Weirdest tech issues you've seen

[Toggle]

Whenever I get into a Skype call these days, I get these moments when my friends start receiving static from my end and I have literally done nothing on my PC. It happened today when I was simply sitting at my computer, without anything displayed on the screens, and my friend basically couldn't hear anything but static from my side. He couldn't even hear me talking. I've tried everything I could think of and it still happens.

[NeatSquidYT]

Turning off and back on again seems to fix basically every issue. It's so weird

[MeDownYou]

Whenever I get into a Skype call these days, I get these moments when my friends start receiving static from my end and I have literally done nothing on my PC. It happened today when I was simply sitting at my computer, without anything displayed on the screens, and my friend basically couldn't hear anything but static from my side. He couldn't even hear me talking. I've tried everything I could think of and it still happens.

I'd say the solution is to do the following:

 

1. cover it in magnets

2. wrap it in wet towels

3. submerge it in your bathtub and fill with bathtub with ice

 

*note steps should be done with the side panel OPEN

[Guest DollarPC]

I forgot to turn on the power switch on a Corsair RM 80+ Gold 1000w PSU then i sent it in for RMA

[asim1999]

I forgot to turn on the power switch on a Corsair RM 80+ Gold 1000w PSU then i sent it in for RMA

LOL, and i thought once that my RM wasnt working due to it being dead silent lol. 

[Pugs501]

After 3 days of troubleshooting my new mobo, didn't plug in the ATX 12v Power Connector.

[Guest DollarPC]

After 3 days of troubleshooting my new mobo, didn't plug in the ATX 12v Power Connector.

Just wow *LAUGHS* Just wow *LAUGHS*  :lol:

[gergy008]

when one of the computers in my house is plugged in it slows powerline to a crawl

Cheap PSU?

[Toggle]

I'd say the solution is to do the following:

 

1. cover it in magnets

2. wrap it in wet towels

3. submerge it in your bathtub and fill with bathtub with ice

 

*note steps should be done with the side panel OPEN

Hmmm... This may actually work. Just kidding, I'm gonna invest in a soundcard and see if that works.

[Jimbillroo Digital]

This is proof of how unpredictable computers can be.

[jefftheworld]

Original story reminds me of a classic tale of a similar nature:

 

 

A Story About ‘Magic'

Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no one knows who).

You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words ‘magic' and ‘more magic'. The switch was in the ‘more magic' position.

I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.

It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.

Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the ‘more magic’ position before reviving the computer.

A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the ‘more magic’ position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.

The computer promptly crashed.

This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.

We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic.

I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on ‘more magic’.

1994: Another explanation of this story has since been offered. Note that the switch body was metal. Suppose that the non-connected side of the switch was connected to the switch body (usually the body is connected to a separate earth lug, but there are exceptions). The body is connected to the computer case, which is, presumably, grounded. Now the circuit ground within the machine isn't necessarily at the same potential as the case ground, so flipping the switch connected the circuit ground to the case ground, causing a voltage drop/jump which reset the machine. This was probably discovered by someone who found out the hard way that there was a potential difference between the two, and who then wired in the switch as a joke.

 

[PeskyEscky]

My PC makes the sounds of plugging a USB device in just randomly... I could be sat watching a film, playing a game or not even touching it, and it will make the sound. So annoying. Peripherals have been replaced and it still does it!

[PeskyEscky]

Also had 4 sticks of identical RAM die in 4 seperate PCs in the space of 2 weeks, the upgrades had been done 2 years previous, must have been a bad batch!

[Guest]

Sometimes after hibernating my PC, it randomly turns itself back on. It gets quite annoying.

[KemoKa]

Not a tech issue, more of a tech should-be-an-issue-but-surprisingly-isn't.  My laptop has decided that it is made of asbestos, because I accidentally put it in the fleece-lined laptop compartment in my bag while it was still running. Now, for those of you who aren't aware, I have an Trinity A10 in my laptop, and Trinities run HOT. But alas, my computer just will not die. I warm myself up at night with it plugged in and benchmarking, and it will happily do that all night running at 95°C in an environment where most computers would just suffocate and die. No throttling or anything, it just doesn't care.

[techswede]

With my old speakers for my pc i was getting some strange russian chatter when the pc was turned off.

Consistent volume no matter how much i turned the volume wheel in any direction. And loud enough to disturb my sleep..

[UnderwearThief]

I did boot it with the case closed and HDD latched, that's actually how I found the problem. It just wouldn't turn on anymore, so I opened it up and then this all happened.

Maybe there is a bad SATA cable and by latching it in, it causes it to bend at a weird/bad angle and cause a bad connection?

[EarthboundHero]

Whenever I screw my screws into my PSU, if the screws touch the case, it makes whining noises in my headphones. So annoying.

[Just Monika]

1. PC takes a solid 30 seconds to boot up from power button press to desktop, despite having the OS (Windows 7 x64 Ultimate) on an 840 Pro and all "fast boot" settings enabled. I only use Sleep mode so this doesn't bother me very much.

2. My Nexus 7 (2012) tablet is only capable of charging from 20% up to ~60% over a period of 8 hours being plugged into a wall socket (Math: 5%/hour charging). Once in a blue moon, I wake up with it charged to 100%.

[fringie]

My PC likes to turn itself back on from hibernation/sleep all the time, no clue why.

 

At my old job my managers macbook pro was producing a noise of 3 short beeps randomly when in use so I looked up the error code (or w.e. it's called) online it turns out it's the RAM. I ran memtest (booted from disc, not through the os) and it fails so I'm like yh it's the RAM. So, we buy new RAM and the issue still persists. I try some 'solutions' I found online with no luck and decide it must be the 'logicboard' (aka motherboard..). The manager is like just take all the data off n sell it. So when I finally get round to formatting the PC (I formatted the drive with the safe delete because confidential data) it turns out with macs you can only download mavericks from the store via an apple device when I used a windows workstation (apple, making things more difficult than they should be -,-). So after using another macbook I make a bootable usb and install mavericks on the macbook pro and the issue is gone.

 

Safe to say he had 0 confidence in me after that. Apple making windows users look like idiots since 1976.

[asim1999]

My PC likes to turn itself back on from hibernation/sleep all the time, no clue why.

 

At my old job my managers macbook pro was producing a noise of 3 short beeps randomly when in use so I looked up the error code (or w.e. it's called) online it turns out it's the RAM. I ran memtest (booted from disc, not through the os) and it fails so I'm like yh it's the RAM. So, we buy new RAM and the issue still persists. I try some 'solutions' I found online with no luck and decide it must be the 'logicboard' (aka motherboard..). The manager is like just take all the data off n sell it. So when I finally get round to formatting the PC (I formatted the drive with the safe delete because confidential data) it turns out with macs you can only download mavericks from the store via an apple device when I used a windows workstation (apple, making things more difficult than they should be -,-). So after using another macbook I make a bootable usb and install mavericks on the macbook pro and the issue is gone.

 

Safe to say he had 0 confidence in me after that. Apple making windows users look like idiots since 1976.

Turn off Wake on Lan, it worked for me, now my PC doesnt turn itself on

[ofr057]

for some reason games made by valve always go back to a tiny resolution. I set them back to the right size, and i open it up the next time and its small again

[McMurderMonkey]

Sometimes when typing a message in Skype, before I have sent it, in the chat log a hand emoticon appears as if a new message, and makes a butterfly like animation, before it and it's surrounding box and timestamp dissappearing. No one else sees this, and it happens fairly often with any contact.

[BrokenOnion]

When i changed monitors, my pc wouldnt send signal to monitor and my keyboard wouldnt light up. Then i read somewhere that if you unplug it and then hold the power button for 30s, then plug it back it and turn it on it will work. It did and i still have no idea why.

[fringie]

Turn off Wake on Lan, it worked for me, now my PC doesnt turn itself on

Thank you .