When you want your PC to work silently, you switch Windows to a silent sound theme. But it still beeps at you for some things. Very irritating, especially when I’m trying to listen to music on headphones, to have an ear-shattering BEEP every time an email arrives or you dare to try and move the cursor beyond the end of the document in Wordpad. WhoTF decided it should beep for that anyway?

Solution 1: Double click on the volume control speaker icon. Options / Properties, and get it to display the PC Beep volume. Then mute the sucker.

But if there’s no sound devices on the PC, including a Virtual PC you’ve otherwise got the sound disabled on, you need to resort to other methods.

Solution 2: (Windows 2000 and later) net stop beep will stop the beeping for the current session.
sc config beep start= disabled will stop it permanently. Note the space after the equals sign.

(There are whackier ideas too, like recording silent WAV files to use for system events. And you could physically disconnect the speaker, if you have access to the hardware.)