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Microsoft Support: Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music
- blantonl 16y agoHas anyone here ever come across this?
- ianium 16y agoI had two old computers that would play the first 2.5 notes of Fur Elise every time they were power cycled, before the fan was completely spun up. I only figured out what it was after holding the fan one day and recognising the tune.
- derrida 16y agoWow. I thought Microsoft were too uncool to include stuff like this in their code.
- canop 16y agoYou were right : "This is a design feature of a detection circuit and system BIOSes developed by Award/Unicore from 1997 on."
- savramescu 16y agoSo Microsoft actually suppressed this on Normal Mode, but not in Safe Mode. At least there's information about it somewhere, because I wouldn't expect it if I encountered it.
- jsight 16y ago"During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play "Fur Elise" or "It's a Small, Small World" seemingly at random. "
- dazzawazza 16y agoIt's in the bios so it would happen if you were running any OS. Evidence of MS coolness still eludes us.
- nikcub 16y agohow about the flight simulator easter egg in Excel? that was cool microsoft always included cool easter eggs in their products http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_eggs_in_Microsoft_products http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_eggs_in_Microsoft_produc...
- ajarmoniuk 16y agoNot anymore. After the lawsuit about including the web browser with the system they are no longer allowed to include undocumented features in their software. (citation needed)
- rubyrescue 16y agono it wasn't then. It was around 2000 or so and more related to (as i remember) two things - securing government and enterprise contracts and public perception related to viruses and security. I was there as an employee in Visual Studio and distinctly remember the admonition from Brian Valentine that there were to be NO easter eggs in Win2K and on. They couldn't credibly say that they were in control of the security of the platform with people hiding doom levels in Excel and (in the case of Visual Studio) working slot machines...
- ajarmoniuk 16y agoWorking slot machines? Please tell me more...
- rubyrescue 16y agovisual studio 6.0 - help | about, then ctrl-shift while double clicking the visual studio logo. the code name for the project was... vegas EDIT: wow this isn't even on wikipedia. i feel like i'm revealing a MS secret. :)
- chris_j 16y agoThe summary indicates that the music is played by the BIOS to indicate that the CPU fan is failing. I would have thought that it would be better to just play a warning beep; having music play randomly is a bit weird.
- wladimir 16y agoOnce, a PC scared the shit out of me because the motherboard started talking at bootup (was a feature of Asus motherboards). But at least it was recognisable as an error message, just having music play randomly would be even more weird.
- eli 16y agoAt least it's distinctive. Pretty hard to Google "my computer beeped at me" and expect to find much.
- ry0ohki 16y agoFur Elise is cool, but playing "It's a small world" when you already have a hardware problem is just evil.
- brudgers 16y ago"It's a small world" hardly qualifies as classical music,either.
- ppod 16y ago"indication sent to the PC speaker from the computer's BIOS that the CPU fan is failing or has failed, or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance" Should have made it play "Daisy, Daisy, tell me your answer do..."
- jarin 16y agoYet another instance where Macs are better (well, at least the old ones) ;) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g1-iPRw-5M&t=0m25s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g1-iPRw-5M&t=0m25s I had a Centris 660AV and I used to play that crash sound over and over, it was hilarious.
- BudVVeezer 16y agoConsidering this was developed in 1997, this is actually an ingenious way to get "Joe Q User" to call tech support. They boot up their computer, and music randomly starts to play, they get scared, shut down and call tech support. It certainly won't work every time, but considering that this has to happen all within BIOS while the CPU is melting, it's a reasonably good idea.
- jblesage 16y agoI submitted this about 9 months ago... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1552067 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1552067
- nateberkopec 16y agoOh, so THAT'S what that is! BRB, calling tech support.
- sliverstorm 16y agoI think you meant OH! Good thing I know how to fix this now, damn PC got Fur Elise stuck in m[NO CARRIER]
- shaunkoh 16y agoWhy not play a recording that actually said, "CPU fan failing, call tech support".
- zlapper 16y agoBecause the music was in MIDI format, I guess.
- rbanffy 16y agoMIDI would be overkill. A pitch-duration table along with the code to vibrate the speaker at the right frequency for the right amount of time would be far simpler.
- georgieporgie 16y agoIt played over the piezoelectric motherboard speaker, the one that usually emits only a beep, and is intended to play a given frequency for a given duration. It's possible to use pulse width modulation to make mediocre digitized sound come out, but it is quite complex and would use a lot of BIOS space. A simple sequence of notes, however, is compact and easy.
- Splines 16y agoIt's the same reason why we still have beep codes and LED status indicators on our motherboards: You don't need to localize Fur Elise.
- StavrosK 16y agoIn Greek, we call it "Για την Ελίζα".
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- hernan7 16y agoA throwback to simpler times. Back then many datacenters were just a room where you had a couple of desks with some PC's on them. Maybe a Sun pizza box or 2. And people would be there to listen to the machine play "Fur Elise" when the power supply failed. In today's datacenters where you have lines and lines of racks receding into infinity, and where you need to use hearing protection whenever you need to get in for 5 minutes to power-cycle some stubborn switch, I don't see a solution involving "Fur Elise" being too useful.
- s00pcan 16y agoI'm playing Portal 2 right now and just heard the line "Oh no. He's playing classical music." Fur Elise is playing. And it means exactly this! I would have never got the joke otherwise. But I suspect that was the reason this was posted.
- wilshire461 16y agoIt isn't Fur Elise that is playing it is Little Prelude in C Minor.