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Does the BIOS beep come from the same sound hardware channel...as Windows 7 OS audio?

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No. Motherboards either have a small speaker on the motherboard or have pins on the motherboard that connect to a small speaker on the case to make the beep. It is independent of whatever audio controller is on the motherboard.

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Thanks, all, for answering this. I need a 15 reputation to be able to up all your answers. – user33666 Jul 15 '10 at 8:38
The BIOS is loud and clear. Anything after that from inside Windows 7 64bit, including the command window, is silent. I must have fried the audio controller. ThinkPad T60. – user33666 Jul 15 '10 at 8:51
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More than likely not. Typically motherboards have a simple internal speaker for error codes. Without knowing what exact hardware you have it would be impossible to know for sure.

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On some laptops beeps do come from same physical device, but it's not under that control of that device's driver, so if you disable beep, sound will work and if you disable sound, beep will work. On some earlier versions of windows, beep could be used as a sound device, but that feature hasn't been available for quite some time.

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Actually, Windows 7 (not sure about Windows Vista) uses the default speaker for beeps. You can try this out by opening a command prompt and typing in echo, a space, then Ctrl-G, then hitting Enter

If you were talking about the BIOS beep before Windows 7 loads, then yes, it comes from a PC speaker mounted on the inside of the case. Some computers do not have this speaker, so it is really annoying to try and diagnose hardware failures on these computers.

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My 64bit version doesn't. 64bit vista had beep completely disabled, can't guarantee for 32bit, but I think it doesn't either. Just to be sure, you can always start CMD and type crtl+g and after that enter. – AndrejaKo Jul 14 '10 at 19:42
The BIOS beep is different from Windows beeps. This question is about the BIOS beeps, which occurs prior to Windows even loading. – MDMarra Jul 14 '10 at 19:48
Hm... The question says Windows 7 OS audio, though. – Hello71 Jul 14 '10 at 19:56
@MarkM, yes but ^G uses system beep, not windows beep. – AndrejaKo Jul 14 '10 at 20:01
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