The reason behind the mysterious phenomenon that 'PC screen goes black when sitting on IKEA chair' has been revealed



Engineer Felix Häcker has reported a strange phenomenon where, when he sits down or stands up from a chair he bought at IKEA, his PC monitor suddenly goes black.

Felix Häcker: 'So folks, don't forget to check...' - Mastodon

https://mastodon.social/@haeckerfelix/110272427676278609



Häcker said that he had been suffering from a phenomenon in which his PC screen would suddenly go black for a few seconds for several weeks. He had replaced all the cables and plugged the monitor cable into a different port, but nothing had changed. The only thing that had happened was that he had started using a chair called ' MARKUS ' that he had purchased from IKEA, which made Häcker think that the IKEA chair might be related to the strange phenomenon.


By

Karl Baron

Suspecting that the IKEA chair might be causing some kind of poor contact, Häcker tried wiggling the table and cables, but the IKEA chair didn't seem to be making contact with the table. The screen also went black when he sat down or stood up.

I also bought a different chair and tested it, but the screen did not go black. For some reason, the screen only turned off when I sat on the MARKUS.

So, when he searched for 'IKEA MARKUS chair screen problem', he found the following forum.

Hauptmonitor is sharp black | ComputerBase Forum
https://www.computerbase.de/forum/threads/hauptmonitor-wird-sporadisch-kurz-schwarz.2060771/



In this forum, there was a claim that 'If you push the back of your MARKUS chair a little or rub the seat back and forth, then lean forward slightly or stand up from the chair, the monitor in front of you will immediately flicker. This is caused by static electricity building up and sending a large amount of static electricity to the metal parts of the PC.' In fact, according to the person who posted this claim, the screen flickering stopped when the humidity in the room exceeded 40% or when they attached a wire to the chair and plugged it into the earth of the power strip.



DisplayLink, a company that develops semiconductors and liquid crystal displays, also states on its support page that 'surprisingly, if your display is intermittently dimming or flickering, it may be related to a gas lift office chair. When someone stands or sits on a gas lift office chair, it can cause sudden interference that can be picked up by the video cable and cause a loss of sync,' and suggests that this can be prevented with electromagnetic noise elimination devices such as magnetic ferrite rings.

Display intermittently blanking, flickering or losing video signal – DisplayLink Support
https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/738618-display-intermittently-blanking-flickering-or-los

After learning the cause of the phenomenon, Häcker commented, 'Welcome to 2023... IKEA's MARKUS chair is not compatible with your screen.'

in Hardware,   , Posted by log1i_yk