Sometime, you just don’t want to be bothered by the pesky alert noises from the applications you run. One such application that uses such annoying sounds is Yahoo Messenger and some of the other IM clients out there. Sometimes when I’m doing some audio editing, I need to shut Windows up so that the error dings and alerts won’t mess with my work. So how do you manage all of these?

In previous versions of Windows, you might just have to set the options of the individual applications to disable sounds. With Vista, you need not undertake such annoying tweaks because you can simply tweak the audio signals triggered by the different applications through the Sound Mixer.

You will see the active applications that trigger or use sounds with their individual volume sliders and mute buttons. Quite nifty and pretty handy if you’d ask me. So annoyed by Y!M sound? Just mute it out while still enjoying your MP3s playing in the background.