Original Acer Aspire One hard drives crash at the sound of Bono’s voice

OK, the headline might be a bit of an exaggeration. But just a bit. While playing U2 songs on your 8.9 inch Acer Aspire One won’t guarantee a hard drive failure, it turns out that some Aspire One owners figured out the hard way that one of the computer’s two speakers is situated just a bit too close to the hard drive. When you play music at full blast, it seems to vibrate or send out evil death rays or something and cause hard drive failure which can result in data loss and other errors.

The problem first reared its ugly head when a member of the Hardware Cult forums was playing U2 track “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me Kill Me.” While the problem isn’t related to this song along, several forum members seem to have reproduced the error with the sweet sounds of Bono’s voice.

via Engadget

Posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009, 8:38 am by Brad Linder

Karuko

Electromagnetic waves due to the magnetic material in speakers.
Karuko

From your source it's seems to be vibration (HDD have magnetic shields).
So your title to this is spot on!
DG

Yet another reason SSDs remain the best option?
BoloMKXXVIII

Not evil death rays, not vibration or magnetic waves. It is Bono's voice that is trashing the hard drives. They just give up the will to live.
SBS

Always knew Bonio was evil >(
Mikez

I bet this failure mode has blindsided a few designers.

Let me see now. . .
Turn the sound down very low, put ear against lid – -
Oops, that puts your head too close to the WiFi antennas;
which might cause brain damage.
(Antenna near field radiation is next to impossible to predict.)

But if you are turning up the volume enough to shake your HDD -
that ship has probably already sailed.
http://www.pot.tv trey

unfortunately millions of others have missed that Live8 scam he took part in where he fellated Bush and Blair in front of the world by calling those criminals humanitarians and the St Peter and St Paul of aid.
whomever

Word.

I was very disappointed to watch the industry move away from SSD and adopt HDDs nearly universally. It goes against the intent of the netbook. HDDs use more power, and are prone to failure from moving parts, and the extra capacity is unnecessary. Sure, SSDs are more expensive on a per-gigabyte basis, but if netbooks used them more, it would help drive the price down and capacities would eventually catch up anyway.
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Harry

Thinking about the traditional laptops that I know about, most have the speakers far from the hard disk, which apparently makes good design sense.

Going through the links in that article, I found this youtube link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

which shows a similar problem in high end Sun RAID hardware. A guy shouts in front of the disks, and performance drops. Funny thing though. The environment is already very noisy. So I guess it is sudden sharp sounds that do this, rather than constant background noise.
Lee

This is EXACTLY why any netbook I have now, and any netbook I get in the future will have an SSD. Hard drives are so 20th century. It's time to give these dinosaurs a rest. In five years (TRUST ME) hard drives will be a dying breed. SSD or other storage mechanism will have completely replaced it, and the only hard drives available will be used and refurbished units.
Tim

I own one of these and it flakes out /crashes all the time. There are two recurring problems. One, it will just boot over and over again. I figured out you can do a restore by holding ALT-F10 during the boot process. Never store important files on this computer you will lose them. Second, I'm currently looking at a completely dead Acer One. The power light is on but no one is home. It won't do anything.

Lastly, the support is a joke buy the stores warranty if you feel compelled to own this PC. I'm out $350.00
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http://www.teentoday2009.webs.com/ Peter

Hmm… It Happened To Me Not Playing U2 Songs But Using The Internet On Wi-fi Then Weeks Later Using My Cricket Modem
Lesson Well Learned Stay Away From Acer!
http://www.teentoday2009.webs.com/ Peter

Hmm… It Happened To Me Not Playing U2 Songs But Using The Internet On Wi-fi Then Weeks Later Using My Cricket Modem
Lesson Well Learned Stay Away From Acer!
Sam Gilon

I had the same proble, this time with the Andre Rieu orchestra playing “Brazil” full blast from youtube. Looks like the hard drive got into some kind of resonance and was making crazy noises. The screen went blue with some warning messages. I had to remove the battery for the thing to stop.
Once I reinstalled the battery and restarted the laptop everything went back to normal.
I then tried the same again and heard the same kind of noise. luckily I managed to switch-off the laptop speakers immediately and the noises diappeared.
Are Acer aware of this “magic”?
Sam Gilon

I suggest that you format the HDD, install Windows XP Professional SP3. Get all the drivers from the Acer website. I had miy Aspire One with Windows XP Home plus some other stuff it came with, and it was a piece of @#$%. After the reinstallation it's perfect.
rey gonzales

i have lost my sound driver and i bought two recovery drivers and still no sound. please help me figure out my administrator pass word
rey gonzales

i have lost my sound driver and i bought two recovery drivers and still no sound. please help me figure out my administrator pass word
Dajerutneusa

Come on guys, remember whatever physics we were taught even in high school, how a singer at the right note, pitch, volume, or whatever can break a crystal wine glass.
How and when Joshua had the horns blown and shattered the walls of Jericho. Ultrasonic and sb-sonic noises are nothing to be messing with!

Besides, SSD’s remind me of the RAM disks of the old dos days, and when I bootted up it was from a 1.44 floppy stuck in “A” drive/slot. If SSD’s can be trusted to retain forever software installed, fine, but if not, not fine. And with how many GIG’s most software eats up now a days SSD’s better have more room than the 16G I have noticed on some uniits.
Dajerutneusa

Come on guys, remember whatever physics we were taught even in high school, how a singer at the right note, pitch, volume, or whatever can break a crystal wine glass.
How and when Joshua had the horns blown and shattered the walls of Jericho. Ultrasonic and sb-sonic noises are nothing to be messing with!

Besides, SSD’s remind me of the RAM disks of the old dos days, and when I bootted up it was from a 1.44 floppy stuck in “A” drive/slot. If SSD’s can be trusted to retain forever software installed, fine, but if not, not fine. And with how many GIG’s most software eats up now a days SSD’s better have more room than the 16G I have noticed on some uniits.

Original Acer Aspire One hard drives crash at the sound of Bono’s voice

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