Comments by "" (@rstevewarmorycom) on "Can Magnets Scramble Computers? | I Didn't Know That" video.

  1. The reason the huge electromagnet did it was that it was AC, meaning it was alternating at mains frequency between North and South many times a second. Secondly, they turned it off and made it reboot from the hard drive. Previously it was just running a program in memory and not accessing what may have been a screwed hard drive. A small bulk demagnetizer could have screwed it up easily.
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  2. You don't have to remove your HDD. If it isn't being accessed, then you wouldn't see the program crash that was only in RAM at the time!!! Waving magnets over it won't erase it, it would require an AC bulk eraser, which is what the big lifting magnet was.
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  3. No. Haven't you ever played with magnets before? I can see a caveman would have been freaked out, or someone from the dark ages who believed in witches, but nowadays??
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  4. The Start menu wasn't up the first time, and it was already up when he tried the bigger magnet and he didn't collapse it, and again not for the coiled magnet. Then for the huge electromagnet he wasn't able to boot at all. The first magnets would not have affected it, I've done that myself to see, but his test simply wasn't well done. A handheld AC bulk eraser would do it, I've done that and had it wipe the HDD.
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