Microsoft Support: Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music (opens in new tab)

(support.microsoft.com)

141 pointsurbannomad14y ago34 comments

34 comments

Considering 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.

ppod14y 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..."

ry0ohki14y ago

Fur Elise is cool, but playing "It's a small world" when you already have a hardware problem is just evil.

brudgers14y ago

"It's a small world" hardly qualifies as classical music,either.

chris_j14y ago

The 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.

wladimir14y ago

Once, 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.

eli14y ago

At least it's distinctive. Pretty hard to Google "my computer beeped at me" and expect to find much.

s00pcan14y ago

I'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.

wilshire46114y ago

It isn't Fur Elise that is playing it is Little Prelude in C Minor.

jarin14y ago

Yet another instance where Macs are better (well, at least the old ones) ;)

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.

shaunkoh14y ago

Why not play a recording that actually said, "CPU fan failing, call tech support".

Splines14y ago

It'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.

StavrosK14y ago

In Greek, we call it "Για την Ελίζα".

zlapper14y ago

Because the music was in MIDI format, I guess.

rbanffy14y ago

MIDI 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.

georgieporgie14y ago

It 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.

hernan714y ago

A 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.

blantonl14y ago

Has anyone here ever come across this?

ianium14y ago

I 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.

derrida14y ago

Wow. I thought Microsoft were too uncool to include stuff like this in their code.

dazzawazza14y ago

It's in the bios so it would happen if you were running any OS. Evidence of MS coolness still eludes us.

nikcub14y ago

how 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_produc...

2 more replies

canop14y ago

You were right : "This is a design feature of a detection circuit and system BIOSes developed by Award/Unicore from 1997 on."

savramescu14y ago

So 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.

1 more reply

jblesage14y ago

I submitted this about 9 months ago...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1552067

nateberkopec14y ago

Oh, so THAT'S what that is! BRB, calling tech support.

sliverstorm14y ago

I think you meant

OH! Good thing I know how to fix this now, damn PC got Fur Elise stuck in m[NO CARRIER]

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