From the "Thank heavens for that" file. WE DO LISTEN about things you don't want to hear.

Before I went on holiday I wrote something for Technet newsletter saying that we planning to make the boot-up sound in Windows Vista a fixed thing. Now this was only at cold boot, not logon, not wake-from hibernate or sleep modes, so it shouldn't be THAT big a deal. 

 As luck would have it, the newsletter went out the day I returned from holiday and my mailbox was soom full of mail to reinforce my belief that it would cause a disportionate amount of customer annoyance. It ranged from "It's just wrong to have a sound I can't turn off " to "I run a recording studio where the PC is connected to 200 Watts of amplification" . There was plenty to pass on to Redmond.

The Vista team have just posted "Your collective voice truly made a difference in this matter, as we've incorporated a way for users to turn off the start-up sound".

I want to say a quick "thanks" to those folks who fed back on this. We parrot off "we always value your feedback" so often that it stops sounding sincere. But we do.  We are human, things we do can be improved and help identifying which things is welcome. 

 

Tagged as Microsoft Windows Vista (Windows Vista)