"klinnng"

I kept hearing this subtle “klinnnng” sound at random intervals, with nothing seemingly happening in my computer. This made me alert, since it sounded like some background process was on to something, and in the worst case I had become 0wn3d/trojanized.

So after consulting with NASA and the British scientists, I figured out that this was actually how my Windows Live Messenger was configured — when a contact comes online, it plays a sound, but doesn’t show a popup. Funny thing is, I never touched the sound and alert options for quite a long time, so some recent upgrade/installation must have made its own tweaks there. I previously had “no sound, no popup” for “contact online” events and it was fine, but now it started playing a sound. So had to disable that again. With Skype, some people have been sometimes victimized by the same things, since you can configure the visual notifications and sounds separately.

So the next time you hear a klonk, first go through the settings of all your programs before going OMG OMG I AM TEH PWNED