Last night I had a lightning strike nearby and one of two displays blanked for a second. It's behind a UPS and a good surge protector. Likely some EMI/RFI getting into the power and/or display cable of the monitor itself, toppling digital circuits in the panel and waking up the watch dog. The same display has also blanked in the infrequent case where I've discharged static on the mouse: the cables are all parallel, so they'll couple and bounce the panel ground plane, with the same outcome.
These devices are built to the edge of performance margins. Throw in some high voltage transients and things flip out. I think displays are particularly susceptible due to long cables, large surface area and unavoidable shape of common displays: they're effectively patch antennas.
The furniture static case is amusing: I imagine some foam cushions can cause millions of tiny static discharges in parallel when they expand. This will flow through the metal stand to "ground" and probably make a VHF range RFI spike (based on the size of a typical chair frame.) Common 24-27" display panel geometry just happens to be in the same neighborhood...
Adding ferrites to cables, as I see suggested several times, might help. You could also get unlucky and make it worse: choke a line to just the right length an it becomes a better inductor/antenna. Electricity is fun.
Might want to increase humidity. In ESD rooms the humidity is controlled and kept high to reduce static build up.
to add:
> In my particular case, my chair wheels are made out of plastic (non-conductive), so my solution was to “ground” my chair by adding a metallic chain from the chair to my room floor. I got the idea from reddit.
The chain grounded chair is used all the time in ESD rooms. The floors in these rooms use semi-conductive flooring which is tied to a ground rod. The chair is grounded to the floor which is in turn ground bonded to earth.
This. I had a huge problem with static shocking my desk in the dry winter air, causing my monitor to blank out for a few seconds. A small, quiet ultrasonic humidifier completely eliminated the problem.
On a side note, distilled water is highly recommended with ultrasonic humidifiers. Heat-based devices evaporate solely the water and leave mineral deposits behind. Ultrasonics create tiny droplets _along with the dissolved minerals_. Hard tap water or mineralized drinking water will coat your work area in chalk-like dust.
Distilled water is somewhat expensive, and humidifiers chew through water in the winter (at least here). I quickly switched away from ultrasonic for that reason, 6-8 litres of distilled water per day for a medium sized apartment is not sustainable. Evaporative with tap water and biocides is the way to go.
The air outside is extremely dry (<5% relative humidity once heated to indoor temperatures), and the air is quickly replaced by the ventilation. I have anecdotely heard that in the US they have much lower requirements of rate of air replacement than here in Sweden though, so maybe that could work there, but then you would also have stale air, which doesn't sound great.
A reverse osmosis filter will provide plenty of water with nearly no minerals. They're available to install under the sink/counter for a few hundred bucks and provide clean drinking/cooking water and work fine with ultrasonic humidifiers without the issue of depositing minerals everywhere / clogging up the ultrasonic emitter. So its a lot cheaper than buying it plus you get great water.
Those aren't exactly common here, since municipal water is high quality and everyone drinks it as is. It is not like some parts of the world where the tap water is full of chlorine and barely drinkable (I ran into that when I went to Athens).
And if you have your own well, you generally do a cheaper filter targeted at whatever impurity you have (such as an iron filter), rather than a reverse osmosis filter.
With reverse osmosis the water also gets too pure for drinking and you need to add back minerals to it for safety, it is not healthy to drink ultra pure water for any prolonged period of time.
Man. It seems like every avenue of humidification is paved with difficulty.
Ultrasonic humidifiers (and others) that spritz water droplets out? They need fed expensive water, or they spread particulates everywhere. Health aspects aside, it's nice living in a house that isn't bathed in something that looks like chalk dust.
Evaporative methods? They're similar in their lust for pure water, and the particles tend to concentrate at the humidifier instead of everywhere else. That accumulation needs to be cleaned up periodically (or parts replaced, depending on how rent-seeking the design is).
Distilled water from the store? That's gloriously clean water, but it represents a money pit that can never be filled up.
RO water? Sounds nice (is nice), but they're expensive and inefficient (producing 1 liter of RO water wastes in the realm of 3 or 4 liters down the drain). The systems need installed, and not everyone has the capacity to wrangle their own plumbing projects.
And as an added bonus: Drinking RO water saps our precious bodily fluids of the minerals and electrolytes that people crave to stay alive, so we also seek to deliberately impurify it.
I guess that means that an ideal path to RO-oriented humidification, we end up with 3 taps at the kitchen sink, then? One that provides demineralized for the humidifier, another that provides remineralized water for drinking, and one for everything else?
---
It's all ugly in some way.
Isn't there some kind of evaporative humidification method that is easy and inexpensive to clean? Something I can just feed cheap tap water into, and that I only have to deal with cleaning once a month or something? That sounds like the path of least pain for me in my neck of the woods.
> Hard tap water or mineralized drinking water will coat your work area in chalk-like dust.
Also, y'know, your lungs. Deep inside your lungs.
Running tap water in an ultrasonic humidifer's going to spike the particulate pollution (PM1/2.5/10) throughout your entire house by hundreds of ug/m^3. And it seems that children are particularly prone to inhaling this stuff and having it deposited in their lungs (~2x more particles and ~3.5x more mass).
They really shouldn't be used with anything except distilled water. The things should come with a continuity tester that disables them if the water's conductive or something.
This was happening to a colleague's monitor. As it happened frequently when either of us got up, I suspected it was the fabric of the chair, which was probably some kind of acrylic. I made slips for the ass part of the chair from 100% cotton, and to my amazement it fixed the problem.
Ferrite chokes easily fix this problem. Very useful to have a box of them in an office full of people.
It’s pretty clear that most modern standards (HDMI, DisplayPort, thunderbolt, etc) are so close to their physical limits that there’s no more room for errors.
Ferrite beads are awesome, and I agree that everyone involved with computing and electronical things should have an assortment of them nearby. They can fix problems.
And yeah, we're pretty close to the limits. We always have been, though: At all points on the timeline of digital electronics, we've been pushing speeds to be as fast as we can manage today. But tomorrow (and the next day, and the day after that), we'll solve more of the problems and yet-again make it even faster.
Which brings us back to...ferrite beads, and problems.
I got introduced to Monoprice back when HDMI was still new and somewhat finicky, when stores like Best Buy were fond of selling $180 HDMI cables (and even Wal-Mart wanted something like $60). In that crazy world, Monoprice was the place to buy inexpensive cables that worked.
And it was clear that HDMI was the future, so I placed an order for a half-dozen or so different-colored HDMI cables with ferrites pre-installed near each end.
They showed up, and... they barely worked. They were glitchy, touchy, and intermittent. I was frustrated, and I felt like I'd made a poor decision that cost me money instead of saved me money. In fact, I was rather pissed off by all of this.
With nothing to lose, I used a knife to cut away the plastic overmolding on the ferrites on one of the cables that was being particularly problematic. And then I smashed those ferrites with a hammer.
With the ferrites thus-removed, the cable immediately began working perfectly. It was glitch-free. I couldn't get it to misbehave even if I tried. I repeated this with all of the other cables from that order and they all started working perfectly, too.
---
So, ferrites. Their presence adds a little bit of series-mode inductance. And that's something that can be useful. It slows down the edge of things like transient voltage spikes. And since the spikes are transient, slowing their rise-time in this way reduces their bandwidth and peak amplitude. Adding a snap-on ferrite bead can be enough to turn a problematic data bus into a well-behaved data bus.
But! They're just dumb hunks of minerals. They're indiscriminate. They can't distinguish betwixt the bad signals and the good signals -- everything is affected. So while ferrites can be useful in a fight against unwanted noise, they can also be destructive of the signals that we're trying to use.
They're good to have available, but they're also not necessarily something that someone should go forth and attach to every cable they find. If there's no problem that needs solved, then there's no solving to be done.
(These I days I make it a point to actively avoid buying cables that have ferrites pre-installed, both professionally and at home. But I've got a stash of snap-on ferrites in the top drawer of the toolbox just in case; it's good to have options.)
It looks like the youtube embed is broken. It is supposed to link to a EEV blog video. It is wild how many times someone brings me broken equipment and it turns out EEV blog has already investigated the same issue for the same device.
I'm having the same problem, except it's crashing my dang PC. Actually, it's only crashing the GPU, but that's pretty indistinguishable from the whole PC crashing in practice.
Now I'm wondering if I should ground my chair to the shelf my PC is sitting on.
As pretty obvious evidence this is static related, it only happens in the winter.
I've had the same problem for a couple years - specifically the GPU crashing. Had a very hard time isolating the issue - seems like a mix of static + the EMI spike OP talks about (it happens most reliably when I stand up quickly from my desk chair).
My guess is that, like OP, we're both getting interference in the our DP connections, and that that interference is in our cases causing the GPUs to crash.
Haven't had a chance to try ferrite cores yet but that was going to be my first test.
other things not encapsulated in the parts list: My PC sits on the bottom shelf of a foodservice-style wire shelving rack. My motherboard's I/O shield is integrated and wasn't a perfect fit into the case.
The DP cable is, probably, in-spec. I usually buy Cable Matters or BlueRigger.
I do wonder if ferrite cores would help.
edit: The only similarity I notice in our builds is lower-end ASRock b650 motherboards.
Not an issue for the author but a rolling desk chair on one of those plastic mats made to protect a carpeted floor are the perfect storm for generating static. Also a fun fact that gas tanker trucks used to drag a chain for this reason.
Similar observation: sometimes when we get off the couch, on which we have a blanket made from artificial fibres, it causes our TV to go black for a couple of seconds. The TV is wall mounted and a metre from the end of the couch, and about 3.5’ from where we’re sitting.
This has happened at our company so many times... I thought I was crazy when it seemed to be related to static electricity. But it was obvious when someone got zapped and it immediately blacked the monitor.
I played with a negative ion generator at my desk, and it was great at knocking out my 1440p monitor signal, but the 1080p seemed more resilient.
Since then I got a 4K display, and it likes to drop out in thunderstorms. I switched to a better DP to HDMI adapter, and the chunky original Samsung cable. I'm waiting for the next storm to see if it helps.
Many years ago I had a LG CRT that often would turn off in the exact moment I entered the bedroom. The monitor was configured to go to sleep after 20 or so minutes of inactivity, so it was supposed to turn off on its own. And I always assumed it was a case of only noticing it when it did happen (like when you buy a car and suddenly start seeing the same model everywhere)... But it always seemed uncannily frequent... Now I wonder if I might have somehow disturbed the electric field each time
I replaced some ceiling boob lights with flush-mounted LED panels -- they are a nice warm color, and I like them. I have a UHF/VHF antenna in my attic and I use it once a year to watch the Superbowl.
I found out this year that my reception is horrendous if those lights are on. The coax cable which goes from the attic to the TV downstairs runs right above the lights and the LED driver / PWM noise must couple with the coaxial cable. I'm not running anything fancy like RG6 since I just re-used whatever cable was already run up there from the 70s.
This has been happening forever but only on my bike trainer setup. I have a laptop and an external display mounted in front of my handlebars. The screen will reliably go blank when I remove my outer layer as I start to warm up. I tried grounding myself but that didn’t seem to help. I had just assumed static electricity due to the Lycra shorts rubbing against the saddle. Maybe the ferrites will work.
I don't use microSD cards anymore, but they had been in my feature phone as well as my Raspberry Pi. I ran into so, so many problems with the Raspberry Pi related to storage. It would lock up at the drop of a hat. It would often have major trouble reading/writing the sdcard, especially at startup. My phone, for its part, would complain about a corrupted filesystem, or couldn't access files, immediately after I replaced the sdcard in its slot.
Of course I live in the Phoenix metro area, and it's dry all year round. So I began taking some extraordinary measures. Of course, I had a little "repair kit" containing one of those basic ESD wrist straps. I used that. I would also do all card swaps in the bathroom without a mat. I would also, you know, remove any garments that could possibly generate ESD in any way! And, I invested in the heavy-duty, rugged type of sdcards like you'd find in a GoPro on a skydiver's kit.
These days there isn't anything using sdcards anymore. My Pixel 8 Pro doesn't even have a slot for it. I'm thankful, because USB thumb drives are more resistant to this stuff, and I make use of those very sparingly, as it's mostly about cloud storage now.
I have the exact same problem, except it affects my cheapo keyboard. Almost every time I move from my desk, the Num/Caps/Scroll Lock LEDs flash up as the controller restarts. And since it's a PS/2 model, if I'm holding a key and let it go as I'm standing up, it never sends the termination sequence and keeps typing it until I press it again.
I'll definitely try some of the tricks from this article.
I have a similar problem, except instead of shutting things down, static discharge seems to wake my computer up (from suspend-to-ram). I have yet to figure out why that happens, but it's not the mouse or keyboard.
My guess is that, in the vein of the "monitor flickering" symptom, your PC sees the DP/HDMI cable disconnect and reconnect due to the static. The reconnection wakes it up.
I don't know. Manually {dis,re}connecting the cable doesn't wake the PC up, but it's too hard to reproduce reliably to tell if having it disconnected makes a difference.
Make sure that all your wall outlets in the area are actually grounded. Get an outlet tester at a hardware store and check. They cost about $10. Good first step. There are sometimes 3-prong outlets where the ground connection is not connected, especially in older buildings. This is an electrical code violation, so if there's a landlord involved, get them to fix it.
Laptop plus external monitor is an interesting case. The monitor should be grounded via its power plug, but the laptop's ground may be floating. Not sure about the grounding path for Apple laptops. Attempts to find info on laptop grounding online are returning AI slop.
If everything is running off 2-prong plug external power supplies, there may not be any grounding.
Get the room humidity above 40% and most static effects will disappear. The water in the air grounds them out. That's often the easiest solution.
There are electrostatic field meters. Halfway decent ones start around US$150. I used to have a surplus store field detector on my desk when assembling electronics. It would squawk if the field level got high. Wearing a wrist strap would shut it up. With a meter, you stop guessing. This isn't mysterious, just something that needs instrumentation to chase down.
The chair chain is good, but make sure that the shiny enameled chain and the floors are actually conductive.
Outlet testers only go so far. They can produce false assurance.
One of the things that people (well, idiots -- but idiots are also people) discover when replacing an old 2-prong outlet with a new 3-prong outlet from the big box store is that they've only got 2 wires to work with. There is no ground conductor is present.
So they do the wrong thing the wrong way, and connect the ground screw on the new outlet to the neutral wire. This satisfies them ("all of the outlet parts are wired up!"), and sometimes they even think about it hard enough to justify it as being Good Enough ("ground and neutral are connected together back at the panel anyway, so it doesn't matter!").
That's bad, mmkay? Nobody should do this. Ever. It is unsafe. But sometimes people do it anyway. It's a real problem that exists in the real world.
This problem is made worse because an outlet tester won't detect this fault -- at all.
And the badness doesn't stop there, but instead compounds: The tester doesn't just fail to detect the fault. Instead, the tester will (must) cheerfully report this condition as being perfectly cromulent and safe. That false assurance is problematic in and of itself.
So, yeah: Everyone should have an outlet tester. But everyone should also be aware that they aren't idiot-proof -- their results can be poisoned by idiots from the past.
---
Anyway, code. NEC 406.4(D)(2) allows replacing an ungrounded outlet with a GFCI outlet (with the ground screw disconnected and doing nothing at all). The outlet must be marked (that's why GFCI outlets include a sheet of stickers in the box that say "NO EQUIPMENT GROUND"), but it's code-compliant to do this.
So even if one pushes a landlord about an ungrounded 3-prong outlet on the wall, that doesn't mean that they're going to send someone out and tear into things to install a ground wire. It might instead mean that they put a GFCI outlet in, put a sticker on it, and call that good enough.
And, safety-wise: A GFCI used in this way actually is good enough.
But even though safe, it doesn't help at all with EMI/RFI/static issues and electronics, which the landlord doesn't have to care about. That part isn't their problem. :)
(406.4 also allows replacing existing 2-prong outlets with new 2-prong outlets, which are still being made in factories every day.)
Right. I've seen unconnected grounds. And I still have a 220V dryer grounded via the neutral. Hasn't been code for new installations since 1996, but is grandfathered.
And yes, I know about GFCIs with no ground and the warning. Had one of those once.
Still, an outlet tester will find the common case. I suspect that the situation here is that everything is on 2-wire external power supplies and there is no path to ground anywhere. But by plugging in an external monitor, the user created more external EMI exposure, by bringing his floating ground out of the laptop and monitor. Standalone laptops are tested for EMI compatibility (emissions in the US, emissions and sensitivity in the EU), but that doesn't cover being cabled up to random external devices.
I find this very interesting, especially given that there is a paper from 1993 (linked in the artcile) that explains the issue, but it is still happening - and maybe nowadays even more than ever?
Some folks are suggesting ferrite beads, others are suggesting shorter cables.
If one has a medium-sized chunk of money to burn, one could try fiber optic cabling. I've personally had -AFAICT- perfect results from Monoprice's "SlimRun AV" fiber DisplayPort cables, and Nippon Labs' fiber HDMI cables. [0] I expect that Monoprice's fiber HDMI cables and Nippon Labs' fiber DisplayPort cables are also fine, but I've never used those, so I cannot comment.
For folks concerned about "dreadfully fragile" fiber optic cables, I do know that the Monoprice cables are durable... a vigorous misadventure caused me to torque the hell out of the monitor-side connector. The connector bent, forcing the case split a bit at the seam. After some counter-bending of the connector and pushing its case back mostly closed, the cable works fine. Given the outward similarity in build quality, I expect that the Nippon Labs cable I have is at least as durable.
[0] Both families of cables drive my "4k" HDR monitor at 60Hz without lossy compression.
This happened all over our office for a while after we got new monitors, it was the pneumatic jacks (?) in the chairs compressing triggering them, it took a while before anyone figured it out, IT eventually went round and put ferrite cores on all the cables for the monitors and that seemed to fix it.
Last night I had a lightning strike nearby and one of two displays blanked for a second. It's behind a UPS and a good surge protector. Likely some EMI/RFI getting into the power and/or display cable of the monitor itself, toppling digital circuits in the panel and waking up the watch dog. The same display has also blanked in the infrequent case where I've discharged static on the mouse: the cables are all parallel, so they'll couple and bounce the panel ground plane, with the same outcome.
These devices are built to the edge of performance margins. Throw in some high voltage transients and things flip out. I think displays are particularly susceptible due to long cables, large surface area and unavoidable shape of common displays: they're effectively patch antennas.
The furniture static case is amusing: I imagine some foam cushions can cause millions of tiny static discharges in parallel when they expand. This will flow through the metal stand to "ground" and probably make a VHF range RFI spike (based on the size of a typical chair frame.) Common 24-27" display panel geometry just happens to be in the same neighborhood...
Adding ferrites to cables, as I see suggested several times, might help. You could also get unlucky and make it worse: choke a line to just the right length an it becomes a better inductor/antenna. Electricity is fun.
My understanding is it's the piston and gas, undergoing rapid decompressor.
Might want to increase humidity. In ESD rooms the humidity is controlled and kept high to reduce static build up.
to add:
> In my particular case, my chair wheels are made out of plastic (non-conductive), so my solution was to “ground” my chair by adding a metallic chain from the chair to my room floor. I got the idea from reddit.
The chain grounded chair is used all the time in ESD rooms. The floors in these rooms use semi-conductive flooring which is tied to a ground rod. The chair is grounded to the floor which is in turn ground bonded to earth.
This. I had a huge problem with static shocking my desk in the dry winter air, causing my monitor to blank out for a few seconds. A small, quiet ultrasonic humidifier completely eliminated the problem.
On a side note, distilled water is highly recommended with ultrasonic humidifiers. Heat-based devices evaporate solely the water and leave mineral deposits behind. Ultrasonics create tiny droplets _along with the dissolved minerals_. Hard tap water or mineralized drinking water will coat your work area in chalk-like dust.
Distilled water is somewhat expensive, and humidifiers chew through water in the winter (at least here). I quickly switched away from ultrasonic for that reason, 6-8 litres of distilled water per day for a medium sized apartment is not sustainable. Evaporative with tap water and biocides is the way to go.
The air outside is extremely dry (<5% relative humidity once heated to indoor temperatures), and the air is quickly replaced by the ventilation. I have anecdotely heard that in the US they have much lower requirements of rate of air replacement than here in Sweden though, so maybe that could work there, but then you would also have stale air, which doesn't sound great.
A reverse osmosis filter will provide plenty of water with nearly no minerals. They're available to install under the sink/counter for a few hundred bucks and provide clean drinking/cooking water and work fine with ultrasonic humidifiers without the issue of depositing minerals everywhere / clogging up the ultrasonic emitter. So its a lot cheaper than buying it plus you get great water.
Those aren't exactly common here, since municipal water is high quality and everyone drinks it as is. It is not like some parts of the world where the tap water is full of chlorine and barely drinkable (I ran into that when I went to Athens).
And if you have your own well, you generally do a cheaper filter targeted at whatever impurity you have (such as an iron filter), rather than a reverse osmosis filter.
With reverse osmosis the water also gets too pure for drinking and you need to add back minerals to it for safety, it is not healthy to drink ultra pure water for any prolonged period of time.
Man. It seems like every avenue of humidification is paved with difficulty.
Ultrasonic humidifiers (and others) that spritz water droplets out? They need fed expensive water, or they spread particulates everywhere. Health aspects aside, it's nice living in a house that isn't bathed in something that looks like chalk dust.
Evaporative methods? They're similar in their lust for pure water, and the particles tend to concentrate at the humidifier instead of everywhere else. That accumulation needs to be cleaned up periodically (or parts replaced, depending on how rent-seeking the design is).
Distilled water from the store? That's gloriously clean water, but it represents a money pit that can never be filled up.
RO water? Sounds nice (is nice), but they're expensive and inefficient (producing 1 liter of RO water wastes in the realm of 3 or 4 liters down the drain). The systems need installed, and not everyone has the capacity to wrangle their own plumbing projects.
And as an added bonus: Drinking RO water saps our precious bodily fluids of the minerals and electrolytes that people crave to stay alive, so we also seek to deliberately impurify it.
I guess that means that an ideal path to RO-oriented humidification, we end up with 3 taps at the kitchen sink, then? One that provides demineralized for the humidifier, another that provides remineralized water for drinking, and one for everything else?
---
It's all ugly in some way.
Isn't there some kind of evaporative humidification method that is easy and inexpensive to clean? Something I can just feed cheap tap water into, and that I only have to deal with cleaning once a month or something? That sounds like the path of least pain for me in my neck of the woods.
> Hard tap water or mineralized drinking water will coat your work area in chalk-like dust.
Also, y'know, your lungs. Deep inside your lungs.
Running tap water in an ultrasonic humidifer's going to spike the particulate pollution (PM1/2.5/10) throughout your entire house by hundreds of ug/m^3. And it seems that children are particularly prone to inhaling this stuff and having it deposited in their lungs (~2x more particles and ~3.5x more mass).
They really shouldn't be used with anything except distilled water. The things should come with a continuity tester that disables them if the water's conductive or something.
Or use an evaporative humidifier.
Don't use ultrasonic humidifiers. You are spraying mold into your lungs, guaranteed.
Or just clean it sometimes?
Evaporative > Ultrasonic, hands down.
Walmart also solved their shopping cart shocking problems with a piece of metal that drags on the ground.
https://external-preview.redd.it/XKDz1OYC3I7A8BPUHzbzNPiysM-...
This was happening to a colleague's monitor. As it happened frequently when either of us got up, I suspected it was the fabric of the chair, which was probably some kind of acrylic. I made slips for the ass part of the chair from 100% cotton, and to my amazement it fixed the problem.
Ferrite chokes easily fix this problem. Very useful to have a box of them in an office full of people.
It’s pretty clear that most modern standards (HDMI, DisplayPort, thunderbolt, etc) are so close to their physical limits that there’s no more room for errors.
Ferrite beads are awesome, and I agree that everyone involved with computing and electronical things should have an assortment of them nearby. They can fix problems.
And yeah, we're pretty close to the limits. We always have been, though: At all points on the timeline of digital electronics, we've been pushing speeds to be as fast as we can manage today. But tomorrow (and the next day, and the day after that), we'll solve more of the problems and yet-again make it even faster.
Which brings us back to...ferrite beads, and problems.
I got introduced to Monoprice back when HDMI was still new and somewhat finicky, when stores like Best Buy were fond of selling $180 HDMI cables (and even Wal-Mart wanted something like $60). In that crazy world, Monoprice was the place to buy inexpensive cables that worked.
And it was clear that HDMI was the future, so I placed an order for a half-dozen or so different-colored HDMI cables with ferrites pre-installed near each end.
They showed up, and... they barely worked. They were glitchy, touchy, and intermittent. I was frustrated, and I felt like I'd made a poor decision that cost me money instead of saved me money. In fact, I was rather pissed off by all of this.
With nothing to lose, I used a knife to cut away the plastic overmolding on the ferrites on one of the cables that was being particularly problematic. And then I smashed those ferrites with a hammer.
With the ferrites thus-removed, the cable immediately began working perfectly. It was glitch-free. I couldn't get it to misbehave even if I tried. I repeated this with all of the other cables from that order and they all started working perfectly, too.
---
So, ferrites. Their presence adds a little bit of series-mode inductance. And that's something that can be useful. It slows down the edge of things like transient voltage spikes. And since the spikes are transient, slowing their rise-time in this way reduces their bandwidth and peak amplitude. Adding a snap-on ferrite bead can be enough to turn a problematic data bus into a well-behaved data bus.
But! They're just dumb hunks of minerals. They're indiscriminate. They can't distinguish betwixt the bad signals and the good signals -- everything is affected. So while ferrites can be useful in a fight against unwanted noise, they can also be destructive of the signals that we're trying to use.
They're good to have available, but they're also not necessarily something that someone should go forth and attach to every cable they find. If there's no problem that needs solved, then there's no solving to be done.
(These I days I make it a point to actively avoid buying cables that have ferrites pre-installed, both professionally and at home. But I've got a stash of snap-on ferrites in the top drawer of the toolbox just in case; it's good to have options.)
I miss the old days when the choke was built into the (analog VGA) cable.
It looks like the youtube embed is broken. It is supposed to link to a EEV blog video. It is wild how many times someone brings me broken equipment and it turns out EEV blog has already investigated the same issue for the same device.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-V_Z3bD_PA
Remember the "degauss" button? I had no idea what it did, but the sound it made sure was satisfying.
https://youtube.com/shorts/R0OhD2Bc6FY
That attempted to demagnetize the components in the CRT that could cause beam deflection and warped colors.
That "component" was the shadow mask: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mask.
I'm having the same problem, except it's crashing my dang PC. Actually, it's only crashing the GPU, but that's pretty indistinguishable from the whole PC crashing in practice.
Now I'm wondering if I should ground my chair to the shelf my PC is sitting on.
As pretty obvious evidence this is static related, it only happens in the winter.
I've had the same problem for a couple years - specifically the GPU crashing. Had a very hard time isolating the issue - seems like a mix of static + the EMI spike OP talks about (it happens most reliably when I stand up quickly from my desk chair).
My guess is that, like OP, we're both getting interference in the our DP connections, and that that interference is in our cases causing the GPUs to crash.
Haven't had a chance to try ferrite cores yet but that was going to be my first test.
Curious what system specs you have in case we have overlap in anything that could isolate the issue. Mine: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Xpdb8Z
Mine: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Kw7wh9 It was happening more often when I had a Sapphire NITRO+ RX VEGA64, but the 6950 XT isn't immune.
other things not encapsulated in the parts list: My PC sits on the bottom shelf of a foodservice-style wire shelving rack. My motherboard's I/O shield is integrated and wasn't a perfect fit into the case.
The DP cable is, probably, in-spec. I usually buy Cable Matters or BlueRigger.
I do wonder if ferrite cores would help.
edit: The only similarity I notice in our builds is lower-end ASRock b650 motherboards.
Not an issue for the author but a rolling desk chair on one of those plastic mats made to protect a carpeted floor are the perfect storm for generating static. Also a fun fact that gas tanker trucks used to drag a chain for this reason.
Similar observation: sometimes when we get off the couch, on which we have a blanket made from artificial fibres, it causes our TV to go black for a couple of seconds. The TV is wall mounted and a metre from the end of the couch, and about 3.5’ from where we’re sitting.
This has happened at our company so many times... I thought I was crazy when it seemed to be related to static electricity. But it was obvious when someone got zapped and it immediately blacked the monitor.
I played with a negative ion generator at my desk, and it was great at knocking out my 1440p monitor signal, but the 1080p seemed more resilient.
Since then I got a 4K display, and it likes to drop out in thunderstorms. I switched to a better DP to HDMI adapter, and the chunky original Samsung cable. I'm waiting for the next storm to see if it helps.
My hdmi cable causes my headset dongle’s range to significantly decrease. From like 50+ feet to 10.
Many years ago I had a LG CRT that often would turn off in the exact moment I entered the bedroom. The monitor was configured to go to sleep after 20 or so minutes of inactivity, so it was supposed to turn off on its own. And I always assumed it was a case of only noticing it when it did happen (like when you buy a car and suddenly start seeing the same model everywhere)... But it always seemed uncannily frequent... Now I wonder if I might have somehow disturbed the electric field each time
I replaced some ceiling boob lights with flush-mounted LED panels -- they are a nice warm color, and I like them. I have a UHF/VHF antenna in my attic and I use it once a year to watch the Superbowl.
I found out this year that my reception is horrendous if those lights are on. The coax cable which goes from the attic to the TV downstairs runs right above the lights and the LED driver / PWM noise must couple with the coaxial cable. I'm not running anything fancy like RG6 since I just re-used whatever cable was already run up there from the 70s.
Florescent lighting in the bathroom?
This has been happening forever but only on my bike trainer setup. I have a laptop and an external display mounted in front of my handlebars. The screen will reliably go blank when I remove my outer layer as I start to warm up. I tried grounding myself but that didn’t seem to help. I had just assumed static electricity due to the Lycra shorts rubbing against the saddle. Maybe the ferrites will work.
Happened to me too with a new chair.
I suspected static electricity. The solution was a thin cotton pillow on the seat. Problem gone.
Nice, I made a cotton slip for my seat, which worked the same way I guess.
I don't use microSD cards anymore, but they had been in my feature phone as well as my Raspberry Pi. I ran into so, so many problems with the Raspberry Pi related to storage. It would lock up at the drop of a hat. It would often have major trouble reading/writing the sdcard, especially at startup. My phone, for its part, would complain about a corrupted filesystem, or couldn't access files, immediately after I replaced the sdcard in its slot.
Of course I live in the Phoenix metro area, and it's dry all year round. So I began taking some extraordinary measures. Of course, I had a little "repair kit" containing one of those basic ESD wrist straps. I used that. I would also do all card swaps in the bathroom without a mat. I would also, you know, remove any garments that could possibly generate ESD in any way! And, I invested in the heavy-duty, rugged type of sdcards like you'd find in a GoPro on a skydiver's kit.
These days there isn't anything using sdcards anymore. My Pixel 8 Pro doesn't even have a slot for it. I'm thankful, because USB thumb drives are more resistant to this stuff, and I make use of those very sparingly, as it's mostly about cloud storage now.
I have the exact same problem, except it affects my cheapo keyboard. Almost every time I move from my desk, the Num/Caps/Scroll Lock LEDs flash up as the controller restarts. And since it's a PS/2 model, if I'm holding a key and let it go as I'm standing up, it never sends the termination sequence and keeps typing it until I press it again.
I'll definitely try some of the tricks from this article.
It affects my non-cheapo keyboard (Ultimate Hacking Keyboard) as well. Though thankfully I don't have the termination sequence issue.
One of my monitors just did the same thing yesterday as the compressor in my office minifridge shut off.
I don't think my DP cables have any ferrite chokes built in...
I have a similar problem, except instead of shutting things down, static discharge seems to wake my computer up (from suspend-to-ram). I have yet to figure out why that happens, but it's not the mouse or keyboard.
My guess is that, in the vein of the "monitor flickering" symptom, your PC sees the DP/HDMI cable disconnect and reconnect due to the static. The reconnection wakes it up.
I don't know. Manually {dis,re}connecting the cable doesn't wake the PC up, but it's too hard to reproduce reliably to tell if having it disconnected makes a difference.
Have you checked USB peripherals? I could see a keyboard or mouse causing a wake-up.
Any idea if ESD can damage the monitor over time?
Make sure that all your wall outlets in the area are actually grounded. Get an outlet tester at a hardware store and check. They cost about $10. Good first step. There are sometimes 3-prong outlets where the ground connection is not connected, especially in older buildings. This is an electrical code violation, so if there's a landlord involved, get them to fix it.
Laptop plus external monitor is an interesting case. The monitor should be grounded via its power plug, but the laptop's ground may be floating. Not sure about the grounding path for Apple laptops. Attempts to find info on laptop grounding online are returning AI slop. If everything is running off 2-prong plug external power supplies, there may not be any grounding.
Get the room humidity above 40% and most static effects will disappear. The water in the air grounds them out. That's often the easiest solution.
There are electrostatic field meters. Halfway decent ones start around US$150. I used to have a surplus store field detector on my desk when assembling electronics. It would squawk if the field level got high. Wearing a wrist strap would shut it up. With a meter, you stop guessing. This isn't mysterious, just something that needs instrumentation to chase down.
The chair chain is good, but make sure that the shiny enameled chain and the floors are actually conductive.
Outlet testers only go so far. They can produce false assurance.
One of the things that people (well, idiots -- but idiots are also people) discover when replacing an old 2-prong outlet with a new 3-prong outlet from the big box store is that they've only got 2 wires to work with. There is no ground conductor is present.
So they do the wrong thing the wrong way, and connect the ground screw on the new outlet to the neutral wire. This satisfies them ("all of the outlet parts are wired up!"), and sometimes they even think about it hard enough to justify it as being Good Enough ("ground and neutral are connected together back at the panel anyway, so it doesn't matter!").
That's bad, mmkay? Nobody should do this. Ever. It is unsafe. But sometimes people do it anyway. It's a real problem that exists in the real world.
This problem is made worse because an outlet tester won't detect this fault -- at all.
And the badness doesn't stop there, but instead compounds: The tester doesn't just fail to detect the fault. Instead, the tester will (must) cheerfully report this condition as being perfectly cromulent and safe. That false assurance is problematic in and of itself.
So, yeah: Everyone should have an outlet tester. But everyone should also be aware that they aren't idiot-proof -- their results can be poisoned by idiots from the past.
---
Anyway, code. NEC 406.4(D)(2) allows replacing an ungrounded outlet with a GFCI outlet (with the ground screw disconnected and doing nothing at all). The outlet must be marked (that's why GFCI outlets include a sheet of stickers in the box that say "NO EQUIPMENT GROUND"), but it's code-compliant to do this.
So even if one pushes a landlord about an ungrounded 3-prong outlet on the wall, that doesn't mean that they're going to send someone out and tear into things to install a ground wire. It might instead mean that they put a GFCI outlet in, put a sticker on it, and call that good enough.
And, safety-wise: A GFCI used in this way actually is good enough.
But even though safe, it doesn't help at all with EMI/RFI/static issues and electronics, which the landlord doesn't have to care about. That part isn't their problem. :)
(406.4 also allows replacing existing 2-prong outlets with new 2-prong outlets, which are still being made in factories every day.)
Right. I've seen unconnected grounds. And I still have a 220V dryer grounded via the neutral. Hasn't been code for new installations since 1996, but is grandfathered.
And yes, I know about GFCIs with no ground and the warning. Had one of those once.
Still, an outlet tester will find the common case. I suspect that the situation here is that everything is on 2-wire external power supplies and there is no path to ground anywhere. But by plugging in an external monitor, the user created more external EMI exposure, by bringing his floating ground out of the laptop and monitor. Standalone laptops are tested for EMI compatibility (emissions in the US, emissions and sensitivity in the EU), but that doesn't cover being cabled up to random external devices.
I had that with cheapo mechanical keyboard, on particularly dry office days I could hover my hand over it to make it crash and restart
This happens to me when I brush off my mousepad too fast with my palm. It will also cause my wireless headset to "reboot".
I use wired headphones, and I'll get an electric discharge from my inner ear and through my earbuds when I get up from my chair.
It's not painful, but feels like pop rocks in my ear canal.
I find this very interesting, especially given that there is a paper from 1993 (linked in the artcile) that explains the issue, but it is still happening - and maybe nowadays even more than ever?
I thought it was me bumping my table. But now you have me wondering if it's charge buildup.
The sound card on my windows computer dies if i turn the desk fan i have off! I should try it
Some folks are suggesting ferrite beads, others are suggesting shorter cables.
If one has a medium-sized chunk of money to burn, one could try fiber optic cabling. I've personally had -AFAICT- perfect results from Monoprice's "SlimRun AV" fiber DisplayPort cables, and Nippon Labs' fiber HDMI cables. [0] I expect that Monoprice's fiber HDMI cables and Nippon Labs' fiber DisplayPort cables are also fine, but I've never used those, so I cannot comment.
For folks concerned about "dreadfully fragile" fiber optic cables, I do know that the Monoprice cables are durable... a vigorous misadventure caused me to torque the hell out of the monitor-side connector. The connector bent, forcing the case split a bit at the seam. After some counter-bending of the connector and pushing its case back mostly closed, the cable works fine. Given the outward similarity in build quality, I expect that the Nippon Labs cable I have is at least as durable.
[0] Both families of cables drive my "4k" HDR monitor at 60Hz without lossy compression.
Sounds like very cheap monitor which had lot of cost cutting done on side of protections of inputs.
I would not be surprised that touching such monitor will electrocute you.
This happened all over our office for a while after we got new monitors, it was the pneumatic jacks (?) in the chairs compressing triggering them, it took a while before anyone figured it out, IT eventually went round and put ferrite cores on all the cables for the monitors and that seemed to fix it.
I freaking hate my Ikea chair. Thing shocks me every time I get up from it and then touch it.
Shorten the display cable.