Robert Scoble has written an article in the wake of initial negative feedback on Vista’s having a non-disableable sound that plays on startup. One of the reasons given:
Volume control in a Windows machine is a wild west. A mess. The startup sound is designed to help you calibrate or fix something that got out of wack when you startup your machine. Let’s say you muted your machine, and you don’t hear your startup sound, you know you aren’t ready to listen to stuff. The Xbox has a hard-wired startup sound. There is one way to mute it: to turn down the speakers that are connected to your Xbox. Same will be true for Windows Vista.
As someone who occasionally goes through phases of wanting his desktop (wallpaper, icons, themes, sounds) to look pretty, I can definitely appreciate the effort Microsoft is apparently going through to improve the user experience under Vista (even if the hardware requirements to experience their efforts are far mightier than what I really need these days..).
However, I think that a mandatory startup sound is not the best idea in the world. I can understand the reasoning, but having worked in an office where many people don’t disable the sound on their machines, the idea of starting the day / starting the week with the Vista sound being played over and over and over and… is just maddening.
This is behavior that really ought to be customizable. If you want to standardize the treatment of sound at startup, how about defaulting to mute-at-startup and a minimalist sound scheme?