I wish my computer made more sounds and other things

[browsing]

After looking at the streamer Vinesauce play the game Frog Days, it makes me realize how quiet my user experience is on computers  . I don't like that  .

What I would like to see is a more entertainment focused user experience. Think back to the days of desktop pets  . More stuff in that vein. But also I wish my computer made more bleeps and bloop noises that are fun to listen to. I know I can manually set some of these things but then the issue is trying to find sounds that work  .

Finally, it is interesting that there are ubiquitous design choises, windows are flat, can move them around, you have a task bar, usually regardless of the operating system. These are designed purely for efficiency and productivity. But what I would love to see is a more "console-like" experience, 3D menus, animations, etc.

What do you think? 

[Dan Q]

Not the kinds of sounds you're thinking of, but...

Long ago, I had one of these:

If you're thinking "yeah, grandpa; I know what that is - it's just an internal 3.5" floppy disk drive"... you're half-right. Because that's actually an LS-120 "Superdrive".

The LS-120 was a high-capacity magneto-optical storage medium - like MiniDisc! - whose disks had a massive 120MB capacity (compared to the 1.44MB you could get onto a regular 3.5" floppy). I got mine - plus one disk - from a friend, who'd in turn got it at a commputer auction. I installed it into my PC in the second half of the 1990s and... barely used it.

I mean: I used it as my 3.5" drive - because it could read and write "regular" disks too - and I used my (sole!) LS-120 disk as backup storage (it worked pretty well as a backup: my total hard drive capacity when I first got the drive was, I think, 145MB!). But I didn't really use it. But I kept it and even installed it into subsequent computers all the way through until around 2007! Why?

Because of the sounds it made! In order to position the LS-120 disks at the precise spot they needed to be for the highly-accurate magnetic heads to work, it used a stepper motor to pull in and to eject disks, rather than the more conventional "push and it clunks" eject buttons you might have seen on regular 3.5" disk drives. The purrs and whirrs of that disk drive, plus its happy little zip and beep as the computer booted up, made the thing entirely worthwhile.

(I also had a very old hard drive - a similar model is pictured below - which I kept long beyond its useful life mostly because of the cool sounds it made my computer make!)

[TheFrugalGamer]

You might search through Diskmaster to see if you can find sounds that would be suitable for your PC. They're all taken from the collections on Archive.org, so there are probably quite a few desktop theme collections to search through:
https://discmaster.textfiles.com/

You can specify what types of files you're looking for, so for instance, looking for audio files with the name "minimize" brings up these:
https://discmaster.textfiles.com/search?q=minimize&family=audio

===========================================

And now for story time! This is a story I read a long time ago on the internet somewhere, probably in an old forum, that I still think about from time to time. Back in the day, it was pretty common for users to change their sounds around to whatever we wanted, and along with the "95 Plus!" extra themes that came with Windows 95, you could surf around the internet and download packs that had different themes--usually movies, cartoons, etc.

This one particular user was a sports fan and really liked a certain basketball team (I've never followed this field, so I don't remember anything about which one it was). So naturally, they themed their desktop around said team, and even decided to set their shut down sound clip to a recording of their theme song, for funsies. This user then proceeded to never shut their computer down again, as you did back in the day, because they didn't particularly care about preventative maintenance.

Naturally, after some time the PC went a little bonkers and needed maintenance, so they put in a call to whatever tech support they had a relationship with. The tech on the phone, as a natural first step, asked the user to restart the PC and see if that fixed the problem. Queue the theme song playing loudly while the shut down process began. Apparently, though, the shut down process will refuse to complete until the sound clip has finished playing, and this theme song was a full 3:something minutes long, which meant that they were stuck on the phone while listening to a bombastic fight song playing through their speakers for more than three very slow minutes.

User was struck with waves of embarassment while saying, "I am so, so sorry" to the tech on the phone, who was trying unsuccessfully to not laugh on the other end.

[Notabot]

On Steam u can find a programm called Bongo Cat but it has no sounds ... it tracks ur clicks on the mouse and keyboard and every 30 minutes u get an random item that u can give ur little cat on the taskbar. Its for free and personally i really like it :D