Turn off system speaker sounds in guest VMs

This is a tip that regularly gets shared around the office when people are developing on VMs - how do you turn off the system speaker? In particular, WinForms developers are driven almost to tears by the incessant beeping when they're developing/testing something with messagebox dialogs. An additional problem is that you might want to have certain VMs still using the system speaker, so you can't turn it off in the BIOS of the host machine. Here's what you do: 1. In your guest VM, open a command window 2. Type the following: "net stop beep" 3. Enjoy the silence To reverse this, simply type: "net start beep". Yes, the system speaker is a service, no, it's not in services.msc. Work that one out.