The old laptop crashed immediately because of the song
Laptop models with older hard drives may crash when playing Janet Jackson’s song “Rhythm Nation”.
On August 16, Raymond Chen, Microsoft’s Chief Software Engineer, shared the story behind the special song. Around the year 2000, Windows Product Support received a message from a “major computer manufacturer” describing the song. Rhythm Nation Janet Jackson It can crash laptops running Windows XP released in 2001.
During the investigation, the Microsoft team repeatedly found that not only the products of this “big company”, but also other models of Windows laptops had similar problems. Even playing music from a laptop can interfere with a nearby laptop.
Why did the computer crash?
After several days of research, the Microsoft team found that the cause of the problem was not Windows XP, but the echo frequency of Janet Jackson’s song. “It turns out that there are natural resonant frequencies in the song. These frequencies affect the HDD, which was the very popular 5,400 rpm type at the time,” Chen said.
Especially when playing a song, sound waves with a natural frequency of 60 Hz are created. At 5400 rpm, the frequency of the hard disk oscillates and breaks the laptop. This phenomenon is scientifically known as vibrational resonance.
Then laptop companies solved the problem by adding a filtering device to remove the harmful frequencies from the hard drive when the rhythmic Nation-like sound came out of the computer. The exact number of affected devices was not recorded.
Following Chen’s post, another Microsoft developer, Larry Osterman, said he noticed that some PCs were having problems playing games. 101 monochrome mazes. The audio frequency emitted by the game may cause crashes when the device’s speaker is close to the hard drive.
Bao Lam (Consequences TNW)