this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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That probably wasn't a virus.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2bs41z/til_that_if_your_bios_was_made_by_awardunicore/
Holy shit, TIL!
When I read it, it stirred a distant memory of hearing such a story before, so I knew that there was something behind it and looked it up.
Literally why would someone make that. That is completely indistinguishable as a signal.
I mean I guess you are supposed to take it to your computer repair shop and tell them it won't stop playing Für Elise, and the shop is supposed to recognise it as a failure of CPU fan signal. If it just beeped a few times on startup then people would ignore it, and if it beeped constantly then well maybe Für Elise is nicer.
Huh yeah that's MUCH better than throwing a post code and playing a beep during startup to signal something is wrong.
Sadly, many motherboards don't have POST code displays.
Hm. Well if the motherboard can play a song it can blast " Error" during startup to be infinitely more helpful.
I don't think those speakers are capable of voice. They can handle a few different beep tones and that's about it. The song was not like listening to Spotify, it was played using beep tones.
I had an Athlon motherboard with voice POST messages… one night I woke up to it saying “your CPU has a problem!” over and over and was freaked out until I was completely awake and figure out what was wrong.
It wasn’t high quality coming through the piezo speaker, but it was good enough.
I definitely remember short 2 or 3 second clips of relatively high quality music being played through our family's IBM XT's motherboard speaker at one point using a demo we got from a BBS or the Public Domain Software site in the mid-80s. It wasn't easy but some madman made a proof-of-concept that did it and it was incredible at the time.
Ohhhh right. Well its worth the <$1 of input costs.
That would be way more complex to have the motherboard play than a sequence of beeps at different frequencies. Especially at the time.
You could just about play speech using one bit output using pulse-width-modulation. But it was almost unrecognizable. And would take a lot of memory for the time.
It was usual to have different numbers of beeps for POST errors.
But this was an age when a PC would say "Keyboard error. Press any key to continue", so things were not thought out that well.
If your keyboard was actually working, you pressed a key. If it was not working, you went to get new keyboard. What is "not thought through" about that?
But you're not allowed to proceed in life until you've pressed any key!
Fair
"my shits fucked yo"
Would any of your tech-handicapped relatives actually pay it any attention, though?
Yes
Can we trade relatives?
Tip: be passive aggressive and sarcastic when helping them. It both teaches them the solution in a memorable way, makes them not want to get help from you again, AND makes them think twice before doing so.
No
I’m impressed that the computer was usable with the failed CPU fan.
Computers in 97 didn't need much in the way of cooling. A large passive heatsink was plenty for those CPUs. They're not the 300+ watt behemoths we have today.
I really remember heatsinks being a thing on overclocked systems around that time frame and then once we got to P4 cpus the chilling towers appeared those things were massive
The lower power 486s didn't even need a heatsink. The P3 was the first to take a heasink resembling what we have today, but damn did the P4s need some serious cooling.
It's kinda funny how we think the 100 watts of a desktop P4 was insane when now the TDP of a high end laptop CPU is more than that.
My Pentium 100 even says "Heatsink req'd"
It really isn't. Modern mobile cpus barely sip power.
PL2 on a 14900T is 106W
Edit: I'm an idiot, T series is low power socketed, not mobile. 14900HX has a TDP of 55W but boosts short term to 157W, which is still pretty ridiculous
My 11950H (and all other “full power” Intel mobile CPUs) have a PL1 of >100 watts (109 for mine), and mine a PL2 of 139 watts. This laptop is about an inch thick.
Nothing about this laptop sips power, I’ve gotten as bad as 30 minutes of battery life out of a 90 watt hour battery not playing games.
If you meant cell phones and tablets, that's mostly due to the different architecture. RISC processors are super energy efficient, which also makes them much cooler to run.
x86-64 is a CISC architecture, which tends to be much more power hungry. There are only a couple of very low power Celeron CPUs that work under 10W of TDP, while that's very common among phones' CPUs.
In many cases it's actually RISC under the hood and uses an interpreter to translate the CISC commands and run them in the most optimal manner on the silicon
ARM and RISC-V absolutely scale up to multi-hundred watt server CPUs quite easily. Just look at the Ampere systems you can rent from various VPSes for example
The big benefit that ARM and RISC-V have is they have no established backwards compatibility to keep carrying technical debt forwards. ARM versions their instruction sets and software has to be released for given versions of ARM cores, and RISC-V is simply too new to have any significant technical debt on the instruction set side.
Atom cores were notable for focusing the architecture on some instructions then other instructions would be a slog to execute, so they were really good at certain things and for desktop use (especially in the extremely budget machines they got shoved into) they were painful. Much like how eCores are now. They're very carefully architected for power efficiency, and do their jobs extremely well, but an all eCore CPU is a slog for desktop use in many cases
I helped set up a friend's "586" (about equivalent to a Pentium 1) and he had neglected to buy a heat sink or fan
A hammer was a sufficient heat sink for the time it took to set up windows
Super impressive since we used to play Quake 2 all day on it!
Reminds me of the Apple version of Karateka, which did something special if you inserted the floppy disk upside down.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/5/22564151/karateka-apple-ii-upside-down-easter-egg
Can't view this without cycling my VPN... We need a way to see reddit posts without visiting reddit. Is this a thing? Like... Piped for Reddit.
It explains that it means "fan failure".
And there was a link to a video of it happening.
The only other link to an MS support page did not work.