Midnight mystery: The case of the ‘weird’ laptop

It has to be a corollary to Murphy’s Law: Behind the most mysterious tech problems are perfectly explainable causes — but good luck figuring them out. I experienced this firsthand in 2010 at a nonprofit company where I did some consulting on the side.

Many employees at the nonprofit worked at both the office and their homes, depending on their tasks. Sometimes a problem had been occurring for several days before they got around to telling us about it.

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One day a user brought us her laptop. She said it was acting “weird” — she was getting a lot of random pop-ups, blue screens, and frequent lockups. She said that programs had launched randomly for months, but since her laptop seemed to work otherwise, she had ignored them. It wasn’t until the appearance of blue screens and lockups that she took the laptop in for attention.

We carried the unit into the IT shop and started in on the usual diagnostics. First, we booted it up and ran a thorough malware scan with multiple programs, all of which came up clean. However, the unit was not on for long before the dreaded BSOD showed up.

We then popped in the manufacturer’s diagnostic CD and began the hardware tests. The results showed a code for bad memory and the hard drive was throwing SMART errors. The cooling fan had failed completely.

Her laptop was four years old and outside of any warranty. We had some new laptops we’d planned to distribute to those who needed upgrades, so we backed up her data and gave her a new machine. End of story.

Nope. Within a week, she brought the new laptop back to us, complaining of very similar problems. This had us stumped — it was brand new.

We asked her to describe how she used her computer and what happened before and after the problems showed up. She said she always worked at home in the evenings. Before going to bed, she’d close all programs and put the unit into sleep mode. Everything at that point would be working fine.

But when she got up in the morning, the laptop would be turned on, with random programs showing up onscreen. Once, it was Internet Explorer; another time, it was the PowerPoint presentation she had been working on. The most common program she saw was the manufacturer’s hotkey configuration window.

We asked more questions. Did she have kids at home? No. Was there anyone else in the house? Yes, but she had asked and they said they hadn’t touched the computer.

Maybe there was a virus in the data we’d migrated from the old laptop. We took the new machine back into the shop and started running a full battery of malware tools looking for rootkits, worms, and every other form of hard-to-detect malware imaginable. Nothing!

We put in the manufacturer’s diagnostic CD again and let it run the hardware diagnostics in a continuous loop overnight. Nada. We were back to square one.

For good measure, we installed all of the latest driver updates, the newest BIOS update, and a handy tool from the manufacturer that gave us the ability to view BIOS-level hardware event logging. By hook or by crook, we were going to get to the bottom of this.

We gave the laptop back to her, explained what we’d done, and asked her to bring the laptop back to us the next time this happened.

We didn’t have to wait long. The next day she brought the laptop to us with the same scenario: In the morning she saw a screen full of random programs and the hotkey wizard open.

We checked the BIOS hardware log and noticed a pattern.

• At 9:26 p.m., the machine had been put into sleep mode.
• At 11:48 p.m., it had been woken up via keystroke on the keyboard.
• At 12:05 a.m., the CPU’s thermal limit of 120 degrees F had been exceeded, leading to CPU speed reduction and increased fan RPMs.
• At 12:56 a.m., the thermal limit of 120 F had been exceeded again, leading to a critical thermal warning message.
• At 1:19 a.m., the machine cooled down and all was well again.

This was bizarre. Why would the PC suddenly wake up in the middle of the night, get really hot, then suddenly cool off?

We explained our findings and asked the user if she had any ideas. She got a funny look on her face, said she had a theory, and promised to report back to us in the morning. Sure enough, the next morning we received an email from the user stating that she had discovered the cause of the problem and attached an incriminating picture.

She explained that she checked several times after leaving her laptop for the night and everything was fine. But when she snuck into her den at midnight, she caught Boots, her fat orange cat, preparing to take a nice, warm nap on her laptop.

It all made sense. As Boots stepped on the keyboard and settled down, he brought the laptop out of sleep mode and opened random programs — and of course the hotkey wizard. And as his warm, fluffy body snoozed on top of the unit, the internal fan had to work overtime to keep it from melting down. Then when Boots was done with his catnap, he’d jump down, leaving the programs open and the computer cooling down. Mystery solved!

We all got a good laugh from the situation and were glad to know our detective work had finally paid off. Even with the weirdest issues, there is always a logical explanation — you just have to keep digging until you find it.

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