Just had this happen to me for the first time in a while and it always catches me off guard.
To give my example, I was listening to music on my PC, and mid-song the PC completely locked up and a loud buzzing sound came through my headphones. I’ve had it happen in the past with other PCs and with game consoles as well, but why does it happen?
In: Technology
The sound hardware in a PC is designed to work with as little interference from the CPU as possible. To that end, it’s generally set up so it can play a chunk of audio from memory without interference–all the CPU needs to do is update the location the audio hardware is playing from every now and again. If the system has completely locked up and is no longer responding, the audio hardware will often just keep playing the last little bit of sound it was told to over and over again–depending how long that sound fragment was you might get an obviously repeated bit of music, or just a buzzing.
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