PC wakes from sleep when changing clothes | Hacker News Reader

PC wakes from sleep when changing clothes

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Office chair interference theorists, assemble:

- My PC plays a weird sound whenever I stand up from the desk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30950402

- AriedK's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32631096

- Sitting on gas lift chairs can generate an EMI spike which blanks your monitor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22036652

- Bug: Office chair turns off monitors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21978004

Don't forget the curious case of the 500 mile email: https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles

That one is great. We still get real-world examples of similar issues where people migrate applications and they suddenly don't work anymore. After 10 such attempts the common denominator was distance, turns out someone set the network latency limit to 1 ms and when you migrate an application to a different datacenter the network isn't sub-1ms anymore.

Or the my car has issues based on the flavor ice cream I purchase.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/

In college I was told about a case with punchcard mainframes where it would crash around the same time in the process of running a long complicated multi step calculation. The place had under floor wires and tiled flooring. One was lose and a worker feeding data in would walk across it at the same point in the process, generating an emi spike.

"Sitting on gas lift chairs can generate an EMI spike which blanks your monitor" I'm not sure how exotic this is but I always had the issue that my monitor has infrequent and unexplainable blankings, I guessed it's just the cable, power brick or monitor but this is a much more fun thing to blame ;)

I mean I specifically had “My screen goes blank exactly when one of my colleagues stands up” so I imagine it must be reasonably common (it is almost certainly the cable or cheap unshielded laptop dongles to blame at the root)

Chair triggers on oscilloscopes are a real thing.

Magnets in wallets, belts, shirts can also trigger the magnetic switches in laptops to power on or off.

My wife and I both work from home. I work in a spare room and she works from the living room. Our desks are separated by the spare room wall. For a long time, every time she got up from her chair my monitor would black out for about a second.

I think the issue is that she sits on a blanket, so when she gets up it generates static electricity. Though, she has a similar monitor and I actually have to monitors side by side. I'm not sure why just my monitor was blacking out. It also does that when I turn on a small fan under my monitor.

it's more likely the piston in her chair. Try replacing your video cable, or putting a "ferrite bead" on it.

Our TV regularly blanks when I get up from my living room couch. Even seen it happen once when our (large) dog was sprawled across the same chair and slid off. Just measured it, and there's 2.2 meters between the TV and the couch.

I have two monitors that have always blanked whenever I ... move too much?

This information may just settle YEARS of idle speculation and curiosity on my part. Hooray!

Ditto, I've been waiting patiently for my tower GPU to finally succumb for a few years now.

The second and third link give me a 403

Reminds me of the classic "every time I flush the toilet my computer reboots".

(The toilet caused a water pressure drop that made the well pump kick in, causing a power drop, rebooting the computer.)

My son was scared as hell because he was hearing voices in his bedroom late at night. I used his bedroom as my office during the day while WFH during the pandemic. The speaker picked up a radio station and played it at low volume when I hibernated the computer for the day.

I would sh*t myself

Reminds me of jump scare internet pranks.

When I was a teen I had a guitar amp that would, if plugged into an effects pedal with certain settings, pick up a Spanish-language radio station. No clue how!

Same happened with simply a cable plugged, I think the jack cable acted as an antenna.

The length of the cable would be a multiple of the right frequency or something like that, it'd catch a random AM radio

AM radio is such a simple modulation scheme that even a piece of grass can be used to demodulate it, with enough power. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9UO9tn4MpI

Well, this article [0] shows a guitar FX pedal design that can be used as a radio receiver. Maybe you could get a shortwave radio signal?

[0] https://acidbourbon.wordpress.com/2021/04/11/a-74xx-defined-...

Mine picked up Cuban AM radio on cloudy nights. Never figured out how to tune it, though.

(The stations, not the guitar)

One of the transistors in the early stages of the amplifier (or effects pedal) acted as a detector for the AM signal probably being picked up by a cable that worked as an antenna. It worked essentially as a untuned crystal radio followed by a powerful audio amplifier. The problem usually is a result of bad grounding or screening.

IIRC there was a time when radio signals were so strong, and bedframe coils so thick, that you could hear radio broadcasts through them.

Every so often I hear the faintest music when on/near my bed. First I thought maybe the neighbor (single family home) was playing loud music, but nothing when I went outside.

Then I figured it was audio/music hallucinations - but it only happens next to/on the bed, it's really faint but enough for me to hear whole songs. Once when I was really paying attention, during the pause between songs I thought I heard speaking/gibberish - not able to recognize words like the songs. Now I mostly just try not think I'm entering some psychosis state. I just dont know where its coming from

Countless years ago I had a boombox that, set to the right radio frequency, could listen in on nearby cordless phone calls.

I just looked it up out of curiosity, and the early phones used 1.7 MHz, right at the top of the AM range. That seems like it was asking for trouble.

In about 1996 I was doing the same thing with radio shack walkie talkies.

Some neighbor was on their phone all night, every night.

I had this too when I was young! Fortunately I was old enough to experiment and play with the sound, it was some sort of Spanish speaking program. Crazy stuff.

My old computer speakers picked up passing truck radio, endless entertainment and sometimes chills

Back in the early 2000's I'd get a 3 second heads up that my cellphone was about to ring when my speakers would make a 'buzzity buz, buzzity buz' right before a call came though.

That phenomenon still puzzles me. Why wouldn't it ring right away?

Probably some kind of handshake?

It's a pretty complex distributed system, where voice just one application carried over a generic network, and at start it's not even 100% sure what radio cell the handset is in.

https://yatebts.com/documentation/concepts/gsm-functionaliti...

Here is an interesting historical note on the subject: http://www.gsmhistory.com/chapter/chapter-22-unintended-cons...

The same effect was used to make stickers that lit up when you were receiving a call, with no battery needed!

https://hackaday.com/2022/02/26/heres-how-those-battery-free...

Had a similar issue in a band I was in, an electric guitar was picking up radio stations and playing them through the amplifier. For weeks I thought I was going insane until I figured out the cause.

I fought for a year with a similar issue: when getting up from my chair, sometimes my monitor lost the image for a second.

Turned out to be a SecretLab's particular weave accumulating a lot of static and discharging through the chair's feet when getting up because the base then made contact with the frame, generating a proper EMP disrupting the Displayport signal in my cable.

Seems like you're not the first to find that!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32631017

In our offices, I could rub my shoes on the carpet and ALL monitors 7+ would blackout for 1-2 seconds but only if I had my headphones connected.

I used to get mysterious lockups on my personal PC. Turns out I had a habit of touching the case with my leg, and when enough static built up on my chair, the zap from my leg would crash it.

The thing is still going, knock on wood!

A lot of DIY PC cases are almost certainly trash in regards to EMI. One of the reasons for all the scraping interlocking tabs on OEM PCs isn't just that they're cheap to make, but also to ensure a good connection between panels - OEM PCs have to pass EMI tests, DIY PC cases don't.

And that's before considering that most DIY PC cases nowadays, for some unexplainable reason, replace a whole side with transparent acrylic or glass.

It's very explainable: they want their cases to look cool and there's a market for that.

Also annoying if you don't care about blikenlights but do want a large, well made, high airflow case (big fans can spin slowly and be quiet).

They all seem to come with the glass side, PC is on the floor so I mostly live with it but still limits a lot of options.

Same with all the RGB on everything.

Some of us just want a fast computer, we don't really care what it looks like when it's running.

  > Also annoying if you don't care about blikenlights
  > but do want a large, well made, high airflow case

I wanted the same thing, and found the Fractal Meshify series to be a good fit. They can be configured with an opaque metal side panel, and have great airflow.

Meshify 2 Compact (ATX): https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/meshify/meshif...

Meshify 2 (E-ATX): https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/meshify/meshif...

I have been using 4u server chassis for my last few builds, great airflow, built well, lots of space, and not designed for a 12 year old, they are pretty great.

The only problem is that it really illustrates how desktop class motherboards are 90 degrees out of phase with regards to airflow.

I wonder how the non-DIY gaming PCs are exempt from this, tbh...

Only if the wood is properly earthed!

Electromagnetic pulse pulse

Thank you

I ran into that one for a while, and I read that newer DP cables’ standard has better shielding to prevent it. I got a newer cable and the issue went away, ymmv

I have the exact same issue with the same chair manufacturer.

My Windows PC randomly wakes from sleep because the mouse moves like 1/2000 DPI in some direction because of air movements or some heavy truck driving by nearby my house.

Razer mouse, in case it matters.

I think Microsoft could save a whole lot of energy usage globally by pushing a more sensible algorithm with an update.

If it's wireless flip the switch underneath the mouse to power it off.

That doesn't scale. You need to make it frictionless to the end user.

(And I'm using a wired mouse since I hate changing batteries.)

Pardon my confusion but…

…what? Is there a laugh being had that’s going over my head? I’m still kinda waking up

Most people are lazy. A software solution is going to be more effective than a wetware one.

And those that aren't lazy will not automatically learn about what they "should do".

Nevermind that it's just stupid to tell people what to manually do when it's possible to automate it via software.

In case anyone else has this issue, at least it’s pretty easy to turn off:

Launch Device Manager.

Go to Mice and other pointing devices.

If you’re using a Bluetooth mouse, go to Human Interface Devices.

Right-click on your mouse and select Properties.

Select the Power Management tab.

Find the option: Allow this device to wake the computer. Uncheck it.

(Thanks, I just did that. It worked.)

This demonstrates that it's in Microsoft's power to save a whole lot of electric power usage globally by pushing a software update.

I have never seen this happening, with many machines and different mice. Maybe it only happens with specific mice? Anyway, want I want to say is that the power usage across the world due to this misfeature is maybe not quite as dramatic as it may appear.

I's a high-DPI "gaming" mouse. I use it because it has lots of programmable buttons.

Gaming seems like quite a big thing with Windows users these days though and they seem to want high-DPI mice, so I do think it could actually be a sizeable thing outside of large office environments.

Sure, but those kinds of updates are usually the kind that hackernews complains about. "Microsoft pushes mandatory, OPT-OUT windows update that prevents mouse from waking up computer!"

Then later, in typical internet fashion.

"alt right angered as Trump slams Bidens mouse moving policy claiming freedom of mouse movement is more important than saving our planet from imminent assured death due to global warming"

ObXKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/

did it work for Bluetooth mouse? I thought that wakeup from sleep works only for wired mice

Or just flip the mouse over when you walk away.

That could work if you only care about your own electricity usage. How are you going to get the other several billions of Windows users to do the same? Maybe a software update makes more sense?

I do believe there was a game which had an easter egg based on this. While the game controls were keyboard-based, it detected the erratic mouse moves to display something like "Don't whack your table!".

Now I wonder if mouse movement could be used as a side channel to hear sounds in a room... NSA have probably done it already.

Or Mordechai Guri, the Israeli dude who specializes in air gap exploits.

The problem with that solution is most people want their PC to wake up when they wiggle the mouse.

he didnt' say it shouldn't wake when it wiggles, he said they change the sensitivity required to wake it.

It turns out it's actually pretty easy to distinguish "wiggle the mouse" from "a truck just drove by nearby and triggered a one pixel movement". Microsoft should have quite a few employees that could figure this out.

It is probably hard to do while the computer is asleep.

As I wrote in another comment; it was possible to disable wake from sleep from within Windows for that particular mouse; that was promising.

I don't know if it's possible to execute logic on mouse movements in the Windows sleep power state. Either way, I feel it's something MSFT should spend some time on, given the current situation.

If there is code running in that low power state, it's likely firmware on a microcontroller somewhere inside the motherboard chipset. Microsoft probably can't do anything to fix that, other than make more robust mouse wakeup a requirement for branding future products as "made for windows".

Suspend isn't even usable at all on my desktop when running Linux. The AMD GPU doesn't come back up properly 3 out of 4 times, and then any userspace processes that were using any graphics APIs (such as the desktop environment) are borked. Fixing that would probably save me 1kWh per day.

In my experience, I can't even get monitors to power off reliably, and I spend hours and hours fiddling with that sort of thing trying to debug it. Anything power-save related is a mess.

If that's the case, at least they could make change the default of allowing wake-by-mouse-movement via a software update, as demonstrated by my experiment just now.

They could, but a lot of folks (anecdotally) do want their computer to wake on mouse movement. Maybe it could be tied to power management mode as a compromise.

I remember a computer I had 15 years ago waking up on mouse movement, and it was great. My last couple desktops /might/ wake up on a mouse click, if they go into suspend at all on Linux. I assume the general regression in suspend in Linux is due to Windows mandating non-standards based power saving modes in the last decade.

listening for clicking might be a better choice:

1. mouse doesn't have 'actively listen' for mouse movement - exceptions: ball-mouse 2. unintentional-clicking is much more rare

There's a big difference between "wiggling the mouse", and having a non-zero reading from the mouse. With sufficient sensitivity, a breeze or vibration can cause the latter, but a wake-algorithm should be able to distinguish the two.

Makes me wonder if there’s a huge power surge during late night earthquakes due to moving mice…

I wish the mouse itself could filter out these movements and refuse to send a wake signal unless the magnitude exceeded a minimum threshold.

I think this is exactly what my Logitech M510 does. When the mouse goes to “sleep” after being idle for some time, bumping it very slightly doesn’t seem to do anything; you have to move it about a quarter inch or more for it to wake up. This effectively prevents minor bumps from waking up my PC.

Apple too. I have a USB mouse and it's virtually impossible to put my Macbook Pro to sleep. I've resorted to unplugging its power supply (when the lid's closed it won't wake up if it's not plugged in). But you would have thought this was trivial to fix.

Apple solved this by having the mouse charge port on the bottom. So if the mouse is changing it’s unlikely to trigger as its upside down.

However if a fly goes past.

This comment makes no sense.

However if a fly goes past.

I believe it should be: "However, if a fly goes past, it can get in the way of the laser (or whatever the mouse uses) and trigger mouse movement."

Okay. Now please explain "Apple solved this by having the mouse charge port on the bottom."

The mouse won’t randomly move on the table and trigger the sensor, because Apple’s horrible mouse has to be charged upside down, looking like a dead beetle. I hate that mouse.

I should have put an ellipsis at the end of my fly comment.

So every time you're away from the desk, you put Apple's horrible mouse upside down to charge it and thus this problem is solved?

Yeah, I know I'm probably being overly anal here, but, come on. :)

This is how you charge it. It really is horrible. I love my Mac’s but not this mouse.

That sounds like a mouse issue, there shouldn't be enough jitter for that to happen. Common reasons would be a dirty sensor or maybe surface incompatibility.

My computer wakes up randomly in the night, I've always assumed it was due to the mouse moving a pixel from random vibration of my desk.

And, side note, would it be too much to ask that after a billion dev-hours effort in to the most popular consumer OS on earth, that it could figure out that a 1-pixel movement at 3:28 AM does not mean I want my display to light up and stay on for a full 60 seconds? And while we're at it, why is the only way to send Windows to sleep (one of the most common things I do with a hotkey) a four-key combination (win+x,u,s)?

Win+L always put it to sleep instantly for me. Might be a setting somewhere to go to sleep when locking?

That’s probably due to the “System unattended sleep timeout” being set to zero.

I believe that's log out, I'm looking for sleep/hibernate.

It's lock, for the record.

In Device Manager you can configure any USB device to not wake the computer (“Allow This Device to Wake the Computer”). I usually do this for mice.

> why is the only way to send Windows to sleep a four-key combination (win+x,u,s)

Using OpenShell, the slightly shorter Win-Right-Return works for me. Some keyboards used to have a dedicated off/sleep/suspend key. You can map any shortcut you like using AutoHotKey, or you can bind a global keyboard shortcut to a batch file via a file shortcut in the start menu (Ctrl+Alt+something), or by pinning it to the task bar (Win-n).

I know it can be worked around, it's just mystifying that it needs to be.

This is #2 on my "what the hell, microsoft" list, right after the way the Teams join meeting? taskbar popup obscures the Teams join meeting button.

Clearly they need to flip the switch to More magic.

For those unfamiliar with the reference:

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

Lots of fun war stories in this one, including [spoilers] magnetic bracelets making laptops think they're closed, monitors going off when you stand up due to static discharge from the chair's gas cylinder, and being next to the elevator.

And less fun ones, like the story that some American soldiers supposedly made Vietnamese women dressed in nylon stockings (to create static) walk well ahead of them on patrols to set off mines ahead of them, killing the women. Dunno if it's true but 'twas said.

Sounds like war crimes.

Sounds like made up nonsense.

Anybody wearing anything would set off anti personnel mines. Or was this static supposed to setting of anti tank mines?

Anti-tank mines aren't a concern for people though, unless you happen to be in/around a tank.

After installing Microsoft flow on my laptop I had the same occurrence where it would randomly start in my bag.

Used powercfg to troubleshoot and saw the problem was with Microsoft flow and so I disabled it

My Windows laptop use to wake from sleep because of postponed Windows updates. I took me some time to realize what's the cause; it sucked for me because I would put my laptop to sleep and then I would go to sleep but freaking Windows would wake me up from sleep. We had hard time going to sleep together at the same time.

Does it shutdown afterwards?

I’ve had a recurring issue where I put the computer to sleep in the evening and in the morning I have to boot it from shutdown.

>Does it shutdown afterwards?

No it doesn't shutdown, it wakes from sleep and it stays like that. Then I have to install Windows updates and restart it in order for updates to be applied. At least it taught me not to postpone Windows updates.

>I’ve had a recurring issue where I put the computer to sleep in the evening and in the morning I have to boot it from shutdown.

Maybe your computer has some power issues or it might be operating system? And if it is laptop check your battery life because when laptop is in sleep mode battery drains as well but slower than when laptop is awake. All in all check power and battery(if laptop).

My computer started rebooting when I went to the next room for a drink of water.

Turned out there was a loose floorboard and a short in the power supply.

The motion of standing up was enough to trigger the short.

I have a similar weird behavior where if I push in or out my chair from under my computer desk, my USB devices would disconnect and reconnect. My wild guess is that my secretlabs chair has some sort of magnet that’s causing it.

Are you always in the chair? Then, perhaps you’re the magnet.

Makes me think of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32631017

Someone else in the comments of this post has the same issue and they think it’s static from the weave of the material. (I lost track of the comment, sorry for not linking it)

I had a very simple problem of overheating CPU which was a source of consternation in my four-person household. I was working office hours during the day, and my girlfriend would use my home-built 486 PC for art and Internet access during the day. It was summer in San Jose. Girlfriend began to complain how unreliable my machine was, and I thought she was certainly daft, because it never ever crashed on me while I was using it intensively.

I continued to discredit her experience until we moved out, at which point I opened the PC's case to discover that the CPU fan had become dislodged and wasn't effective for cooling the toasty little 486DX100, which was surely catastrophic in Silicon Valley's summer heat, and so I was finally able to accept girlfriend's testimony about how unreliable the thing was!

Fast forward about 20 years; my father complained that his laptop locked up constantly, and I told him to get a nice cooling pad for it because he literally held it in his lap while using it. He took my advice and using it on the cooling pad eliminated the heat lockups, even without running the fans it included.

I had a similar issue where my computer would sometimes wake from sleep when I entered the room, or even exit. Some times it even woke up when I wasn’t even home. This was quite annoying as you can imagine.

It turned out that in my case the issue was that my connected mouse, a fancy super sensitive gaming mouse, somehow picked up some movement ( possibly resonance) when I walked heavily, closed the door, or something else made vibrations in the house.

When I realized this, after a short internal rant about mouse input being a default wake up mechanism in windows, I was able to disable this feature and not worry about the computer randomly turning on anymore.

M2 MBP wakes itself enough to show the battery meter all the time when an external mouse is connected. I have to unplug the mouse to stop it bleeping and blooping every 5 to 30 seconds throughout the night.

Mouse is a Logitech "gaming" mouse.

I recommend enabling and using hibernate.

insta-edit: That said, I can confirm that while some hibernated devices require using the power button to wake, others will continue to monitor input devices. So your mileage may vary.

From my experience, mouse needs to click AND move to wake from hibernate, while keyboard input does nothing

FWIW my PC will wake from keyboard input while hibernating but not mouse.

My wife's M1 Macbook Air is powered by USB-C from a Dell monitor. When the laptop suspends after idle, after a moment the monitor goes into standby, which partially(?) wakes up the laptop and makes it ding, which wakes up the monitor. After about 30 seconds of idle, the laptop suspends again (/goes back into deeper sleep), and after a moment the monitor goes back into standby, which partially wakes up the laptop and makes it ding, which ...

A few winters ago, I had walked across my floor, and unplugged something. I discharged some static into the screw that holds the outlet's faceplate, and my nearby desktop PC woke up. It wasn't plugged into that outlet, but it must be on the same circuit. I've haven't been able to reproduce.

If you have unexplained waking of your Windows PC check the wake on lan and/or power management properties of the network card. I had this problem and I swear some other IOT network device was sending a WOL magic packet to my PC.

This past week there was a thunderstorm, fried my desktop. Didn't think that was still a thing. Reading some other comments about computer weirdness: my suggestion is get a good UPS or surge protector.

Old story – stuck printer unstuck by closing a curtain:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22159811

My mental image after reading the title: sleep-walking police constable wakes up while he was changing clothes. Thought it'd be an interesting read, but there I was.

I had a printer that would do some sort of cleaning thing (sounded like paper feed) whenever I plugged in something to wall power

(Hum, yess, get more close to the camera...)

Last winter this used to happen to me when changing bedsheets.

My keyboard light goes off and on if I toggle my desk fan.

1. Disconnect your optical mouse

Buy yourself some cotton clothes.

ESD?

Yes.

Pretty interesting stories in that thread like the magnetic bracelet stuff.

This is a tangent and I’m sure others will see me as being oversensitive but I’ve always found it distasteful that the subreddit has master race in its name. I mean there are real people who have suffered serious consequence because of racism. Just my thoughts.

spoken like a true dirty console peasant

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P0dXtOVi2yo&t=58s

Glad to see someone consider it. Black person here (I'm just one, mind you, not speaking for everyone). While there are other shifts in tech language that I'm glad we made, I personally am pretty cool with this one.

I think it's because anyone with a brain knows that the concept of an actual "Master Race" is so hilariously stupid and ridiculous that this serves to, among other things, make fun of that concept as well -- given that being a "PC person" is at heart nothing at all like "identity," one can switch to this or that side at will.

It’s a custom PC, they’re lucky it wakes from sleep at all.

Custom built PCs are overall more efficient, cost effective, and reliable than anything prebuilt due to their nature. But it does require a general understanding of its parts. Perhaps you are lacking some understanding of custom builds, or it's anecdotal data? Either way that does not represent the entire subsection of computing.

> more efficient, cost effective, and reliable than anything prebuilt due to their nature

Absolutely untrue, and I’ve run the numbers to prove it. Prebuilt PCs have lower TCO because they extensively test configurations and have aggressive pricing around support contracts. Every broken pc costs them! Some vendors are better than others, as well.

Now, if we’re talking about gaming PCs, the numbers are a little different there. It makes sense to roll your own for that. But for most people, building their own pc yields nothing but the entertainment of building their own pc.

Out of interest, when do you have the cost of the rebuild written off in your calculations - many PC building enthusiasts enjoy a "Ship of Theseus" experience with their equipment; replacing parts piecemeal as and when they deem it necessary.

With the prebuild OEMs their unifying warranty is indeed a plus, but it becomes a curse when it's finished - it is frequently not possible to replace failed parts on these systems at reasonable expense, due to customised model-specific parts (non-standard motherboard shapes, non-ATX power supplies, weird CPU Cooler mounting hardware) - in the gaming world this is alive and well today in Dell's Alienware and own brand gaming PCs, and in the workstation world, basically anything Dual Socket is frequently super custom.

The custom build may have more utility after one of it's standardised components fails out of warranty, as this standardisation allows for a choice of replacement (either in matters of cost or performance). If the prebuild fails out of warranty you may have some eWaste on your hands if a non standardised component fails.

People can buy cases with glass covers on their sides—I have one—and I do wonder, could they ever sell a complete computer system with these case, due to ESD/RF regulations.. Is it a loophole selling computer cases that could never (conjecturing here) satisfy radio emission tests with a running PC inside them, but as they never sell those as systems, it's fine, and then the user ends up building that very system themselves?

Many big name brand prebuild vendors sell plastic or glass sided gaming PCs - Here's one HP example: https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/omen-by-hp-45l-gaming-desk...

Shows my research ;).

But, still, have such glass-walled been tested for ESD/RF, if they are not sold as systems? Or are those transparent parts made of some RF-blocking material?

Surely a vendor such as HP would have the paperwork to show that their cases are tested with their motherboards, but a small system builder company (e.g. PC component seller that can also assemble the system) probably would not have done such testing..

My wife had an entirely plastic computer case. They’re definitely a thing.

They will have a conductive spray on the inside or an internal shield if they aren't some uncertified Alibaba product.

This is a good point to bring up. I believe that spread spectrum clocking and DC-balanced line coding schemes on differential buses have allowed the rules to be bent somewhat. However there is still an EMC issue present. It would be nice to have a metallized film or plated mesh to reduce the problem caused by glass and plastic. Old equipment used to have copper fingers on all seams and I don't see that as often anymore either.

i am pretty sure that legally any case that is sold with the intention to build a computer has to comply with emission regulations.

Up until about 10 years ago I would have agreed with you. I've been building my own computers since the 90s and I've bought about $100k worth of various computers for companies over the years with more on the horizon. My first computer was an AMD K6-2 but my dad got me into computers with a custom 486-DX.

Lets look at some PCs I've built. An AMD FX-9590 with dual 570HD GPUs in SLI. That's 700w right there. And it was impossible to keep cool, sounded like a vacuum cleaner, and felt like a space heater when you walked by. Not cost effective or efficient. Motherboard failure, but not before one of the 570s quit.

I then had a first gen Ryzen. I had so many HDDs that I had to have dual PSU's for a total of 1,850w, but not redundant like most servers are. That eventually failed due to motherboard failure. Also lots of drive failures. Way more than an OEM box. And when they failed I had to take the system offline and tear it all apart. Modern servers have hot swappable HDDs and even PSUs... so you can replace these parts without tools and without bringing the server offline.

Now lets look at a Dell R700 series server. Dual, redundant PSU's, ECC memory, redundant systems everywhere, remote management that consumer boards just can't compete with, fit and finish is perfect, drivers just work, and if it doesn't you can call someone and they will make you whole again without "troubleshooting first". When a PSU in a server fails, the server sends you an email. When the server needs a hard reboot, you can reboot it from the BMC even if the OS is panicking. There is a little screen on the front that changes colors when there is a problem, and there are color coded POST error codes.

You usually hear the argument "build your own" from hobbyists and gamers, and I do fit into that category typing this on a full tower Ryzen with a RAID 5 array for all my games. However, the broad statement of " Custom built PCs are overall more efficient, cost effective, and reliable" is simply not true. It doesn't make sense for (most) IT Departments to make, build, or custom order PCs for pretty much any reason. Even when I managed a factory network, the engineering machines were Dell Precision Workstations and they rarely ever had problems. If they were using 10x custom gaming computers I guarantee there would have been problems all the time. Engineers aren't gamers, and most aren't "custom PC" people. The tolerance for problems is very, very low. Time is money. You do a lot of your own troubleshooting that people at work doing their everyday jobs aren't going to be willing or able to do on their own.

The IT Deparment would rather a PC with 9,000 CPU marks and 2 support tickets than a machine with 12,000 CPU marks and 25 support tickets.

Your anecdotes do not a trend make. It also sounds like maybe your strengths lie in a direction other than building custom PCs.

You do realise that you can get server parts for a custom build? That is what I run for home use, it’s the most reliable machine I have personally owned.

And that even those workstations you think are reliable can and do have problems (I have first hand experience of that), like all computers. It’s the response time and contracts that I wanted to problems that I used to look for when buying workstations and that doesn’t always help when it comes to firmware issues.

There are plenty of data centres and companies that are running what you call custom builds. Look at Hetzner, backblaze, or even bigger companies that role their own.

$100k is a drop in the ocean for experience, that is like a typical week purchasing for some, and wouldn’t even cover the cost of some machines I have used.

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