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I know this question is somehow skeptic but especially in old computers, if we muted the computer sound, I guess there will not be commands for issuing sounds and no loading of sound files, Doesn't this improve performance of the computer in general (even a little bit)?

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Disabling system sounds improves my performance on the computer, mainly because the sounds no longer annoy me. ;-> – Moab Jul 6 '11 at 13:45
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up vote 6 down vote

To me "muting the sound" implies that the sound files may still be played, but the volume is zero, so they're not heard.

In this case, there would be no performance advantage because the processor would still go through the process of loading files.

But even if the processor is spared the task of loading the files - the difference in performance would be very slight, and probably unmeasurable on all but the oldest hardware.

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If something does a lot of sound loading, then disk IO could actually be noticable. But yeah, they'd have to do a hell of a lot of loading for that to be significant. – Phoshi Jul 6 '11 at 9:48
That's a part of what I'm asking, does the computer really load the files and send them to the sound card and the sound is muted so it is not heard? or it knows that this is a sound-y operation and not initiate that file loading because of the mutation? – LordCover Jul 6 '11 at 9:52
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I think 'muting' really means reducing the volume to zero, but the files are still loaded. – pavium Jul 6 '11 at 10:03
There can be a difference between muting and zero volume. I have a USB headset that will still play sounds at zero volume on the Windows built in volume control (yes, really), but won't when it's set to mute. – Bob Mar 15 at 12:17
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up vote 3 down vote

The programs that play sounds will still load the files (if they don't detect the muted status, which 99 percent of applications will not), decode them (if they're coded, like MP3) and send them to the audio subsystem in Windows. What the audio subsystem does afterwards, I don't know. It might send them to the sound card with zero volume, but it might just as well trash everything if it's muted anyway.

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up vote 1 down vote

Assuming you mean to set Windows to not play any sounds then it will improve the performance - but only by a bit.

On a modern machine I'd expect it to be unnoticeable, but on an older machine you might be able to spot a difference - particularly if you were playing longer sounds.

However, if you mean to just mute the sound card then Windows will still play the sound - you won't hear anything and there'll be no performance improvement (even if it is so tiny as to be practically unmeasurable).

However, I wouldn't really worry about it.

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Yeah me too, I have a 2.4 GHz PC but It was a skeptical question. – LordCover Jul 6 '11 at 9:42
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up vote 0 down vote

I suggest you:

  1. Disable sound card.... and also select no sound theme in Windows.

  2. Also more advanced, you can delete startup sound file Or replace with emty file.

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