For someone in the prime of his second childhood I generally pride myself on being reasonably switched on about things computer and electrical. After a career in electronic maintenance I think I can usually unravel most technical mysteries. However the other evening I was at the PC downloading, surfing and doing all the other things we computery types like to do.
Suddenly there’s a “Beep!” and a short time later another “Beep”. I remembered a year or so ago a similar beeping mystery was solved when I found an cordless phone that had been decommissioned and put away on a shelf whose battery had just run down and was telling the world of its problems. So I spent the next 30 minutes or so crawling around on my knees trying to locate the source of the “Beeps”. Eventually it was time for bed and I closed down the PC and thankfully the “Beeps” stopped, which confirmed they were coming from the computer. I should explain my hearing is not too good these days and I wear a hearing aid, which makes a nonsense of the sound direction finding skills you had in your youth.
In the morning on powering up it was gone and I breathed a sigh of relief.
Later in the day it came to me. You know that useful little program dave.m found that tells you if you’ve hit the Caps Lock key inadvertently? That produces a beep! It’s a very useful little program and if you are typing in Word or doing something similar you immediately know what caused the beep and I leave it on all the time. This time it was just some letters landing a little heavily on the keyboard (I remembered later) which must have triggered it.
I shall still use it but hopefully I won’t be caught out so easily again.
Tony
