in Windows (where I have access to temperature monitoring software), the CPU temperature is normal. The beep is coming from the PC speaker, tied into the motherboard. I can't quite triangulate the source of the (very mechanical-sounding) click. Ideas?

sorry about the parentheses