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
My keyboard and mouse disconnected for a second everytime I sat on my chair. I have changed my laptop recently and I haven’t been able to reproduce this behaviour.
"Computer works fine now, but the smell of decomp is becoming unbearable… "
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.
Yeah, reminds me of a video I once saw: having an empty can on your desk and using one of those electronic lighters on it makes the display reset for some seconds.
HDMI isn’t shielded that well and the shocked can shortly acts as an antenna, sending gibberish signals that get picked up by the display.
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.
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.
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.
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.
USB mice and keyboards usually have unshielded cables, which are allowed for USB 1.1, since they don’t need higher speeds.
My right monitor will occasionally turn off when the small refrigerator in the room starts its compressor. The right monitor isn’t on battery powered backup like the left one, in an effort to have a bit more time on battery when power really goes out. Took a while for me to figure out the cause, but if I had to troubleshoot that remotely (I do remote IT support for a living) I’d be so confused.
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.
my pc wakes up when I or my cats go near it
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.
Had a similiar issue but with an external hard drive and a bluetooth mouse. When the drive was idle everything was fine, but when IO was happening the pointer got really laggy. Anyway I’ve added some distance between the bluetooth receiver and the drive cable.
