This is like the tech equivalent of consulting the village shaman or wisewoman for some serious disease.
Pumps and motors do mess with electronics though.
True, true… The techpriest vibes I’m getting out of this is because it’s a minor to non-existant improvement that might or might not be placebo is achieved by seemingly outlandish cure. As if the angry spirit of the fridge needed appeasing so that it stops haunting your mouse.
The more consumer friendly and complex this stuff gets the further away from the raw metal those the users see as “magicians” are.
It used to be that the “magicians” were the Electronics Geeks (and the OP’s post and most comments here are a basically on “magic” that has to do with Electronics), but nowadays most “magicians” capable of explaining and dealing with the “unexplainable” are Software Techies.
Reminds me of the story of a company whose internet connection would cut out intermittently and they couldn’t figure out why. Details hazy but the gist is here.
One day they have a tech come in to investigate the problem. He goes downstairs to where the router is, and everything’s fine.
Seemingly the moment he goes to leave, the connection goes off. Panic stations! He goes back to the router and the connection is re-establishing. OK. All tests fine. He goes away again. It goes off again. What. Tech aura is real!
Nope. Turns out that when he went downstairs, he used the stairs. When he was coming back up he was lazy and used the lift.
The lift motor had been causing enough EM noise to knock out the connection whenever it was used.
I’ve also read another of someone with connection issues with their server. Server was unreachable, but every time someone went into the server room to debug the problem everything was working fine. After a while they noticed the switch with all the cables was plugged to the same outlet as the lightbulb, an outlet which was motion activated, so it only worked while someone was in there.
Some decades ago when I was still an engineering student, my team had to present an electronic assignment. The damn circuit didn’t work, no matter what I did. So I decided to go ask the teacher for advice. I walked away a couple of meters, when my teammates told me that the circuit finally started working. As soon as I went back, it failed again. We soon determined that it failed only when I was near it. My teammates presented the assignment while I was at the other side of the lab. We passed the assignment, and sure enough, when I approached again to pick up my things, the damn circuit stopped working again.
https://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html
A Story About ‘Magic’
Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab’s PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab’s hardware hackers (no one knows who).
You don’t touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words ‘magic’ and ‘more magic’. The switch was in the ‘more magic’ position.
I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it’s a basic fact of electricity that a switch can’t do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.
It was clear that this switch was someone’s idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.
Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the ‘more magic’ position before reviving the computer.
A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the ‘more magic’ position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn’t affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.
The computer promptly crashed.
This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.
We still don’t know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we’ll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic.
I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I’m silly, but I usually keep it set on ‘more magic’.
1994: Another explanation of this story has since been offered. Note that the switch body was metal. Suppose that the non-connected side of the switch was connected to the switch body (usually the body is connected to a separate earth lug, but there are exceptions). The body is connected to the computer case, which is, presumably, grounded. Now the circuit ground within the machine isn’t necessarily at the same potential as the case ground, so flipping the switch connected the circuit ground to the case ground, causing a voltage drop/jump which reset the machine. This was probably discovered by someone who found out the hard way that there was a potential difference between the two, and who then wired in the switch as a joke.
USB-3 over USB-A upstream sockets often put out 2.4GHz noise which will interfere with many wireless dongles, including those commonly used for wireless mice and keyboards. The solution is to get a USB2 extension cable or hub for your dongles.
Intel knew this would be a problem, but ignored it.
In the core2duo era I overclocked a cpu to 2.4GHz, and It killed the wifi in the computer similarly, it took a while to figure out why it was happening, and connect the 2 seemingly unrelated thing.
Microwave ovens also work in the 2.4 GHz range, at one flat my torrents basically stopped when my neighbor used their oven.
Same. Had wireless in my parents house many years ago, and the microwave oven caused wireless internet timeouts.
