Oh yeah: The predecessor to the computer we owned at the time was one we bought secondhand from a coworker; he had actually assembled it himself. This would have been around 2000 or so.
We brought it home, set it up, and started using it - and it would completely crash after a couple minutes. That got worse and worse.
He took it back home to try to troubleshoot - and it worked fine. This happened several times. We began to joke that our house had bad feng shui or something. He replaced the hard drive just to be sure.
We brought it home, and for some reason, set it up on the floor (it was a tower-style) and it seemed to be doing just fine.
Then we put it back on top of the desk - and it crashed again.
We finally realized that it was proximity to the monitor (CRT; the predecessor to that flatscreen mentioned above) that triggered the issue. Evidently the monitor was giving off enough RF interference, and the homegrown computer was not well shielded. When the computer was on the floor, it wasn’t an issue.
When we replaced the monitor with the LCD one, the computer worked fine.
So yeah, feng shui wasn’t really all that bad a theory! May not meet the scientific explanation but effectively the problem WAS where the damn thing was placed.
I don’t know if we’ve had the weirdest computer problems, but we’ve certainly had the funniest ones!
The latest behavior we’re having trouble with is that I’ve got 3 computers and 1 desk. I built what is effectively a “rack system” using Metro-style shelving, and had set them all up through a KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) switch so I only needed one keyboard and mouse.
All was going well, until the one work computer decided it didn’t wanna play. When I switched back to it, sometimes it would decide that it was no longer willing to respond to the USB ports - thus, no keyboard and no mouse. Plugging them directly into the computer didn’t help - the only fix was a forced reboot. This happened every week or so, then every couple of days, and last week when it hit 2-3 times a day I had to solve the issue.
The solutions appeared to be
- Use a USB 2.0 hub between the work computer and the KVM (didn’t work)
- Power the KVM off and on again (didn’t work)
- Invest in a very $$$ KVM that does something called Dynamic Device Mapping, where the computers don’t know they’ve been disconnected (these start at 250 bucks. Nope)
- Have a lot of different keyboards cluttering up the desktop.
Note that all 3 computers are Windows 10; 2 of them (including the troublemaker) the professional / enterprise / whatever version.
I wound up leaving the problematic computer connected to the monitor via the KVM, and just connecting a separate keyboard / mouse directly to that computer. The other 2 computers still use the KVM’s keyboard / mouse. Then when I need to switch, I have to move the unneeded keyboard to a little bit of spare desk space, and grab the other one.
For some reason, when I type the unlock PIN on the shared keyboard, the other computer does not unlock. Deucedly inconvenient. And my desk looks like a cable factory exploded all over it.