John Lamansky

Tonight my computer froze. Windows itself was locked up. That, like, almost never happens.

But even more unusually, after several seconds of being locked up, suddenly a shrill tone came out of my Dell Dimension 8400 computer tower. It sounded like a prolonged BIOS beep. I turned off the computer right away. And then decided to turn it back on to see if it would boot successfully.

It booted up just fine, thankfully. I did some online research and I found an article that said the following:

Executives at Creative Technology Ltd. said they believe they’ve isolated the so-called “squeal of death” associated with the company’s Audigy sound cards, and that it’s not tied to the sound card itself.

The “squeal,” which consists of a shrill tone caused by an audio loopback after a PC locks up, has been tied to a specific PCI bridge chip used in at least one motherboard from Soyo Computer Inc. The same squeal has also been tied to a PCI glitch in PCs manufactured by Dell Computer Corp., according to Steve Erickson, vice-president of audio development at Creative Labs, Fremont, Calif.

[...]

Creative has worked to track down the source of the squeal. In one of the cases, Creative found the glitch was tied to the AT123S PCI arbitration chip from Attansic Technology Corp., often used to avoid system conflicts in motherboards with a large number of PCI devices. Under high bus loads, the chip locks up the sound, causing the squeal, Erickson said. The chip has been found on the Soyo SY-K7V Dragon Plus motherboard, which uses the Via KT266A chipset.

Hmm, that “under high bus loads, the chip locks up the sound, causing the squeal” sounds about right, considering I was “only” exporting an audio file, editing another, and opening Outlook 2003 at the same time, with a bunch of other programs open. Tsk tsk.

One thing though: it sounded like the tone was coming from inside the computer. The article didn’t say whether this squeal came through the speakers or whether it was internal, so unfortunately I don’t know for sure whether this is the problem.

But next time, I’ll think twice before I bog down my computer to that extent!

Ah finally, an afternoon to just relax. It has been very busy around here since the school year started; so much so that this is my first post of this month. Yikes!

Well anyway, I’m still here! I’ll try to squeeze in a post or two every once in a while. I’ll probably have more time to devote to blogging and my other projects once I’ve finished drivers’ ed next month.

See ya later! Thanks for reading.