Will desk fan damage LCD monitor/PC?

hj2k_x

hj2k_x

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Seeing it has recently been as hot as hell in CT, I have invested in a 40cm desk fan to cool me off.

I have it placed right next to my one LCD monitor and on top of the desk under which my PC box sits. Recently our CRT television was buggered up by the placement of a smaller fan at its base. Now I understand that the fan creates some kind of small magnetic field and this buggers around with the way CRT devices render the colours on the screen - I am just wondering if the one on my desk will have any similar negative effects on my PC hardware?

Jees, there's nothing like being concise, hey :o
 
Magnets will not affect an LCD as they do not rely on cathode rays to project a picture.
Magnets pull the cathode rays off their original path which leads to the distorted picture and colours you see when you bring them close to CRT's. Don't worry bud, you're safe.
 
Cool beans. I thought as much. Just wanted to be sure.

And what about external hard drives? Seeing as running a magnet over a hdd removes all the data contained on it...
 
Keep it away from the harddrive just to be safe. You'd have to rub the together (Survivor fire making style) though to have any real risk of damage. If you're about a rulers length away, I can't see any damage being done.
 
simongie said:
Keep it away from the harddrive just to be safe. You'd have to rub the together (Survivor fire making style) though to have any real risk of damage. If you're about a rulers length away, I can't see any damage being done.
Click to expand...

I see. Cool. Out of interest, when one does this, is the hdd broken or does it literally just wipe all the data off it? Like when hackers do it in the movies...
 
There won't be any physical damage, it'll just rewrite/wipe some of the binary data on the drive. The worst that could happen is a corrupt partition or sectors that can be sorted out with fdisk and a format or with XP's in-house partitioning and formatting tools.
 
Just for interest.
Why would an external, relatively weak magnetic field influence a hard drive? Every hdd has a "moer" of a magnet built into it to dampen the arm holding the reading head. This magnet is less than 50mm away from the platter.
 
I don't think it would cause any issues, I'm just covering my a$$ :)
 
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