Error and correction beeps

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

Curioser and curioser. The reason I was getting no beeps at all,
anywhere, was that I had the cable from the speaker to the header pins on
the mobo backwards. (Anyone interested in such hardware minutiae, see the
end of this post for the whole megillah.) Once I got that right side up,
I got a startup beep, and even a beep from Xy over some erroneous setting
in Startup.int or settings.dfl (which I'm leaving for now, just to track
beeping), but no spelling error or correction beeps (I know autoreplace
was on, because when I typed "recieve" deliberately, it corrected it).
Closed down Xy, went to a DOS prompt, and ran beeper.bat. Not a peep.
Shut down Windows and restarted to the DOS prompt, ran beeper.bat, and
got a nice, long beep.
	Now it cannot be just Win98 2d ed, because Emery said he had beeps under
that. I suspect a combination of 2d ed. and more up-to-date hardware,
most probably the ACPI we were discussing here a while back. To prove it,
 I should turn ACPI off (if Gates' garbage will let me), but I dassen't
do that until I find my driver CD (in case the partition table gets lost
again), which has gone missing.
Patricia
Supplement: mini cables and header pins.
There's a perfect snake pit of thin, twisted, multicolored cables running
between various points on a case and the front of a motherboard
(hereafter, mobo); the correct way to connect them is one of the least
documented matters in computerdom. In my case 1) the dealer--bad cess to
him--had never connected the speaker at all; 2) the docs merely specified
what the pinout of the header pins was. I managed to guess correctly
which of the two elements of the cable, black and red, was speaker and
which was power, but had no clue to which side of each cable (the
connectors are square in cross-section, with a slight nick, revealing a
smidgen of underlying copper, on one side of each) should face which way.
When I took the speaker out and put it in an older machine--which had
been properly assembled by the dealer--I observed the position of the
copper spots closely. As the specs of the two mobos seemed to be the same
on this, despite the difference in their vintages, and as the speaker
yielded sounds when inserted just the way the original one in the old
machine was, I replicated that position when restoring it to the new
machine--whereupon I got a startup beep.