Haha I remember the days of downloading random EXEs off the internet and running them to see what they do (also the days of CD-rom drives).
My auntie somehow managed to get a virus that played Für Elise through the motherboard speaker and never stopped so long as the thing was on. I don’t think they ever solved it, in the end they just got a new PC.
That probably wasn’t a virus.
Holy shit, TIL!
When I read it, it stirred a distant memory of hearing such a story before, so I knew that there was something behind it and looked it up.
Literally why would someone make that. That is completely indistinguishable as a signal.
I mean I guess you are supposed to take it to your computer repair shop and tell them it won’t stop playing Für Elise, and the shop is supposed to recognise it as a failure of CPU fan signal. If it just beeped a few times on startup then people would ignore it, and if it beeped constantly then well maybe Für Elise is nicer.
Huh yeah that’s MUCH better than throwing a post code and playing a beep during startup to signal something is wrong.
Sadly, many motherboards don’t have POST code displays.
Hm. Well if the motherboard can play a song it can blast “<Type> Error” during startup to be infinitely more helpful.
I don’t think those speakers are capable of voice. They can handle a few different beep tones and that’s about it. The song was not like listening to Spotify, it was played using beep tones.
Would any of your tech-handicapped relatives actually pay it any attention, though?
“my shits fucked yo”
I’m impressed that the computer was usable with the failed CPU fan.
Computers in 97 didn’t need much in the way of cooling. A large passive heatsink was plenty for those CPUs. They’re not the 300+ watt behemoths we have today.
I really remember heatsinks being a thing on overclocked systems around that time frame and then once we got to P4 cpus the chilling towers appeared those things were massive
The lower power 486s didn’t even need a heatsink. The P3 was the first to take a heasink resembling what we have today, but damn did the P4s need some serious cooling.
It’s kinda funny how we think the 100 watts of a desktop P4 was insane when now the TDP of a high end laptop CPU is more than that.
My Pentium 100 even says “Heatsink req’d”
It’s kinda funny how we think the 100 watts of a desktop P4 was insane when now the TDP of a high end laptop CPU is more than that.
It really isn’t. Modern mobile cpus barely sip power.
PL2 on a 14900T is 106W
Edit: I’m an idiot, T series is low power socketed, not mobile. 14900HX has a TDP of 55W but boosts short term to 157W, which is still pretty ridiculous
My 11950H (and all other “full power” Intel mobile CPUs) have a PL1 of >100 watts (109 for mine), and mine a PL2 of 139 watts. This laptop is about an inch thick.
Nothing about this laptop sips power, I’ve gotten as bad as 30 minutes of battery life out of a 90 watt hour battery not playing games.
If you meant cell phones and tablets, that’s mostly due to the different architecture. RISC processors are super energy efficient, which also makes them much cooler to run.
x86-64 is a CISC architecture, which tends to be much more power hungry. There are only a couple of very low power Celeron CPUs that work under 10W of TDP, while that’s very common among phones’ CPUs.
I helped set up a friend’s “586” (about equivalent to a Pentium 1) and he had neglected to buy a heat sink or fan
A hammer was a sufficient heat sink for the time it took to set up windows
Super impressive since we used to play Quake 2 all day on it!
Reminds me of the Apple version of Karateka, which did something special if you inserted the floppy disk upside down.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/5/22564151/karateka-apple-ii-upside-down-easter-egg
Can’t view this without cycling my VPN… We need a way to see reddit posts without visiting reddit. Is this a thing? Like… Piped for Reddit.
It explains that it means “fan failure”.
And there was a link to a video of it happening.
The only other link to an MS support page did not work.
Drain.exe would say “water in drive a:, commencing spin cycle” then power up the drive and make a gurgling sound.
Sheep.exe … would create a sheep that would wander the desktop.
Haha, in highschool I put sheep.exes into the school labs startup folders as a prank once. A couple days later the tech teacher approached me and was like “nobody’s in trouble but these things are a nightmare and if I have to reimage half the lab to get rid of them it would personally ruin my day”. Somehow all the sheep were gone by the next day
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I remember getting sent to the principals office for “hacking” (pinging the computer in the next room) in like 8th grade.
Back in 4th/5th I actually was hacking, modifying our user menu to add Windows 3.1 and a password (copying config from a teacher’s profile). Also brute-forced at least two teachers passwords.
I’m a network architect now, so there’s that.
I remember labs full of networked Win 98 machines in middle school, with like Novell software on them for login credentials and whatnot. The computers sat there with a login screen and when students logged into it you would be presented with the Office suite and a restricted web browser and some educational packages. A lot of normal Win 98 stuff wasn’t there though, like any settings menus. But there was some convoluted way where you could bring up a help text and then by navigating deep in the menu system somehow cause it to launch to a “normal” Win 98 desktop.
I’d often bring a floppy with wolf3d or doom to deal with the boredom
Ah shit the sheep thing! In fact, there were others I can’t remember. And I seem to remember somewhere along the line they went from fun to spam things walking around your screen trying to make you buy shit or maybe they were trying to scam you, I can’t remember but they weren’t fun anymore, and hard to get rid of.
I remember an obscure one named “grommit” that was a dancing animated character and you’d click it to change arm and leg movements.
Bonzi buddy was over of the bad ones, maybe?
Bonzai buddy! Yes, that was one. Also I seem to recall naked women ones you couldn’t close.
I don’t remember grommit, but also I failed to find anything when trying to search it up. It shares its name with too many things.
I had a cottonelle puppy so basically a toilet paper ad. But it’s not even sold in my country, we have other brands.
There was also a program that would open the CD-ROM drive and play a raspberry noise at random intervals. It was a fun prank to set it to run at login.
Lol the für Elise thing is funny. Back in highschool I got a “PC maintenance” credit which had me assigned as support in the computer lab. I made a batch script that ran on startup and showed a warning message saying the hard disk will self destruct and did a countdown from 10 with the motherboard speaker beeping down, fun times
Haha evil! I love it!
man i miss these days.
These days not only would it open your CD drive, it would open your tax documents, your crypto wallet, your account cookies, probably even your banking information.
The modern internet fucking sucks dude.
Put the rose tinted glasses to one side. We still had harmful viruses back in the day, difference is these days you are storing more private information “online” so the effect of compromise is larger.
Back then, there were still lots of “wipers” that deleted files and/or destroyed the OS. Now it’s all spyware and ransomware.
i’m mostly just sad that the funny side of malicious software is gone.
There’s no more funny malware. It’s all ransomware and stealers.
There’s no more funny malware.
That depends who gets infected.
You or me infected by malware? No thanks!
Egon Mark infected by malware? Absolute hilarity!
i mean yeah, but that’s only situationally funny.
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The thing is, harmful apps are now difficult to detect compared to years ago. The hackers prefer to get the control of your device without ruining it.
There’s even extreme edgecases where a compromised machine being part of a botnet actually improves security because the malware shores up security to help itself remain persistent and not find itself removed/blocked by other malware or attackers
Vandalism became theft and kidnapping
Oh don’t worry, malicious .exe files were all over the forums back then.
u aren’t wrong.
Sub7 existed before 2000 if I’m not mistaken.
I was just about to comment that this reminded me of the sub7 days. Not sure when it was released, but I definitely used it in 1998
Edit, memory was wrong, it was released in February 1999
This was a common April Fools prank back in my day. We would put a startup script on a person’s computer that opened their CD drive at random intervals. Drove them nuts!
I have a folder of “pranks” like these from way back and they were harmless but sure enough they fire off modern anti virus software.
I made one called “crash_bandicoot.exe” that opened the windows calculator in an infinite loop.
I had one of those, but it was just called putting something on the calculator key.
The modern school equivalent of cheap pranks on computers isn’t some elaborate virus, it’s just pressing the “mail” or “calculator” keys on the keyboard for the guy next to you. Never personally witnessed anything more elaborate, though my classmate apparently distributed dubious batch files he wrote once
How about the one that launched a dialog box: “Do you have a small penis? Yes/No”, and if you moved your mouse near the “No” button, the button would run away around the screen?
Man, good times.
Odd, that button always worked for me.
Pretty sure this has been around since the mid 90s
Classics are timeless by definition. You witness the adolescence of culture.
That joke was constant in the early 00s.
I remember a guy who tied his baby’s rocker to the drive and wrote code to open and close the CD drive repeatedly lol. Fun times.
Hmm. Did the motor last? It’s obviously not built to provide that much torque/force, although I can’t say for sure it would be damaged by it.
Did people download .exe files in 2006? We were so innocent.
& .bat s & ZIPs
An old fashioned meme but it checks out
naw, what you do is write a small exe to play “youre the best” by joe espesito through the pcspeaker at 15% volume than you can trigger remotely…randomly until the user goes mad
“doesnt anyone else Hear that?!”
good one!
I miss Macbarf…
