The funny story of a TV that crashed surrounding Windows PCs

It sounds like the script for a strange detective series, and yet it actually happened: according to musician Priscilla Snow, her connected television Hisense crashed his Windows PC Many times. A problem that was difficult to identify, but which can be corrected.

Increasingly, our interiors and workplaces are connected. The various connected devices can be made to communicate with each other, allowing us, often using a central device, to simply control our entire technological environment. However, it is sometimes difficult to find the origin of a problem affecting the network or the proper functioning of a particular tool.

A PC that starts to do anything: the misadventure of a Montreal musician

Our story begins on a forum, where Priscila Snow recounted the strange problems encountered by her Windows PC. Regularly, the latter refused to open the screen configuration menu, made its MIDI interface keyboard randomly inoperable, its task manager completely blocked, while the acquisition cards became unstable. Initially, forum users recommended a complete reinstallation of Windows.

But things got even stranger when the composer and audio designer noticed her taskbar disappearing while she was trying to figure out why her remote desktop session had ended. The taskbar then returned, before disappearing again a week later. Tired of the situation and determined to find a solution, Piscilla Snow eventually came across a story that matched her problem on the Microsoft support forum.

When a smart TV seems to create problems on a PC

On the Microsoft forum, a user named Narayan B. indicates that, in his experience, the culprit is the Hisense smart TV. More precisely, the problem would originate in the way in which the connected television manages its universal unique identifiers (UUID), used by the UPnP protocol as part of the discovery of devices on the network. The Hisense TV would, in fact, generate new identifiers at regular intervals.

However, Windows, unable to understand that it is the same device, would add each identifier generated to its DAF (Device Association Framework) database. This would cause an overload, causing a chain of malfunctions randomly affecting Bluetooth, the task manager, the file explorer or even the taskbar.

To counter the problem, and get rid of it permanently, Priscilla Snow indicated that she had deleted hundreds of keys from the registry, keys which obviously corresponded to the identifiers randomly created by the smart TV. To prevent a recurrence of the problem, she recommends deactivating the “automatically configure devices connected to the network” option in the private network settings. She also advises against purchasing the Hisense 50Q8G model, or at least making sure to connect it to another network.

Source : Arstechnica / Cohost