I finally had to explain to a client that their 'haunted' PC was just a loose SATA cable after they spent $200 on a 'spiritual cleansing' for it.

The guy brought in his tower, convinced a ghost was typing random letters, and I popped the side panel to find the data cable hanging by a thread, which honestly made my whole Tuesday.

3 comments

3 Comments

cole_murphy14h ago

You said the data cable was hanging by a thread, but a loose SATA cable wouldn't cause random key presses. That's a keyboard or software thing. The loose cable would make the drive disconnect, so maybe the ghost was deleting files instead. Still a funny fix for a simple problem.

simon_carr11h ago

Hold up, let me play devil's advocate here. I mean, weird stuff happens with old hardware, right? A failing drive sending junk data through the system bus could maybe trick the OS into thinking it's getting input from somewhere. It's not likely, but I've seen weirder fixes that made no sense until they did. Maybe the loose cable was causing a short that messed with the whole board.

jenny_lane126h ago

Lmao, that's amazing. Simon_carr has a point about weird hardware gremlins, but honestly most "haunted" tech just needs the cables pushed in. I once had a monitor "ghost" that was just a bad HDMI cable.