Now I can't believe that someone hasn't suggested this on this website, but I'm unable to find it so I'll plough ahead...
Most motherboards have either a sequence of beeps, or in some cases a combination of lights, that tell you when there is a booting error. The internal speaker is normally used, or the on-board speaker is there is one, to convey the sequence of beeps.
For example, continuous long high and low beeps might mean a CPU error, several short beeps followed by a gap might mean that the graphics card is unplugged.
These beeps are arbitrary, and not common across different makes of motherboard. Also, they are not always in the manuals, and are often on the manufacturer's website - a problem when your PC wont boot.
My suggestion is that rather than using the speaker to convey a sequence of beeps, the speaker should give you a recorded message telling you what the problem is. A simple, low quality sample of "The graphics card is unplugged" would suffice. This would stop you having to root around looking for the answer.
Edit: To ensure that all users can understand the message, a version of each message would be recorded in all languages supported by the Bios. The Language chosen in the bios would indicate the spoken language. So that the bios was still updateable, the speech messages would be stored on a seperate chip.-- Danzarak, Oct 13 2003 Annoying talking motherboards http://www.asus.com...8/p4pe/overview.htmASUStek product page - P4PE [MikeHolio, Oct 04 2004] Asus's A7N8X Deluxe http://usa.asus.com...n8x-d/overview.htm#What MikeHolio said [Letsbuildafort, Oct 04 2004] There's no way this idea could ever work!~-- ywong, Oct 13 2003 Baked. My motherboard, an Asus P4PE, already has this annoying and disturbing feature built-in. I can't tell you how many times it's told me "system check CPU failure" in horribly accented English. They call it the ASUS Port Reporter.-- MikeHolio, Oct 13 2003 Ace... I did a google for this sort of thing, but had no luck.
Ah well, at least I'm on the right lines of things that are recently baked... :)-- Danzarak, Oct 13 2003 The ASUS A7x series of boards I have do this. You can even record your own messages.-- phoenix, Oct 13 2003 "I know you and Frank were planning to disconnect me. And I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen."-- Amos Kito, Oct 13 2003 Asus A7N8X Deluxe board will do that ... gets kind of annoying, that instead of the usual POST "beep" is says "Power-on Self Test competed - now booting to operating system" ... but for Asus it was a good call-- Letsbuildafort, Oct 13 2003 Thank's Rod.. that's exactly what I meant - it means that I'm not having insane ideas that will never work... they already do. It's a research issue I suppose.
I prefer Abit to ASUS I must say, so I've not heard one first hand...-- Danzarak, Oct 14 2003 random, halfbakery