This is like the tech equivalent of consulting the village shaman or wisewoman for some serious disease.
Pumps and motors do mess with electronics though.
True, true… The techpriest vibes I’m getting out of this is because it’s a minor to non-existant improvement that might or might not be placebo is achieved by seemingly outlandish cure. As if the angry spirit of the fridge needed appeasing so that it stops haunting your mouse.
The more consumer friendly and complex this stuff gets the further away from the raw metal those the users see as “magicians” are.
It used to be that the “magicians” were the Electronics Geeks (and the OP’s post and most comments here are a basically on “magic” that has to do with Electronics), but nowadays most “magicians” capable of explaining and dealing with the “unexplainable” are Software Techies.
especially if the pseudo-solution does work in terms of eliminating the symptom, but the real problem was that something isn’t grounded properly…
Ive had commercial techs float the idea of wrapping a tv reciever in foil to mitigate signal interference.
The shamans gut feelings are to be listened to.
Reminds me of the story of a company whose internet connection would cut out intermittently and they couldn’t figure out why. Details hazy but the gist is here.
One day they have a tech come in to investigate the problem. He goes downstairs to where the router is, and everything’s fine.
Seemingly the moment he goes to leave, the connection goes off. Panic stations! He goes back to the router and the connection is re-establishing. OK. All tests fine. He goes away again. It goes off again. What. Tech aura is real!
Nope. Turns out that when he went downstairs, he used the stairs. When he was coming back up he was lazy and used the lift.
The lift motor had been causing enough EM noise to knock out the connection whenever it was used.
USB-3 over USB-A upstream sockets often put out 2.4GHz noise which will interfere with many wireless dongles, including those commonly used for wireless mice and keyboards. The solution is to get a USB2 extension cable or hub for your dongles.
Intel knew this would be a problem, but ignored it.
In the core2duo era I overclocked a cpu to 2.4GHz, and It killed the wifi in the computer similarly, it took a while to figure out why it was happening, and connect the 2 seemingly unrelated thing.
Microwave ovens also work in the 2.4 GHz range, at one flat my torrents basically stopped when my neighbor used their oven.
Same. Had wireless in my parents house many years ago, and the microwave oven caused wireless internet timeouts.
Reminds me of this story where they couldn’t send e-mails farther than 500 miles.
Some decades ago when I was still an engineering student, my team had to present an electronic assignment. The damn circuit didn’t work, no matter what I did. So I decided to go ask the teacher for advice. I walked away a couple of meters, when my teammates told me that the circuit finally started working. As soon as I went back, it failed again. We soon determined that it failed only when I was near it. My teammates presented the assignment while I was at the other side of the lab. We passed the assignment, and sure enough, when I approached again to pick up my things, the damn circuit stopped working again.
Your capacitance is probably weird. Are FM radios you tuned also very likely to go to static when you walk away? (also possible the cause was something you were wearing or carrying)
maybe you wore something that gave you just enough static charge to cause problems?
It could be you wore the kind of clothes - certain shoes, wool pullovers, clothes made of certain plastic fibers - that makes one accumulate static electricity, so you literally had a charge different from the rest (did you have a tendency to get a shock when you touched large metalic objects or other people?)
Or maybe you were the biggest person on the team and hence caused the biggest electromagnetic shadow on the surrounding electromagnetic radiation (nowadays we live surrounded by radio sources). A similiar effect would happen if you had a less dry skin and hence more conductive than your colleagues (was this, for example, early morning after you took your daily shower).
Anyways, somewhere in that circuit was a wire which was unconnected and led to the gate side of a transitor, probably a Mostfet. If you were using a microcontroller in it, you might have left an I/O port enabled that was not physically connected to anything so its value could easilly flip merelly from electromagnetic interference and that day you just happened to have the biggest electromagnetic footprint (due to static charge, body size and/or body conductivity) around.
For fun it’s not hard to make a circuit that “detects people closeby” using a transistor or microcontroller I/O port connected to a wire that goes nowhere with the other side set up to light or not an LED depending on the input signal, which detects people because them being close or not alters the electromagnetic radiation that goes into that wire (an unconnected component pin also works, but it’s more sensitive with a bit or wire). The simple version is not exactly reliable, but it’s pretty spooky when it works.
recently dealt with an issue at my parents house where whenever they connected the TV to the wifi, half the devices in the house would lose connection. turns out there was an instability in the Comcast router firmware and whenever the TV would connect it would crash everything else on the 2.4ghz frequency.
solution was to replace the router with one they owned instead of whatever crap they were leasing from Comcast.
I had an issue like this with a tp-link Wi-Fi adapter in my computer. Never buying from tp-link again
Had a similar problem with my sister’s computer. Everything connected to the same switch as her computer stopped working after the computer booted. The solution was surprisingly easy, just updating the NIC drivers.
Seen that with an elevator running. As soon as the elevator moved, wifi & BT died.
The problem was that the elevator was older than wifi and BT, so there was no warranty or something they could just call on. I told them to still get it fixed, as the local equivalent of the FCC is known not be be that nice when something is creating problems on the spectrum.
My neighbor’s poorly shielded microwave would knock out our WiFi. Because microwaves are in the 2.4GHz range, which is also the same range as older WiFi. Except that a microwave operates with several thousand times more power than WiFi, so it essentially acts as a jammer when it’s not shielded well.
Figuring that out took me fucking ages. I eventually heard her microwave beep through the shared wall, right as my WiFi came back online.
Yep, microwaves are nasty in that regard.
That used to happen at a friend’s house, the microwave would shut down their WiFi.
Ours did that for WiFi. I knew when my wife was warming something in the Microwave, by her complaints about her streaming video dropping
It’s truly a challenge when even your elevator is on the spectrum.
USB mice and keyboards usually have unshielded cables, which are allowed for USB 1.1, since they don’t need higher speeds.
This reminds me of when I had apprenticeship classes that got interrupted by the covid lockdowns. I was forced to do theory classes online over zoom. Every morning my wifi connection would drop for a few minutes at a time during my classes.
Turns out it was the microwave. Every time someone used the microwave, it would disrupt the wifi/router for the whole house.
Ended up making a sign to let people know I was in class. My classes were only for 8 weeks total. I had about 4 or 5 weeks remaining by the time I figured it out so it wasn’t too long of an inconvenience.
I’ve seen similar. Whole two story office building’s wifi got knocked out by some big ol’ 1960s microwave.
No one could figure out why the wifi kept going down during lunch.
I’ve had same sort of issue. A refrigerator cycled on and off and that caused the mouse to disconnect. Also sometimes cause HDMI on my TV to reset connection.
I’ve had a couple of issues like this:
-
Wireless mouse has a flaky connection. Turns out the issue was the USB port it was plugged into (probably RF interference as other devices worked fine on that port)
-
We had a couple of radio receivers in a server rack. The scale of the project had shrunk over the years, so what used to fill up 2 racks now only half filled them (mostly because of upgraded components becoming faster and smaller over the years). Another project needed needed some rackspace, so we reracked everything into a single rack. When we were done, we found that one of our receivers couldn’t get a signal, and another would lose it regularly. Checked over all of our connections and the antennas, but everything seemed normal. Turns out something in the other project was blasting out RF interference.
-
We would occasionally need to manually move data on/off a server using a USB2.0 hard drive. This worked fine for years, until one day we had a server that would randomly disconnect from the drive a few seconds into the transfer. Tried different ports, same issue. The drive itself worked with all the others, so we decided the issue must be with the server. We swapped it out for a brand new one with plans to send the old one back for warranty repairs. Except the new one has the exact same issue. Both servers came from a newish batch from the OEM. Turns out that the earlier versions had a hardware “bug” where the USB ports would source more than the 500ma allowed by the spec. Since they fixed that, our drive would trigger the current limit during sustained use and temporarily depower the port. Solution: get a USB Y cable and power provider power from a wall block
-
I had a mouse that would double click (or more) when you pushed the button. This was pretty obviously a hardware issue, but I figured I could just tell the computer to ignore double clicks that happened “too fast” and avoid needing a new mouse. In theory that should have worked, but the input stack on Linux turned out to be a giant web that I couldn’t figure out, so I ended up opening the mouse and soldering on a random capacitor I had lieing around.
-
We had a laptop with a dead monitor that would mysteriously work at times. It turns out that most of the time, it was sitting on another laptop (of the same type). Those laptops had a magnet latch to hold them shut. It turns out that said magnet also was used as part of a “laptop closed” sensor that would disable the monitor, and the bottom laptop would trigger the sensor in the top one.
Good news, they’re making it easier to fix stuff like “spurious double clicks”.
https://who-t.blogspot.com/2025/05/libinput-and-lua-plugins.html
-
Reminds me of an old coworker, who I think had some sort of paranoia or persecution complex, because he always had stories of how his mouse would stop working at random and cite the kinds of EM pulses that could be used to cause such an effect, clearly the work of someone who wanted to harass him
My wired mouse’s lights reset when I roll my chair just a few centimeters on the carpet. I believe your coworker.
I worked for a cable company as the sysadmin. They were having trouble with channels going off randomly but most often in the morning and evening. One day in the middle of the day I’m out there with all hands on deck discussing the problem when one of the employee’s showed up in his older GM truck. Just as he arrived the channels went out and they jumped on the scopes and cable meters to start looking for the problem. He got out it stopped. We all stood around for a few minutes saying it was going to be a long day if we couldn’t figure this out. After a little bit he was instructed to go back to burying drops on his schedule. The second he cranked up the problem started. He drove off and it stopped. Three of us just looked at one another and we called him back. Sure enough as soon as he drove up the problem started. He was given instruction to not drive past the office gate and the problem went away. As to what on that old truck was throwing out all the gigahertz interference we may never know. That truck was gone withing a week.
I can’t say if the frequency is right, but poorly shielded spark plug wires will send all kinds of EM out. You know, the older cars where if you touched one of those wires you’d feel it, or you could see the aura if it was dark jumping around.
"Computer works fine now, but the smell of decomp is becoming unbearable… "
I’ve had a similar experience when I used to have an eero mesh router. My devices kept randomly disconnecting from wifi and their tech support was blaming a smart light somewhere in the vicinity that’s causing it (lived in an apartment at the time). I don’t own a smart light and there was no such device connected to my network.
And how did you know that none of your neighbors had smart lights?
I never said none of my neighbors had smart lights. I said there was no smart light connected to my router as far as I could see into its interface/settings.
My point is that there clearly could still be smart lights in the vicinity.
This could mean that they eavesdrop on your router.
ZigBee (home automation protocol) operates on 2.4 GHz just like WiFi.
They could have guessed that there is a smart light or maybe they were able to look it up on your router.
Yeah as far as I could tell there wasn’t any smart light (or unknown/untrusted device for that matter) authenticated to my router, so if they saw some random IOT device, they had some type of access. Maybe the smart light was interfering with the 2.4GHz band for some reason. Anyhow, I sold that router after a couple of days of not being able to resolve it with support, and I moved on to an openwrt router.
