I know this is a little strange to be posting on my site about, but it's something someone else may find useful in the future.  How do you stop a VMWare Workstation from sending through "beeps" to the PC speaker/soundcard?  Well...  look here and find out.

In my line of work, I do alot with VMWare virtual machines.  Often I'm listening to music with headphones on, working away.  However that bliss is often disturbed when a VMWare Workstation does a "beep", sending an ear drum shattering wave of sound into my head.  On my laptop, the PC speaker beeps also come through the soundcard, and are somehow also wired into the headphone jack. 

Disabling the soundcard or audio from the VMWare settings has no effect on this. The beep is sent directly from the virtual machine to the hardware, and subsequently into my delicate ears.

So how do you stop this from happening?  Its fairly easy.

You need to add the line mks.noBeep="TRUE" to the preferences.ini for VMWare

In Windows XP, the preferences.ini is located here:

 %userprofile%\Application Data\VMware\preferences.ini

In Windows Vista, the preferences.ini is located here:

%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\VMware\preferences.ini

Now you can work in peace, without having your ear drums ripped out.