Guest post by A recent YouTube video by Sun’s Fishworks Lab’s Brendan Gregg proves that vibrations (including shouting) will cause hard drives’ latency to spike. But then, he only shouted at it angrily. Who’s to say that perhaps blasting Mozart in your server room will cause the latency to drop? Perhaps telling each hard drive that he or she is special may even make their capacities grow!
Verbal threats were also proven, by ‘actual’ scientists, to inhibit the growth of plants, and even change the structure of ice.
Speaking nicely to plants / water would create much more lovely results.
I very VERY much have witnessed this effect on my own computer.
When I bought my current motherboard and I attached water cooler, the bracket at the rear of the board had shorted out a few power pins. It got so hot it melted a pad on my E7200 to the contact pin on the motherboard, and the contact pin separated from the motherboard. Obviously not a good thing – I thought it was dead!
But I just prayed and spoke nicely, with my natural sadness and frustration, and carefully cleaned up the mess. Re-assembled, and eventually she came back on again without her VCC contact!! The burn is pretty severe – it melted through the installation material ( which failed to do its job ).
Then, just two days ago, I installed an ATI x850 and for some odd reason the thing started smoking BAD when I first hit the power ( which I naturally cut quickly ). I removed the card and could see that it was coming from under the heatsink, so I just repeated my previous successful efforts, re-installed the card, prayed, asked it to please be okay… and BAM, starts up like a champ! Still running all that hardware.
I have two hard drives which are running in the same manner – and my sound card used to give me trouble as well. 🙂
Heh, and that isn’t even speaking about my car 😉
It just goes to show ya, be careful how you express yourself – to anything!
–The loon
You, Sir, will never be allowed into the same room as any computer equipment I own.
I did that many times to my toaster. To no effect. Until I realized that it was a Japanese made machine. And, lo, after I switched to Japanese language, everything went smoothly again.
I find it hard to believe that yelling at your computer directly contributes to it running poorly. I will say that doing ANYTHING, especially computer related, with a cool head will usually yield better results. My laptop has been acting up for months now and it finally seemed to kick the bucket two days ago when it couldn’t make it past the entire boot process if it even posted. I was a bit frustrated because It isn’t that old and I was expecting it to last a long time. I immediateley ripped though it disassembling the entire thing and checking all the connections, cursing the entire time. I didn’t end up getting it working again until today when I had a cooler head and slowly eliminated possible problems. It’s working beautifully again, better than it has been in months.