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General discussion

Background office? noise on my laptop

by corissascloset May 30, 2007 4:42AM PDT

I have a Dell Inspiron 710m laptop. About a half-hour ago, I was reading the news on MSN I had only two news content windows open, and MSN mesenger(but was not chatting, in fact no contacts even online.) All of a sudden, noise started coming from my speakers, it sounded like what bakground noise in an office, or from a news station would sound like. Neither of the pages I had up had any kind of playable content on it, just normal adds, no sound. I've searched the internet for the last half hour, but didn't find anything like what happened.(Only people picking up radio stations.) What could this have been? And do I need to be worried about the speakers going out?

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3 Posts
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Probably an ad
by jackson dougless May 30, 2007 4:55AM PDT

I don't use the official MSN messenger for chatting with people on MSN, so I don't know for sure if it has ads in it like AOL and Yahoo's do, but in any case, what you experienced was almost certainly the result of a flash based ad, complete with obnoxious sound effects.

This is but one of many reasons why AdBlock Plus for Mozilla Firefox is an indispensable tool for me. I can nuke Flash ads, and other annoying Flash content, so that I can browse unmolested.

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That's what I thought at first
by corissascloset May 30, 2007 5:06AM PDT

But, after the noise stopped, I checked both pages I had open and none of the ads made sense compared to the noise. Could the ad have played the wrong audio? Both ads were for cleaning products. This was different, paper shuffling, people mumbling for about 20-30 seconds. And, both pages had been opened for a few moments, I'm on broadband, so ads would have already loaded, I would think. Also, my direct dvr is on and is tuned to CNN, but the T.V. is off. Could I have picked up something from that? Sorry to be a bother, but this really bothers me!

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Ads often rotate
by jackson dougless May 30, 2007 6:21AM PDT

It's not uncommon for there to be an automatic refresh of ads, so that every 30 seconds to a minute, a new ad is loaded. All without any kind of user interaction required.

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