Silence Your Startup Sounds!

You may remember how awful my experiences have been with machine boot up sounds. I am at Tech Ed this week and since I want to open up my laptop in many of the sessions, I really need to get the startup noises of my laptop to shut the heck up.

For my MacBook Pro, this is a 2 step process because there are 2 operating systems at play when using BootCamp.

1. Silence Windows
   This is easy enough. Just go to the sounds applet and uncheck the “Play Windows Startup Sound” checkbox.
2. Silence the Mac
   The Mac plays a startup sound even when I am booting into Windows. Aargh! And stopping this is not so easy.

Silencing the Mac

This one is yet another example of Apple trading functionality for simplicity. There is no out-of-the-box way to do this in OSX. Download this Preference Pane add-in for OSX and install it. Then you can launch it and mute the startup sound.