Re: what the beep? - a very strange bug
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg74528] Re: what the beep? - a very strange bug
- From: roland franzius <roland.franzius at uos.de>
- Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2007 05:20:07 -0500 (EST)
- Organization: Universitaet Hannover
- References: <eu1ri7$l0t$1@smc.vnet.net>
Matt Enlow wrote: > Just the other day I noticed some very strange behavior in Mathematica. > > Whenever I received an error/warning message, it would display the > message, then completely freeze for a full 15 seconds, after which it > beeped--but not its normal beep, a much more "primitive", Atari-like > beep--and un-froze. And everything's fine again. It would do that for > every warning message cell. Display, 15-second freeze, strange beep, > unfreeze. > > I then noticed that this would happen WHENEVER a beep was supposed to > occur, such as typing in a mismatched grouping construct (like > "(2x+3]"). It would freeze for 15 seconds, then strange-beep and > unfreeze. So my guess was that it was spending that 15 seconds looking > for the sound file to create the standard beep, not finding it, and > giving up and going with some kind of "default beep". I searched all > help files and online for some kind of a clue as to how Mathematica > goes about producing its actual "beep" sound, with no luck. > > I tried re-installing Mathematica, thinking that maybe the sound file > would be replaced, but the behavior did not change! I am baffled. > Maybe it's really a Windows sound I am missing, that Mathematica just > co-opts? (Oh, I'm running v5.2 of Mathematica on Win XP Home Edition, > SP2). Any ideas/insight would be greatly appreciated. Thank you! Seems to me that the warning beep is generated via hardware interrupt. I once had a gateway solo notebook that produced a standby stop because the beep seemed to be piped to an extra hardware shutdown address for swapping cd and floppy. Microsoft didnt support that adress under win2k. Go to menu/edit/preferences/global/message options and switch off the warning beep. -- Roland Franzius