Microsoft Support: Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music

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.

"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"<p>Should have made it play "Daisy, Daisy, tell me your answer do..."

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

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.

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.

Yet another instance where Macs are better (well, at least the old ones) ;)<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g1-iPRw-5M&#38;t=0m25s" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g1-iPRw-5M&#38;t=0m25s</a><p>I had a Centris 660AV and I used to play that crash sound over and over, it was hilarious.

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

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.<p>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.

Has anyone here ever come across this?

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

I submitted this about 9 months ago...<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1552067" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1552067</a>

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