27
NOV
2007
TOPICS Funny, Technology
Unlike CTRL+ALT+DEL, this is one of the features that was not made popular by Bill Gates.
Directly from support.microsoft.com:
During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play “Fur Elise” or “It’s a Small, Small World” seemingly at random. This is an 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. This is a design feature of a detection circuit and system BIOSes developed by Award/Unicore from 1997 on.
http://support.microsoft.com//default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;261186
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November 27th, 2007 at 11:51 am
That.. is incredible.
So, do you read Microsoft KB articles for fun?
November 27th, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Very interesting “feature”. Not the most intuitive way to tell the user there’s a hardware problem, though. Many users might just think their PC is haunted and throw it out. I think Joel Spolsky would disapprove.
If this feature has been in place since 1997, how is it the MS KB article is dated 2007, and how is it we’ve never heard of this feature before now? Are CPU fans and power supplies really that reliable, or is this BIOS feature buggy?