One night your typical house ant scout was exploring a new area he had never been before. He heard some music coming from a large dark cave across the room, and quickly started his long trek to find out what it was.
Upon reaching the dark cave hours later the scout ant crawled inside admiring the smooth architecture but wasn't hearing the music he had heard earlier, instead there was only a low buzzing noise. As an explorer this ant was determined to investigate. He made his way across a few rough patches and through a few tight areas but finally arrived to where the buzzing was the loudest. Crawling between two silver spires made of red and black the ant froze unable to move, little did he know but he was now making contact with what would be the Battery inlet terminals. The resulting arc blew his body apart with his upper thorax hurling inwards deep into the dark caves depths. He lay there barely able to breathe, what just happened? was that some kind of booby trap? he thought to himself, was this a cave meant to lure unsuspecting and curious explorers to their untimely demise?
He couldn't think anymore, he just wanted to get back to his den. His buddies would be there no doubt talking about the sugar load they discovered that day, and later they would all go down to the Oreo cookie bar behind the kitchen and have a few rounds.
In his dying moments he managed to crawl onto the large black plateau that lay before him and carve the following words into the dark cold slab under the words "Realtek",
"I scout #4254231 with my final breath hereby curse this cave to never utter a sound again", in an attempt to prevent any of his brethren from being enticed by this cave sirens songs of doom.
Then he expired.

ZanQuance wrote:

<snip>

Hmm... I'm going to have to open up my computer so I can take him out and give him a proper burial 🤣

Hey, that should be a game: you control the ant scout, navigating the dark recesses of "The Computer".

keenmaster486 wrote:

Hey, that should be a game: you control the ant scout, navigating the dark recesses of "The Computer".

Bad Mojo is close to that, except you're a roach.

keenmaster486 wrote:

This is driving me nuts. What could possibly have gone wrong?

Defective components. This is why warranties EXIST. :P

I don't know if anyone remembers this, but back when the PS2 was still new, the mean failure rate within the warranty period was something like 12% if memory serves. That means about 1 in every 8 people had to get their PS2 replaced during the warranty period. :o

The X-Box 360 on the other hand had a failure rate that was abysmally high, which is what led Microsoft to put such a ginormous heatsink+fan combo inside the X-Box One. ;)

Well, shoot...

So I left the computer for about ten minutes unplugged and with the battery out, and after powering it back up the audio magically has started working again. Something I should have tried before calling the warranty people, who told me that since I have repartitioned the hard drive, the warranty is shot (yeah, right), afterwards redirecting me to the "premium" warranty service, which I would have to pay through the nose for.

*sigh* computers can be so fickle sometimes 😒

Gemini000 wrote:

Defective components. This is why warranties EXIST. 😜

Best reason for buying a Dell or whatnot instead of building a PC piece-by-piece, methinks.

Jorpho wrote:

Gemini000 wrote:

Defective components. This is why warranties EXIST. :P

Best reason for buying a Dell or whatnot instead of building a PC piece-by-piece, methinks.

Sort of...

If you buy a PC outright, the warranty will come with restrictions and limitations and doing certain things will void the warranty, such as Keenmaster formatting the drive. :P

If you buy the individual components, each component will have a warranty and if it fails, you have to run that component through the RMA process for the company which made it. For something like a video card, this isn't too bad and I have indeed RMAed a video card before. For something like a MOTHERBOARD... well... have fun taking apart and reassembling your entire PC to RMA THAT. :P

keenmaster486 wrote:

Well, shoot...

So I left the computer for about ten minutes unplugged and with the battery out, and after powering it back up the audio magically has started working again. Something I should have tried before calling the warranty people, who told me that since I have repartitioned the hard drive, the warranty is shot (yeah, right), afterwards redirecting me to the "premium" warranty service, which I would have to pay through the nose for.

*sigh* computers can be so fickle sometimes 😒

Does it still keep working when the laptop is on for a longer period of time? BTW, laptops these days don't have a separate sound/graphics card anymore, it's all integrated on the motherboard, so if you have intermittent hardware-related failures it could indicate your laptop's main board is going to fail sooner than expected.

Yeah, the laptop's been on for two days now and seems to be working just fine. I really have no idea what the problem was; it's almost like some bit got tripped in the audio chip and was only reset when all power was removed or something.

Someone might have secretly paid an Ant VooDoo witch doctor to lift the curse...😉