Extremely strange behavior: charging phone causes PC to crash...?

[dolemiteo23]

This isn't much of an issue I need help resolving...but more of a curious behavior I've been seeing with my fancy new Samsung Galaxy S4.

I first tried charging the new phone using the USB port on my Windows 8 PC. Since my PC is located on the ground, it seemed convenient to place the phone on top of the PC tower while it charges.

After placing it atop the tower while charging, Windows 8 crashed...again and again...

Since the phone was charging through the USB port of the PC, I figured that my power supply may not be able to handle the load. So, I plugged the phone charger into a wall socket to troubleshoot.

Still, Windows 8 kept crashing.

After some testing, it turns out the PC does not crash if I place the phone elsewhere while it is charging; for example, 8 inches away on my desk. In this case, the PC is stable regardless of where I plug the phone's charging cord into--wall or USB.

The PC is fairly new, and I can certainly provide specs if needed. Of note, it uses a Samsung SSD hard drive, and is connected to the same wifi network that the phone uses.

My obvious workaround has been to not put the phone on the PC tower. However, I'm curious if anyone has ideas about why charging the phone in proximity the the PC would cause the PC to crash. I can usually make good use of Google to figure out issues like this, but I've come up empty-handed. My intuition tells me that there is some sort of signal interference occurring, but I'm not sure about what would precipitate that.

Any ideas?

Thanks!
-Chris

Edit: I should clarify that this issue only occurs when the phone is CHARGING. That is, when I simply place the phone atop the PC tower while not charging, the PC does not crash. If the phone is being charged (through the USB port or wall socket), placing it atop the tower causes Windows 8 to crash.

 

[inzone]

When doing the charging through USB is the phone on or off ? Have you tried another USB port ?

 

[dmsmith]

Thank you for posting this. I have the same problem (except I have an old S3 and a new Haswell build PC). If I plug the phone in to a usb port and sit it on the computer case the PC instantly freezes. Requires a hard reboot. Same plug, cable, phone, placed 8 inches above the case on my desk, and everything is fine. The computer is well grounded and all of the drivers are up-to-date. I can sit the phone on top of my NAS (same conditions) and everything is fine. BTW, I'm running Windows 7, 64-bit. My GPS, MP3 player and camera do not cause similar crashes. Darn strange.

 

[Minty1888]

Very strange. I seem to be having the same issue. Has taken me 5 days to work out but I think this might be it. I have had the same issue described in OP where my phone while charging in the proximity of my PC will make it crash (not USB, charger using wall socket on same extension as PC) At least I hope that's what it is!! No crash after an hour of moving my phone. I only noticed it when I heard those beeps (when your mobile is too close to your speakers and sending/receiving data) then my PC crashed. This was the second time in ten minutes that it crashed.

The first time i was in safe mode trying to diagnose the blue screens and I had received an email to my phone but I hadn't cottoned on to the fact it might be my phone.

When it crashed the 2nd time, I immediately thought to get the phone off charge, move it to other side of the room and get online to see if anyone else had this issue. So glad to see it's actually a thing!

I built a PC approx 10 days ago. Intel Haswell 4670K, 16gb crucial ballistix sport, gigabyte b85-hd3 mobo, samsung 840 evo, no overclocking, win7pro.

Bluescreen info included:
033114-3494-01.dmp 31/03/2014 02:44:45 CRITICAL_OBJECT_TERMINATION 0x000000f4 00000000`00000003 fffffa80`0e13a2b0 fffffa80`0e13a590 fffff800`02fc97b0 ntoskrnl.exe ntoskrnl.exe+75bc0 NT Kernel & System Microsoft® Windows® Operating System Microsoft Corporation 6.1.7601.18247 (win7sp1_gdr.130828-1532) x64 ntoskrnl.exe+75bc0 C:\Windows\Minidump\033114-3494-01.dmp 4 15 7601 336,091 31/03/2014 03:18:16

ntoskrnl.exe ntoskrnl.exe+403ab2 fffff800`02c4f000 fffff800`03234000 0x005e5000 0x521ea035 29/08/2013 02:13:25 Microsoft® Windows® Operating System NT Kernel & System 6.1.7601.18247 (win7sp1_gdr.130828-1532) Microsoft Corporation C:\Windows\system32\ntoskrnl.exe

My phone is a Blackberry Curve 8520




Everything seemed fine for the first few days. Then for the last 5 days I've been having seemingly random BSOD and computer freezes resulting in a hard reset. I had 8 BSODs and about 6 freezes. As it was a new pc I was thinking it was faulty hardware but I was running every test imaginable and it was passing everything. I can't exactly remember when I started using the wall socket for my phone charger, or if indeed my phone was even charging when these crashes happened. But my phone has definitely been in the proximity of the PC sitting just above it.


I hope finally I've found the answer to my problem. Thanks for posting

 

[spags]

I think I have similar problem but with a cordless phone. It is BT6500 handset. It;s charger is connected next to the socket where UPS is connected. In a distance about 40cm from PC case. I found computer freezing few times a day.

I did replaced PSU(AX860), MB(Asrock, Extreme9), CPU(AMD), MEM , SSD reinstalled OS(win8.1x64) and as the last thing I bought APC UPS 1500 pro nothing was helping. I could not figure it out. I was measuring voltage, frequencies, spikes etc, other home electronics when it starts ( like a fridge ) on sockets.

And one day I have disconnected a phone from socket. From that time my PC is working as a charm so this must be a phone handset.

I have no idea how but this was/is happening. BT6500 charger generated some frequencies that interfere with computer, a handset charging? handset generating some spikes from a main socket to the phone socket then to the DSL and Router - then back to the PC ( over cable?) Sounds ridiculous but I have no explanation to this. Disconnecting BT6500 has fixed freeze problem.

Anyone had a similar problem with land line handset and PC?

 

[CTval]

I've been having a similar issue this week. I have a lenovo which has been fine until I rearranged the room. It suddenly started beeping and flashing the blue power light and shutting down for no apparent reason. When I moved to the kitchen and plugged it in, presto...worked fine. I moved it back to where it was and shortly thereafter it started beeping and shut down. I realized today that the power pack was now sitting on the floor right next to the cell phone charger cord(I wasn't charging my cell phone during these shutdowns). Prior to the furniture rearrangement, the power cord with its pack was sitting atop my sofa, no where near the cell charger cord. Strange as it seems, the cell phone cord is the culprit. Hope this helps someone else.

 

[gordon_8]

Ok, I have been having the same problem and this is what I have discovered through trial and error. Firstly, when I am charging my Android Razr M on my PC, I would charge on the opposite side of where the battery charging jack is located; so since, the charging jack is located on the left and especially if its charging my HP lap top at the moment, I will always charge my phone on the right side of the lap top (opposite of the charging jack side). For some reason, when I do that, it works perfectly fine. However, when I am charging my phone on the same side as where the charging laptop battery jack is located, and I accidentally move my phone, a notification will pop up on my laptop screen and it will say "USB is not recognized" or somewhere along those lines where the laptop does not recognize my Android or my USB wire. Then the laptop crashes. However, this only happens when I am using the long USB wire. When I am using the short USB wire, nothing happens. It charges even faster as a matter of fact, extremely fast. I would say a normal long USB wire will take to charge my phone when connected to my laptop is probably 2.5 hours when connected to laptop. But when the short wire is connected to the laptop, it will charge my phone to 100% from 0% in one hour and fifteen minutes, give or take. I think when you move your phone, it disrupts the charging mechanism inside your PC or laptop causing it short or create an unstable alternating current in your computer. On top of that, your laptop or PC is using lots of electricity. It might be doing that to prevent your computer from overloading in current due to disruption of the current created from your phone and as a result protecting your computer from shorting or damaging. This happen to my Dell laptop when I was charging in a very bad outlet; it caused my laptop to short circuit and every time I tried turning my Dell laptop on high brightness, it will crash. So becareful. That's my 2 cents. Thank you for reading.

 

[hecutler11]

Thank you for posting. This happened to me today with my 4 month old Asus tower. Plugged a new Galaxy S4 (new to me, not world) into front panel USB and comp stopped mid sentence. Power light remained on for 2 min then nothing. Couldn't reboot for 10 min and freaked, checking all connections, etc.
After getting an RMA from Asus and dealing w the snotty 12 year ol...I mean...young lady, I moved all my files to an external storage. Plugged in my phone again and darkness. Found this site on trusty Tom's Hardware. Am no longer crazed. Thank you.

 

[Pauly4]

Thank you for posting. This happened to me today with my 4 month old Asus tower. Plugged a new Galaxy S4 (new to me, not world) into front panel USB and comp stopped mid sentence. Power light remained on for 2 min then nothing. Couldn't reboot for 10 min and freaked, checking all connections, etc.
After getting an RMA from Asus and dealing w the snotty 12 year ol...I mean...young lady, I moved all my files to an external storage. Plugged in my phone again and darkness. Found this site on trusty Tom's Hardware. Am no longer crazed. Thank you.

 

[Pauly4]

This has been driving me crazy. For months PC crashing when charging Motorola g3. Never guessed there was a link until today. Almost junked the acer PC. There should be big warnings as this issue has had no publicity

 

[warprints]

I can't offer any insight into why this happens, but I diagnosed this (chrging phone while its sitting on top of computer) as the issue causing one of our computers to turn off. When the computer was rebooted, it would begin to start up, then just shut off again. Unplugged and removed the phone, and no problem. Restarted computer, plugged the phone back in, and the computer shut off. Bizarre.

 

[sinjongthae]

I don't always get my pc crashed much often with putting my android smart phone on it, though both laptop pc and my phone display have experienced some sort of interference with each other. But yeah, sometime It just crash my running application(3ds max), worst scenario is blue screen -_- .... Any idea on what's really going on?

 

[paulief1981]

I know this is an old thread, but I don't actually see a solution to the problem unless I can't see for looking! but anyways my issue..

In the past with my old mobiles and my old pc's I too found that having my mobile too close to the PC would make it blue screen and crash, I found this out by accident, but it's something to do with the phone signal interfering with components inside the PC and I know this how? because one day the crash happened when speakers were picking up the interferance from my mobile and boom blue screen so I thought to myself hmm odd, so I did a test and put my speakers by my computer and put my phone near both of them and called it from my landline, I did this 3 or 4 times and everytime the mobile started causing interferance in the speakers it crashed

So I'm hoping that my current problem is similar to that if not then I am baffled because in the 15years I've been working on and building PC's I've never encountered this problem before and can't seem to diagnose the problem but my PC will just randomly reboot and come up with a corrupt bios (luckily im running dual bios) sometimes it repairs the bios and it runs fine all day, other times it will POST reboot and boom corrupt bios, sometimes it reboots when sat in windows idling and sometimes when gaming, I can never remember if the phone is in close proximity to the PC when these crashes occur (will be leaving my phone about 6ft away thanks to this post reminding me of my mobile/PC issue) so hopefully it will solve the problem but only time will tell, but if not then maybe someone on here can point me in the right direction and if it is right then maybe this will serve as a possible solution as to why there computer is crashing

Thanks in advance
Paul