Why is my G5 honking at me???!!

Question

Why is my G5 honking at me???!!

Hi - my G5 is working fine without any problems, but has been making some strange tones for no apparent reason. The noise sounds like a cross between a goose and a car horn and is a fairly short blast. It 'honked' once when I tried to reply to a message whilst in Safari and then did a series of 3 or 4 honks when opening Adobe inDesign, but no error messages appeared and everything just continued as normal. It's really puzzling me, I don't have any webpages or other applications etc. open that could be making strange noises in the background and it definitely came from inside the CPU!

I've backed up my recent projects just in case it's about to conk out, but does anyone know what's happening here??

Powermac G5 Dual, Mac OS X (10.5)

Posted on May 27, 2008 3:20 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Claire Clark1 Author

Level 1

9 points

May 27, 2008 3:32 PM in response to japamac

Hi - I've gone right through the list of sound effects and it's totally different to any of them unfortunately! The nearest one is 'funk' but it's much deeper than that and more like a lorry/ juggernaut style horn noise.

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Answer 2

japamac

Level 7

24,400 points

May 27, 2008 3:28 PM in response to Claire Clark1

Hi-

Welcome to Discussions!

Open System Preferences/Sounds/Sound Effects, and see if the selected alert sound is the one that you are hearing.

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Answer 3

japamac

Level 7

24,400 points

May 27, 2008 3:45 PM in response to Claire Clark1

Any third party Mail (or other) software open when the sound occurs?
Other places a sound might be lurking is (hard drive)/Library/Audio, System/Library/Sounds, User/Library/Audio, and User/Library/Sounds

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Answer 4

May 27, 2008 4:19 PM in response to japamac

Hi - I've looked through the hard drive for sounds and nothing matches it. The only apps open were Safari with no other windows open (so no Flash ads which can sometimes be the cause of strange noises), Microsoft Messenger (that I wasn't signed into), Apple Mail and IPNetSentryX, which isn't the sort of program to have sound effects.

The other thing that concerns me is when I was trying the other sounds out just now, the system playback volume for these was higher/ louder than the volume of the sound I heard, which is making me think it was coming from somewhere else inside the computer ...if that's possible?

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Answer 5

adsfushi72

Level 4

1,115 points

May 27, 2008 4:30 PM in response to Claire Clark1

Try muting the volume. Do you still hear the sound?

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Answer 6

May 28, 2008 7:58 AM in response to adsfushi72

Hi, I'll try doing this if it starts up again but thankfully all has been quiet today! One thing I did discover yesterday was that my dear husband had rather absent-mindedly placed a pack of anti-static wipes right next to the CPU (which I think has killed one of my macs in the past!) - I haven't heard the noise since removing these so you never know!!!

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Answer 7

adsfushi72

Level 4

1,115 points

May 28, 2008 8:26 AM in response to Claire Clark1

That's great! I'm glad to hear your issue was resolved!

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