Microsoft developer Raymond Chen, who collects stories about the development of Windows, said that in the era of Windows XP on some laptop models, the process of playing a music video with the song Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation" could disable both the laptop itself and other nearby mobile devices. computers.

This problem was discovered during testing by one of the major laptop manufacturers in their laboratory. Also during the experiments, it turned out that some laptops from other vendors began to slow down or fail if the video did not start on them, but they were next to the device that played the Jackson clip.

Investigation of an abnormal situation showed that the problem is indeed in some sounds from the song. Laptop hard drives running at 5400 rpm began to resonate and break down.

Chen did not elaborate on the details of this unusual situation. Experts believe that typically low-cost laptop hard drives vibrate in the 5 kHz range, and they sometimes experience certain peaks at 12.5 Hz, 87.5 Hz, 1100 Hz, 1450 Hz, 1700 Hz and 1850 Hz.

The laptop manufacturer and its partners have solved this problem. The developers have added a special filter to the audio codec driver that detects and removes unwanted frequencies during the playback of such sounds.

Chen is not sure if laptop developers will remember this moment now, since many years have passed since then, but the audio filter itself has continued to be mandatory lines of code in many laptop drivers since then.

In February, Chen said that in early builds of the Windows 8 tablet version, the menu for displaying error codes included nine pictures of cats sitting on a fence and wagging their tails, looking at the setting moon. It was these pictures that allowed the developers to understand that an error had occurred in the running application, and the screen with the Start button was not available.

Last September, Chen revealed why Windows XP Pinball won't be coming to Windows 11.

bbabo.Net