Comment by markstos
7 months ago
I once had a desktop computer that had great uptime, but started to consistently crash when I got up and left the room to get a drink of water.
Turns out it was old building with loose floorboards. The vibrational force of standing up was enough to short out a failing power supply. As long as I sat my desk, it was fine.
But I had a co-worker who had a worse problem with getting up to get a drink of water. Once while she was kitchen, an eight foot steel lighting ballast came loose from the ceiling and felt right onto her chair.That what-if memory still haunts me.
> The vibrational force of standing up was enough to short out a failing power supply
Or, was it?
https://superuser.com/questions/1406140/monitor-screen-that-...
(not disclaiming that it wasn't, but that "chair piston causes EM surge" had me driven crazy for the longest time til I was able to pinpoint the cause)
I saw this in an office while working on an embedded project where our dev boards had no EM shielding.
Standing up from the chair was enough to cause it to crash.
That reminds me of one. I had a PC that would fail to boot the first time every day. Second and subsequent times were fine, until the next day.
When it stopped happening in the spring, and started again in the fall, it became obvious -- my apartment was too cold. The heat from the first failed boot sufficiently heated up the system to boot the second time.
Canadian winter for you, I guess.