Microsoft Support: Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music

BudVVeezer 15 years ago |

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.

ppod 15 years 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..."

ry0ohki 15 years ago |

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

brudgers 15 years ago | |

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

chris_j 15 years 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.

wladimir 15 years 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.

eli 15 years ago | |

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

s00pcan 15 years 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.

wilshire461 15 years ago | |

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

jarin 15 years 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.

shaunkoh 15 years ago |

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

Splines 15 years 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.

StavrosK 15 years ago | | |

In Greek, we call it "Για την Ελίζα".

zlapper 15 years ago | |

Because the music was in MIDI format, I guess.

rbanffy 15 years 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.

georgieporgie 15 years 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.

hernan7 15 years 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.

blantonl 15 years ago |

Has anyone here ever come across this?

ianium 15 years 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.

derrida 15 years ago |

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

dazzawazza 15 years ago | |

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

nikcub 15 years 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...

ajarmoniuk 15 years ago | | |

Not 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 15 years ago | | |

no 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 15 years ago | | |

Working slot machines? Please tell me more...

nikcub 15 years ago | | |

ye hence my past tense because I couldn't recall one from more recent products. that sounds like a reasonable reason why they don't do it anymore

thepumpkin1979 15 years ago | | |

Excel takes 154MB in disk... that's why!

canop 15 years ago | |

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

savramescu 15 years 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.

_ea1k 15 years ago | | |

"During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play "Fur Elise" or "It's a Small, Small World" seemingly at random. "

jblesage 15 years ago |

I submitted this about 9 months ago...

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

nateberkopec 15 years ago |

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

sliverstorm 15 years 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]