Wierd system beep problem

[ITBadger]

Hi all, I hope that I'm not posting inappropriately, but I have a rather annoying problem, for which I cannot find an answer online.

 

Every hour, on the hour, a number of PC's on the network emit a system error beep, or a number of beeps. There is no record of why in either the event viewer of the PC or that of the servers. It's been happening for a couple of months now, but towards the end of term I was so busy that I just ignored it.

 

Due to the timing of the beeps I thought it may be related to time synchronisation, but have been unable to find any evidence that this is the case.

 

There doesn't seem to be any other symptoms, but I hate not being able to explain what is happening!

 

Have any of you experienced the same problem, or can you shed any light on what may be causing it?

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated:confused:

[Haptic]

Hi all, I hope that I'm not posting inappropriately, but I have a rather annoying problem, for which I cannot find an answer online.

 

Every hour, on the hour, a number of PC's on the network emit a system error beep, or a number of beeps. There is no record of why in either the event viewer of the PC or that of the servers. It's been happening for a couple of months now, but towards the end of term I was so busy that I just ignored it.

 

Due to the timing of the beeps I thought it may be related to time synchronisation, but have been unable to find any evidence that this is the case.

 

There doesn't seem to be any other symptoms, but I hate not being able to explain what is happening!

 

Have any of you experienced the same problem, or can you shed any light on what may be causing it?

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated:confused:

 

how old are the machines and have you checked the bios error log ?

[ITBadger]

Thanks for the speedy reply Simon,

 

There is nothing of relevance in any of the logs that I can access. Certainly nothing hourly. The machines are of differing makes and models, but are no more that 3 years old.

 

Dave.

[Haptic]

Thanks for the speedy reply Simon,

 

There is nothing of relevance in any of the logs that I can access. Certainly nothing hourly. The machines are of differing makes and models, but are no more that 3 years old.

 

Dave.

 

it could be the bios battery failing , is there any signs of post screen asking for you to correct the date and time ?

[ITBadger]

No, none at all. The fact that it is happening on dozens of PC's all over the network (and about a dozen in my room!) kind of rules out a low level issue such as BIOS I would have thought.

 

It's certainly a new one on me!

[Michael]

Have you checked the temperature of the room and the PC's? Seems really odd they beep on the hour to be honest!

[ITBadger]

The temperature is fine, it occurs in our air conditioned server room as well as some cool offices around the school.

 

The fact that it every hour, on the hour suggests to me that 'something' is trying to synchronise or update with a service, but failing. I would have thought it would simply been a matter of checking the application event log to find out what it is, but as I've said, there is nothing of relevance.

[mac_shinobi]

The temperature is fine, it occurs in our air conditioned server room as well as some cool offices around the school.

 

The fact that it every hour, on the hour suggests to me that 'something' is trying to synchronise or update with a service, but failing. I would have thought it would simply been a matter of checking the application event log to find out what it is, but as I've said, there is nothing of relevance.

 

reset bios to system or factory defaults and then save and try again and also set relevant passwords so users / students cant change settings on them.

[Cache]

There's no scheduled task set up to run every hour on the machines are there?

[DMcCoy]

Do they have NOD antivirus on? This will beep for some update/scan completions if configured to do so.

[mac_shinobi]

No, none at all. The fact that it is happening on dozens of PC's all over the network (and about a dozen in my room!) kind of rules out a low level issue such as BIOS I would have thought.

 

It's certainly a new one on me!

 

I only suggested bios reset to factory defaults to elliminate the bios because if students had or have tampered with the settings then they may have done something to make it beep every hour ( was just a thought )

 

Other then that anti virus and anti spyware up to date and also disable any synch stuff through gpo

 

Also as above task scheduler - if nothing in there then I would be a bit stumped

[Michael]

Reading through your messages again, the one thing that sticks out is the fact you mentioned this happens on different hardware in the same room. This would in theory eliminate a BIOS or BIOS configuration issue, but as mentioned above, resetting the BIOS to factory default may be advisory.

 

Failing this I'm speculating it must be software which is triggering the beeps. Usually PCs only do this when a sound card is not detected or available. Although cheating, you could open up the problematic machines and disconnect the internal speaker cable. Most newer machines don't even have them anymore.

[mac_shinobi]

Reading through your messages again, the one thing that sticks out is the fact you mentioned this happens on different hardware in the same room. This would in theory eliminate a BIOS or BIOS configuration issue, but as mentioned above, resetting the BIOS to factory default may be advisory.

 

Failing this I'm speculating it must be software which is triggering the beeps. Usually PCs only do this when a sound card is not detected or available. Although cheating, you could open up the problematic machines and disconnect the internal speaker cable. Most newer machines don't even have them anymore.

 

I haven't done it on windows for a long time but just had a thought about as per the scheduled task type principle that it may also be a date / time hourly chime or beep - just as an example you can set it to do it hourly on os x which I am aware is different to windows but just a thought

[R0M]

Another thing you might want to check is that your students haven't put anything in the start up, like batch files (I don't know how much access they have). It would not be that hard to write a script to out put a beep, try putting this in a batch file:

@echo 

(That's the bell Character you get it by holding Alt and press 0 then 7 on the num-pad)

 

I'm sure using %time% you could set a batch file up to beep hour on the hour, but I can't be bothered working out how. It might be some kids just trying to annoy you / show off to friends / *cough* "Hack" *cough*.

[mac_shinobi]

If the asker figures out what it is - it would be good to know the outcome

 

This thread reminds me of the movie "hear no evil, see no evil" with Richard Prior and Co where near the start of the movie the 2 blind guys are trying to cross the traffic lights and one of them says

 

"Wait for the beep!!"

 

Just made me chuckle a bit and thought it was fitting

[romanx]

Any new software installed? Find a machine and start uninstalling software after every beep until it stops

[SYNACK]

May not track the problem down specificly but if it is the pc speaker then the following should disable it and stop the noise being produced. If it is the PC speaker and there is a soundcard installed a beep like this usually means that something is sending a random code that is being interpreted by the BIOS itself and creating the beep.

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/general-chat/31985-disable-internal-speaker.html#post301009

 

As system beep is hardly used for anything you can safely disable it. Luckily it is really easy.

 

Go into device manager and click the 'view' menu, select 'show hidden devices' then expand the 'Non-Plug and Play drivers' section. Right click on 'Beep' and either disable or delete it.

 

Job done.

 

You can probably script this with devcon on machine startup.

 

This reg key may also work but it could just be for the citrix error that I found it under:

http://forums.citrix.com/thread.jspa?messageID=726120

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

​HKEY_CURRENT​_USER\Contro​l Panel\Soun​d

"Beep"="no​"

"ExtendedS​ounds"="no"

[ITBadger]

There's no scheduled task set up to run every hour on the machines are there?

 

I think you may have pointed me in the right direction Cache. I cannot believe that I didn't think of looking there! Anyway, there are hundreds of jobs scheduled to run every day on the hour. It appears that the beep is caused when processes cannot start or are already runnning. I just need to track down what put them there in the first place now. We have had a Conficker infection in recent months, so it may be down to this. I'll do some digging and post the results back up here.

 

Many thanks to all of you who offered advice. It's great to know that we can help each other out so speedily.

 

Dave.

[ITBadger]

Quick update:

 

It looks as though it's a remnant of the Conficker virus as discussed in this post.

 

Joy of joys, more clean up work to do!

[mac_shinobi]

I only suggested bios reset to factory defaults to elliminate the bios because if students had or have tampered with the settings then they may have done something to make it beep every hour ( was just a thought )

Other then that anti virus and anti spyware up to date and also disable any synch stuff through gpo

 

Also as above task scheduler - if nothing in there then I would be a bit stumped

 

as per above in bold

[ITBadger]

Which was the reason for me thanking you!

[mac_shinobi]

Which was the reason for me thanking you!

 

I don't very often have those moments so Just thought I would re iterate it lol