Bloop.. Beep.. Pling.. Plang. Vista, what are you trying to say boy?

Since I started running Vista late last week and now into day four of my week long venture of this OS, something I have been noticing.. Well hearing really... While I do have several programs that are running online at the moment, and I'm sure I have quelled the noises that they generate or at least set them to noises i recognize, Vista is every now and again still pinging, dinging and just generally making itself known to me even when I am away from the computer and the screen saver has kicked in. Now I'm not unfamiliar with the sounds a computer makes, but it seems that with the Vista operating system, something beeps and I look around the screen to see what might have caused it. Perhaps an alert box someplace or the like. after searching numerous windows and applications I happen to be running at the time, they all appear to be dormant like a sleeping volcano just waiting for it time to spurt a sound at me when I'm looking at my keys or away from the c0mputer. In comparison on my Mac side of the computer, if something dings there is some sort of notice as to what it was that might have caused it. Usually.... Not saying that's never happened on the Mac side where something makes a noise and have no idea what it was but it is very rare. Its frustrating to have an application to sit there and ding at you and then shows no notification of what it was that apparently wanted your attention in the first place. Some might chalk that up to programing but when you don't have any programs running and it does that, well I chalk that up to a REALLY bad deployment of an OS.