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If the sound your computer emits to signal an event—the logon or logoff sound, for example—is an earsplitting assault, relief in the form of adjusting the volume is just a click or two away with Windows Vista’s volume control. And, if you can’t stand the startup sound, you can simply turn it off! You can also use the Volume control to keep your music and other sounds muted so that you don’t disturb other people.
If you’d like to verbally command your computer instead of typing and using the mouse, try Windows Vista’s powerful speech-recognition program. It’s important to go through the tutorial so that the program can recognize your voice and the way you pronounce words, and so that you learn the correct commands. Be patient! It might take a bit of trial and error, but you’ll know it was time well spent when you can dictate letters or long documents without touching the keyboard! Instead of saving your fingers, perhaps you want to save your eyes by using the Narrator program, which actually reads aloud to you. Using your sound system, Narrator can describe items on your screen and can read blocks of text to you. But what if you can’t—or don’t want to—hear any sounds from your computer? You can set it to give you visual clues, including flashes and captions, instead.
Although a computer blaring loud music can be fun when you’re relaxing or having a party, it’s not a good idea when you’re working on a notebook computer around other people in a crowded room or office. Fortunately, you can adjust the sound levels for your system and for each of your applications. You can also turn off the Windows startup sound if you don’t want to announce to everyone in the room that you just turned on your computer. If your computer has more than one output device, you can specify which one is the default device while you’re setting the volume levels for each device.
Click the Start button, type sound in the Search box of the Start menu, and click Sound to display the Sound dialog box.
On the Playback tab, double-click a device to display its Properties dialog box. Make any device-specific settings that you want to be the default settings for that device, including volume levels and enhancements, and click OK. Repeat for each device. (The settings that you can make in the Properties dialog box vary for different devices because of the different features of individual devices.)
Click the device that you want to set as the default device, and click Set Default.
On the Sounds tab of the Sound dialog box, clear this check box if you never want to hear the Windows startup sound when you turn on your computer, or select the check box if you do want to hear the sound.
See Also
"Associating a Sound with an Event" for information about modifying which Windows sounds are used for specific events.
"Customizing the Taskbar" for information about displaying the Volume icon if it isn’t already displayed on the taskbar.
