Current Events > My computer keeps playing this chime randomly. Can't figure out why?

(+) Yeah! (+)

It's a brand new gaming laptop, and I've spent most of the last 3 days installing/updating/fixing settings/etc. So there's a pretty good chance that I accidentally turned on some notification or something that I don't remember.

But when I'm playing a game (both Witcher 3 and Subnautica, so it's not coming from the game itself) it will play a notification-style chime every 3-5 minutes or so. Sometimes it'll do it twice about 10 seconds apart and then take another 3-5 minutes for the next chime. It's really annoying, and kind of kills the experience when it's going off in the middle of cutscenes or a tense fight with 5 ghouls.

Thing is, I know it's also not from Steam because it's still chiming when I'm just browsing GameFAQs and Steam isn't even open (nor running in the background). But it does it about half as frequently. Maybe about 10 minutes between chimes when I'm not playing a game.

For reference, it's the chime titled "Windows Background" in the Sound properties. It's assigned to 5 different things all under Windows:

1. Asterisk
2. Default Beep
3. Exclamation
4. Low Battery Alarm
5. System Notification

Obviously I can rule out the Low Battery Alarm easily, since I'm plugged into the wall and the battery itself is at 96%. But the other 4 are literally about the broadest possible categories you can think of. I don't even know where to start trying to figure out what's causing it. -_-
---

Low RAM warning maybe

Does your browser have a tab open with an ad of some kind being annoying?
---

It's probably the notification centre on Windows 10.
Basically, mute Windows sounds.
If you're worried anything is going wrong. Get Speccy:
https://www.piriform.com/speccy

And run your game in window mode so you can see both the summary tab of Speccy and the game - unless your temps go up to like say... 90 degrees, you're fine.

To mute windows sounds:
right click the volume icon in the lower right, select sounds then select "no sounds" for your sound scheme.
---

SkittyOnWailord posted...

Does your browser have a tab open with an ad of some kind being annoying?

Nope. Just CE and Youtube, and I've got the same adblocker setup I had on my old computer that never chimed randomly.

TheMarthKoopa posted...

Low RAM warning maybe

...not gonna happen on this thing with just a web browser open. >_> I've got 16GB RAM, and I've had the task manager open to see if anything spikes when the chime goes off. Nothing noticeable last time it chimed. Hovering around 3.2GB of RAM used and currently just browsing and downloading Ghost Recon Wildlands off UPlay right now (free download came with the computer...but I hate UPlay so much...>_<).

It was chiming before I started the download, btw. Just to rule that out.
---

You could try making a note of the times it happens and take a look at the Event Viewer and see if there is something common at all the times it happens.

First I would figure out where your computer got a chime and how it's playing it without hands. Gotta get to the root of the problem.
---

I had the exact same problem. New computer. I had to go and turn off the notifications sounds and they did the trick.
---

Try changing the notification sounds and see if the sound that plays changes.
---

TheMarthKoopa posted...

You could try making a note of the times it happens and take a look at the Event Viewer and see if there is something common at all the times it happens.

So I started tracking the times for the past hour.

2:58
3:10
3:12
3:17
3:19
3:28
3:34
3:36
3:40
3:42 (double chime back-to-back about 2 seconds apart)
3:45 (another double-chime about 2 seconds apart)
3:47
3:49
3:54
3:56

And absolutely nothing in the event viewer matches up at all. The closest is under Applications and Services Logs > Microsoft > Windows > CloudStore > Operational. It's got events at 3:55, 3:39, 3:29, 3:22, 3:15, 3:04, and 2:59 in the same timespan.

I've never used this Event Viewer before, though. Is there any way to just display all events sorted by time?
---

DarkDragon400 posted...

Try changing the notification sounds and see if the sound that plays changes.

And after doing this I've figured out that it's classified under the "Exclamation" in the sounds menu. Which doesn't terribly narrow it down very much, tbh, as it doesn't tell you what actually falls under the Exclamation category in terms of alerts. :-/
---

when you hear it, note then exact time, done to the rough seconds even, then check your logs in event viewer
---

Rika_Furude posted...

when you hear it, note then exact time, done to the rough seconds even, then check your logs in event viewer

It's almost like deja vu around here sometimes... >_>

See post #10.
---

that'll teach me for not reading the topic :(
---

Never figured out what was causing it. :-/

But everything is running perfectly fine as far as I can tell. And it doesn't seem like whatever is causing it is using up resources on my CPU or RAM or anything. So I ended up just turning off the sounds altogether and that at least got rid of the chime.

Still...it always bothers me knowing something somewhere isn't working the way it's supposed to and just leaving it like that, even if it's not causing any actual problems. >_<
---

Tried finding out what the exclamation sound means and got
Exclamation - the sound that is played when you try to do something that is not supported by Windows.

No idea why that would keep playing for you.
---

Are you sure its not just emails coming in?

Pitlord_Special posted...

Are you sure its not just emails coming in?

Definitely not e-mails. I have 2 accounts set up on this computer, neither of which are actually tied into Windows, and neither of them received any e-mails last night at all. Let alone 25+ in the span of an hour and a half where I logged the times.

uwnim posted...

Tried finding out what the exclamation sound means and got
Exclamation - the sound that is played when you try to do something that is not supported by Windows.

No idea why that would keep playing for you.

Yeah, it's not exactly a very well-defined category of alerts is it? :-/

I just can't for the life of me think of why it would more than double the rate of it happening when I'm playing a game. It also continued to happen when I finished downloading and started playing Wildlands through the UPlay app instead of the other two games being through Steam.

Only thing I can really think of that makes any sense is that it must have something to do with the internet. So when I was playing the games there was more internet usage, hence more frequent chiming. But that wouldn't explain why the chimes slowed down when I wasn't playing the games but was just browsing the internet while downloading Wildlands. You'd think that would've been the point where the internet connection was getting the most traffic, no? O_o
---

No idea if it applies to your situation here, but sometimes when a motherboard is in the process of failing it will often lose connection to random onboard devices as the BGA chips (GPU, chipset, etc) heat up and cool down. You'll usually hear the USB device plugging/unplugging sound play at random as the connection is lost and reconnected. It's a real pain to test for this though since it can be a very intermittent thing. I've seen plenty of computers pass all hardware tests and then fail on subsequent tests, and then pass again.

Could be something else though.

The best way to test for this is to keep the Device Manager open and see if anything changes on it when the sound goes off.
---

Sounds like a driver issue
---

SpiralDrift posted...

No idea if it applies to your situation here, but sometimes when a motherboard is in the process of failing it will often lose connection to random onboard devices as the BGA chips (GPU, chipset, etc) heat up and cool down. You'll usually hear the USB device plugging/unplugging sound play at random as the connection is lost and reconnected. It's a real pain to test for this though since it can be a very intermittent thing. I've seen plenty of computers pass all hardware tests and then fail on subsequent tests, and then pass again.

Could be something else though.

The best way to test for this is to keep the Device Manager open and see if anything changes on it when the sound goes off.

Oh god I hope this isn't it. The thing is literally 4 days old at this point and it took almost a month from the time of ordering to the time it was on my doorstep. ;_; I do not want to have to send it back...

ClunkerSlim posted...

Facebook notifications?
Some app game notifications?

I don't have Facebook. And there weren't many game notifications happening. Besides, they all had little pop-ups in the corner of the screen while I was playing and used a different chime sound.

E32005 posted...

Sounds like a driver issue

That's a definite possibility. The company I bought it through was supposed to have installed everything and updated all the drivers, but I guess it's not much of a stretch that they might've missed one. And there has been two windows Action Center messages about requiring a restart to complete the installation of the SMBus Driver and the Logitech USB Device driver. Several restarts later and the notifications wouldn't go away despite them both working perfectly fine. Though now that I check, they seem to not have shown up this morning when I booted up. I guess I'll turn the sounds back on for a bit and see if it's still chiming or if maybe that was the issue and it's somehow fixed itself. O_o
---

Aristoph posted...

DarkDragon400 posted...

Try changing the notification sounds and see if the sound that plays changes.

And after doing this I've figured out that it's classified under the "Exclamation" in the sounds menu. Which doesn't terribly narrow it down very much, tbh, as it doesn't tell you what actually falls under the Exclamation category in terms of alerts. :-/

Not what I meant. There are certain events that use the "Exclamation" sound. Try changing the sound those events make until the sound that keep playing changes. Make sure to keep track of which sounds you're changing, of course.
---

I haven't read anything but if you're playing with a keyboard holding down certain keys make that noise you're talking about I know the arrow ones cause that to happen
---

Windows 10 is a mess

that's all you need to know

Me, I would always run a network adapter diagnosis. Get DNS jumper and find the fastest DNS (you are also seeing your outside network's ping times). 50% of the time network adapter diagnosis finds a problem and fixes it. I also start task moniter and start chrome browser and watch task manager processes, and the number of them. I also just go into hybernation mode instead of shutting down PC, I have a SD disk as a windows booster disk so all my settings are saved to it.
---

DarkDragon400 posted...

Aristoph posted...

DarkDragon400 posted...

Try changing the notification sounds and see if the sound that plays changes.

And after doing this I've figured out that it's classified under the "Exclamation" in the sounds menu. Which doesn't terribly narrow it down very much, tbh, as it doesn't tell you what actually falls under the Exclamation category in terms of alerts. :-/

Not what I meant. There are certain events that use the "Exclamation" sound. Try changing the sound those events make until the sound that keep playing changes. Make sure to keep track of which sounds you're changing, of course.

Then I'm not sure how to change the sound for individual events under the Exclamation category. Unless I didn't word it properly and there's confusion. If I right-click on the volume icon in the tray, and then click on "Sounds" it brings up the Sound window. In there, I have the Sound Scheme set to Windows Default. In the Program Events dialog box, it lists 3 major categories (Windows, File Explorer, and Windows Speech Recognition). Under the Windows category is listed the sub-category called "Exclamation", and when I click on Exclamation it says that the sound itself that's assigned to it is named "Windows Background". This same "Windows Background" sound file is also assigned to several other sub-categories.

So are you saying that there is a way to assign each individual event that falls under the "Exclamation" sub-category a unique sound that is not Windows Background? So that one individual event will play a different sound than the rest of the events that would normally call up whatever is assigned to Exclamation? Because if so, I'd love to know how to do that. I'd be able to find the culprit very easily (if a bit tedious) if that were the case.
---