I was able to pick up some cheap games during the steam winter sale and add them to my ever-growing pile of unplayed games (as is tradition). One game I did start playing was Elite Dangerous ( I’m about 30 hours deep into that rabbit hole already). However, I did not find using K&M very enjoyable nor was I about to buy a stick and throttle so I decided to use my Bluetooth DS4 controller. This is where the fun begins. During gameplay, the controller would intermittently behave oddly. It would suddenly stop responding or lag. Sometimes it would spaz out and generate random inputs or the controller would disconnect altogether. I first suspected the steam big picture overlay was interfering with Bluetooth so I bypassed it. No luck. Then I thought the windows Bluetooth setting had some kind of sleep or low power mode that was triggering during gameplay. Again no luck. So I uninstalled and reinstalled any Bluetooth drivers I could find but I was still having issues. I was about to give up and reinstall windows since I knew the DS4 controller was good and many other Bluetooth devices worked fine on my computer. During one last desperate attempt, I launched the game again and to my amazement, the controller worked great. What was different? MY SEATING POSITION! That’s when it clicked! The Bluetooth dongle was in the back of the PC and the way I was sitting, the metal PC case was directly between the dongle and DS4 blocking the signal! I sat there and reflected on my stupidity for a moment and then moved the Bluetooth dongle to the front of the PC and its worked fine ever since. Does anyone have any similar stoires of overlooking the super obvious? ( It might make me feel better)
TLDR: Metal blocks Bluetooth signals and I’m an Idiot.
Maybe not quite as simple but I once freaked out thinking I had destroyed the family PC.
It was my first time poking around inside a PC and knew what I was looking at but not a lot else. So took the ram out of course to take a look at it because PCBs and chips are cool! Once I was done with my fun i put it back and turned on the machine to get a beep and no boot up… tried a few more times and always the same.
Everything looked okay inside so I thought I had killed the RAM. Figureing it is all ready broken and I cant break it any more I went to take the RAM back out and then I noticed it.
It was only half seated, only one clip secured! So i pushed it in properly and made sure the clip was in the notch at then end and all was well again and I left the PC alone for some time after that.
I actually killed a ram stick doing something similar. I offered to clean out my cousins’ laptop that was overheating because at 16 I obviously knew everything there was to know about computer. After taking the back cover off I grabbed one of the ram sticks and gave myself a nasty ESD shock. I shooked it off and continued my work. I cleaned out about half a pound worth of dust and put everything back together. I was quite proud of my work until I realized that the computer was only reporting half of the original ram. Like you I tried everything to fix it but no luck. I murdered that stick of ram in cold blood. I was too scared to confess my crime but lucky my cousin never noticed the missing ram and his computer ran cooler. So win-win I guess.
On a tangent from working in retail. I’ve had plenty of reactions of disbelief when I’ve tried to explain Wi-Fi reception to people, stating that it is really just radio waves in the end. Not magic.
(to people old enough that they have surely had to adjust a TV or radio antenna at some point)
