The harddrive staying silent even though you were mashing keys like crazy was a sure way to tell that your PC had given up on life.
Yeah hitting "save file" and not actually hearing the sound of the file being written to disk was enough to give you a chill
For me it was installing games. The installer was still active, but the drive stayed silent? The installer was lying.
Yeah you can tell the installer just had a time limit hard-coded, like it took them about two minutes on their test machine,
Not nearly as bad as hearing "click...click....click" from the HDD. The PTSD is still strong...
Thanks I can hear this and I hate it.
At least you knew; now when an SSD fails it just…. dies.
Literally shuddering. RIP The epic Doom megawad I was working on for two years 😥
The fans revving for 20 seconds and the program opening it's loading screen: "Nice".
The fans revving for 5 seconds and the program is sitting at 0% CPU after 1 full minute: "fuck this bullshit." But you hold onto hope and wait another 5 minutes, and as your confirming to restart the PC the program starts loading, and you have to watch it load entirely before it's killed by the restart, and the restart takes even longer because the program actually opened.
Or,
You browser is loading homestarrunner.com and the loading bar stops at 10% like it should for 5 minutes, but the 5 minutes passes by, and you click the clock on the task bar only to see your mouse turn into an hourglass.
Fans revving? My 486 fans were either on or off, son.
Still does that on my machine... I can hear some high hissing sounds when moving the cursor on my ThinkPad (running Manjaro)
A relatively easy way I've found to get coil whine is to go on shadertoy.com and use the shadertoy extension to increase the paint calls
It only seems to work with some shaders for me though, shadertoy.com/view/WtfyDj seems to work well
Oooh, what headset are you using? Also, unfortunately I don't know about coil whining, sorry.
Are you using steam VR? If so, what version? I'm currently having some issues with getting games to actually display in the headset and the dashboard not coming up... And since you seem to have it up and running, I'd like to know!
I do have matrix! It's here smorty:catgirl.cloud
In the olden days, when a computer used its voice to tell you it was working, we had the hard drive activity indicator. Now that that information would actually be useful, manufacturers cheap out on a fucking light.
Assholes.
Tbf my RGB do act as an emergency warning system and flash all red if the system is overheating
Old computers seem so much more functional. Like they are real equipment. Modern stuff, especially when running windows, just feels like a blown up iPad. Ads everywhere, fun icons to click on and always pretending that everything is working the way it's supposed to
I think Apple is mostly to blame. Microsoft is trying to be more like Apple with windows 11 layout and they tried the whole tablet and pc compatibility thing with windows 8. If Apple wasn't so profitable I think windows might have tried to find their own style, but Apple does incredibly well with their marketing and people flock to Mac and iOS. Of course windows is rlstill the most commonly used OS, but Apple is slowly making their way to catching up. The only thing truly holding Apple back is their high price to make their product seem higher quality than it really is.
I think Apple is mostly to blame. Microsoft is trying to be more like Apple
When they are not stealing features from KDE.
Very true. Felt weird when I saw some features on school PCs which were on KDE for years...
Almost like they WANT to make software instead of money.
Are those ads everywhere in a room with us right now?
Seriously though, I haven't seen a single ad ever since activating an adblocker when I first used a computer. And macOS has just as many ads on websites when not using an adblocker.
I too don't see ads anymore since switching to Debian (GNU/Linux) but Windows is FULL of ads for Xbox, candy crush and Microsoft's office. I've heard that iPhones and apples devices in general come preinstalled with an apple store app for specifically purchasing walled garden devices... I would say that counts as ads.
Don't forget onedrive, which seems to come back every other reboot
it doesn't.
i uninstalled it on all of my machines and haven't seen it ever since.
same applies to edge, i uninstalled it in 2021 and it only came back once (after the major copilot backport update, which restructured the way windows 10 handles edge (legacy edge got completely removed)), a month ago in 2024, uninstalled it and it's still gone.
Windows defender is a real bitch tho, can't get rid of it no matter what
Really? Is that a thing now? I mean it has been some years since my PC has seen Windows...
it's not.
never happened to me
maybe a thing on windows home, but i only use enterprise
Do you know a way to purchase Win11 enterprise key? Afaik, you do need to own a company or something.
mas can activate it permanently with hwid
enterprise (and "pro for workstations") edition of windows 11 has little to no ads.
same applies to windows 10 pro or higher with local accounts
you should go with enterprise if you need windows for any reason anyway, as it's the only edition with an option to disable telemetry (set it to "Security" in group policy editor, in pro it only goes down to "Required", and no debloating tool will help with that) (it's impossible to do without partching the os or using a firewall in other editions, yes, Microsoft basically paywalls privacy)
ma account login can be blocked via a gpo in pro or higher editions, the system pretends they don't exist at all (e.g. add new account button brings up a menu to add a local account immediately)
Yeeeeeaaah I'm still not gonna use Windows. Thanks for the explanation tho! I did not know that there were substantial differences between the different versions.
you should go with enterprise
Which a regular person can't buy.
The easiest legal route to a permanently debloated Windows with 10+ years of patches is Windows Server Essentials.
Yes you have. Your top search engine results are ads at a minimum, even on DDG. Also most people use a browser extension for ad blocking, which doesn't block all ads by design.
ublock origin blocks all ads for me and in my internet searches I usually add keywords like "stackoverflow" or "reddit" or "wikipedia" or whatever else I need
Anyway your point also exists for macOS and linux
Somebody should tell him decibels go into the negative numbers
In this case, if it's dBSPL they don't*. When measuring dBs in digital they are negative because 0dB is the loudest value the signal can take. In summary, dBs aren't made equal and they're a confusing unit.
*0dBSPL is the auditory threshold, so you can't hear negative dBSPL but it is a valid measure.
dB are a relative unit, and as a relative unit they are all equal (keeping in mind subtleties of amplitude vs. power). They can be used as an absolute unit only when referenced to some value (dBm, dBV...).
Keeping these two things top of mind helps me, at any rate.
Logarithmic scales ftw!
Plus, having -∞ as the lowest on a volume knob is just badass.
Do you have a minute to talk about on/off switches?
For me, I find barely perceptible sounds vastly more annoying than easily noticeable ones. Something about being just out of comfortable listening reach is extremely unnerving to me. So with that in mind, yeah, I often find a lot of modern "silent" tech to be way more annoying than their much louder earlier cousins. 🤷♂️
Like a car alarm in the distance vs living next to a waterfall.
Exactly
Just crank your fans to 100% haha
I still listen to the noises. The cpu makes a unique whine when I highlight text.
Does it have the spacebar heating feature too?
Lol, this isn't part of my workflow! I just happened to notice it one day and was intrigued.
I actually do remember an experience much like yours.
20+ years ago when PC CPUs didn’t properly idle when they had no work to do, there was a program called rain that would issue the correct idle commands or something. It lowered temps!
But when this program was running, moving my mouse would make a slight hum or buzz. That one probably took a bit to figure out.
How could it distinguish between selecting text and other tasks?
I have no idea. It was just something I noticed. If I were to guess, it's just some odd combination of dust, resistance, and the architecture of the cores that causes a hundred little things to mesh together into a whine.
Does it also happen under load?
Through the boop boop
I could play music with my graphics card by moving the FPS cap slider... Coil whine is nuts.
Had to deal with it then because it was the only option, and until my late teens the only pc in the house was in the home office and it was never just left running.
Now that near silent machines are easy to achieve though, and my pc is right by my bed and on nearly 24/7, I see no need to suffer like I used to (it's also at least partly a sensory processing disorder thing, because I hear components most people never notice).
I miss loud harddrive sounds. Sometimes you thought the pc crashed, and suddenly it would rev up and you'd go:"heck yeah, tubular."
Nothing's keeping you from throwing a complete of old disks in your tower and through the power of zfs making an awesome raid for backups
Or building a flopinator to play music with
Compact Flash cards are popular as an HDD replacement in retro computing -- with the downside of no sound.
Luckily people have made a device to emulate the sound of a real hard drive.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
a device to bring back the sound of a real hard drive.
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
you made me nostalgic for the floppy tray check sound from my old PC ;;
Deeeeeeng de dunk!
I always like the soft clicks it made when communicating on the internet, after the screaming noise, when it settled down. Soft hum of the computer and little clicks as I read a forum post.
I remember the school computer lab. They bought all the computers in 2002 and didn't replace them until 2011. It was like stepping into a wind tunnel the fans were all so loud
I mean, I'm still running basically the same PC I built in '14 so I can't say shit lol
You've had the same PC for 20 years! You only had to replace the CPU 15 times, the motherboard 14 times, the hard drive 8 times and the graphics card 17 times! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAh8HryVaeY
Lol it is kind of a Ship of Theseus thing. But really, the only new parts are an extra RAM kit, an extra hard drive, and a new GPU. It still has the same board, CPU, and PSU. The 4790K was an awesome CPU then and it's still pretty good today. I need to swap my power supply this year since it's turning 10.
I've even got the same crappy TN displays I've been using since I got into PC gaming in early 2013. Same with the keyboard and mouse. All of that stuff works well enough for me. But maybe one day I'll stumble into money again and get some nice 4K IPS displays.
I need my keys to sound like I'm using a typewriter, the pc is not a problem
Get a unicomp model M. They are the continued production of the IBM model M that came with their PS/2 personal computers. They use the same machinery that made the originals thus the modern ones are still "original", which is a fun fact.
But yes, very clacky and noisy. Also very well made and durable for the price.
Hmm, I think it will be a good teplacement for my current one, some keys are beginning to fail.
If you are dedicated to putting out one hell of a racket when typing you can also look into reproduction model F keyboards. They are like 5x more expensive and like 500$. They are solid metal tanks though with super noisy switches.
I want it to sound, not scream "IM TYPING IM TYPING"
Gives me flashbacks to going online at night in the 90s hoping that the noise of the modem connecting wouldn't wake my parents 😄
The joys of having a 75% deaf mother, and a father that couldn't find work in the same state that we lived in. I didn't have to worry about noise, I did have to worry about light, but that's much easier to deal with.
Hehe this made me chuckle. Made me remeber the dread of old after an update or fucking with the registry and rebooting waiting for the sounds of the startup knowing all is well. Silence was a death blow!
Kids these days get worried about computer noises???
I slept for years with my Linux desktop/server next to my bed, running 24/7, with a hard disk drive and cheap-end cpu/case fans. The only time I was bothered when the original case fan went bonkers and started making hell of a racket.
(I don't use that thing any more, because it got way too obsolete, but I still have a NAS box with a fan and hard drive and it's not bothering me at all.)
Difference in the types of noises. Back then basically mid range sounds and rumbly low end sounds (this was rare). Today it's all high pitched noises. Hard as hell on the ears if you are sensitive to that (like I am).
You could open the case, and find the tiny cables that are labeled LCD(XXX) and disconnect them I suppose. Just don't disconnect your USB ports and power/reset buttons.
The labels are on the board, not the cables generally speaking.
So, weird slightly related anecdote: My laptop I bought in 2014 came with a spinning rust hard drive, and I dual booted this machine Windows and Linux.
Since I can remember, (aka, Win 3.1) Windows always made a lot of noise with the hard drive. Start it loading something, like opening an application or something, and it would make this rapid, slightly random clicking noise with the hard drive access light just kinda spazzing out. On older, larger hard drives I remember it sounded like brewing coffee, like the bubble pump in a drip machine? Linux doesn't make that same sound, I guess it doesn't do a lot of frequent, scattered reads and writes to disk as Windows does?
Until I replaced the HDD with an SSD, I could tell which OS the laptop was running by listening to the hard drive.
Wasn't the fans (mind you the last version of Windows that have touched any of my machines was 8.1) it was the hard disk. Every Windows machine I've ever used with a mechanical hard drive, from a 486 IBM PS/2 to my Dell Inspiron laptop always sounded like the hard disk had baseball cards in the spokes. Linux doesn't make the same noise; it doesn't sound as frantic. It's like Windows has more papers to shuffle or something.
That almost immediately struck me when I started using Linux about ten years ago and no one else seems to know what I'm talking about.
Remember when nothing else worked and it was totally frozen, you had to hold down the power button like you were pushing a pillow into a long suffering relatives face while they were sleeping like "Shhh Shhh everything'll be ok in a minute"
Fuck me, if I could just get a silent computer it'd be great for my audio recording. I've built them in the past but you cant seem to get the same sort of massive heatsinks now for modern i7s and i9s.