

Microsoft Support: Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music - urbannomad
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=261186

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BudVVeezer
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.

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ppod
"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..."

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ry0ohki
Fur Elise is cool, but playing "It's a small world" when you already have a
hardware problem is just evil.

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

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s00pcan
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
It isn't Fur Elise that is playing it is Little Prelude in C Minor.

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chris_j
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
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.

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jarin
Yet 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.

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

~~~
Splines
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
In Greek, we call it "Για την Ελίζα".

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hernan7
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.

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blantonl
Has anyone here ever come across this?

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ianium
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.

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

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

~~~
nikcub
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_eggs_in_Microsoft_products)

~~~
ajarmoniuk
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
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
Working slot machines? Please tell me more...

~~~
rubyrescue
visual 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.
:)

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

~~~
sliverstorm
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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jblesage
I submitted this about 9 months ago...

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

