Windows has had its fair share of bugs these past few decades, and new issues still crop up from time to time. This isn't entirely surprising considering that the operating system is a monolithic piece of software which also contains code that is considered ancient by today's standards. While Microsoft is working on modernizing certain aspects of Windows, it's unlikely that the OS will ever be "bug-free", which is consistent with the inherent nature of software development.
That said, there have been some problems with Windows that are not entirely Microsoft's fault. Now, a prominent Microsoft engineer has shared more details about a rather interesting bug that plagued Windows XP for quite some time.
Windows PCs didn't really like Janet Jackson
In 2022, Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen disclosed details about a bug that used to crash certain Windows XP PCs in a rather strange manner back in the day. Essentially, if you played Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation on a Windows XP system, your hardware was prone to crashing either immediately or in the near future. In fact, PCs in the vicinity of the song would also be susceptible to internal hardware damage.
Naturally, customers didn't know at all why their PCs had suddenly started to crash more often, seemingly without any trigger. After a lot of experimentation and research, the affected OEM and Microsoft figured out that Rhythm Nation actually contained a natural resonant frequency commonly present in the 5400rpm hard drives of the manufacturer's PCs, which adversely affected the functionality of the hardware. Together, the two corporations worked to resolve this issue and added a custom audio filter that would just filter out the problematic frequency in audio playback devices.
The story doesn't end there
Now, in a recent blog post, Chen has shared additional details of this rather funny bug. According to the engineer, the custom audio filter that was implemented in Windows XP stayed as is until the advent of Windows 7. But then, Microsoft added a new rule on Audio Processing Objects (APOs) that enabled customers to completely disable all audio filters.
Of course, the problem with this rule was that people who didn't know about the Janet Jackson issue would remove all filters, thinking that it would allow them to hear more audio. This would make their hardware susceptible to harm again, so the affected OEM applied for an exception to this APO rule. This exemption was then granted by Microsoft, which meant that users couldn't uncheck the audio filter associated with Rhythm Nation.