How do I turn off Windows event sounds?

Yes, you can turn off sounds in Windows without turning off music.

This is a setting you can change in your Control Panel; see this previous article on how to open your Control Panel. If your Control Panel is displayed in Category View (the default in recent versions of Windows).

It will look something like this:

Double-click on "Sounds, Speech, and Audio Devices". You'll come to a new screen asking you to "Pick a task":

Click on "Change the sound scheme". A dialog box will open looking something like this:

The "Sound scheme" that is already listed, will probably be either blank (as in the picture above), or will say "Windows Default". Click that drop-down box and select "No Sounds" from the drop-down list:

At this point Windows may give you a scary-sounding warning saying that "Your previous scheme will be lost because you did not save it":

Despite the warning, this probably does not apply to you unless you've spent considerable effort customizing the sounds that play under Windows (and you're probably not in that category, if you came to this page looking for information about how to turn sounds off!). The one exception is if you're using someone else's computer and they've pimped it out with a lot of bells and whistles like playing the five-note theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind whenever new mail arrives. If you're using someone else's computer, you might want to ask them before turning all the sounds off.

Otherwise, just say "No" to saving your existing sound scheme, and the annoying clicks and dings from Windows will now be turned off, but music will still play through the computer's speaker system.

Bennett Haselton is a political and technology blogger who helps tell people how to bypass government filters in Iran.