Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt (
More info?)
The most susceptible components are
1. magnetic media
2. display
1. Magnetic media include your hard drives and floppies. The data on these
could be damaged. Some people may say that your hard drives are safe in
the PC case and in there own case. That may or may not be true. It depends
on how well they are shielded and this could range from very good
shielding to very poor shielding. My PC does not have any metal covering
the drive bays at the front of the PC. There is just a plastic cosmetic
cover. Take that cover off and your looking at all the drives, including
the hard drive. Also, many new PC cases have plastic side covers that
provide little or no shielding. It also depends on the strength of the
magnetic fields produced by your speakers. Are they shielded at all or are
they huge speakers in wood inclosures? To be safe, I think you should
avoid placing unshielded speakers near a PC. Newer small speakers may not
be a problem. Do you wanna be sure your ok or are you willing to gamble a
little?
2. The display picture can be distorted by stray magnetic fields. You
might see lots of colors, sort of like a rainbow effect. Also, metal in
the display can become permanently magnetized when explosed to magnetic
fields. I'm not sure if this is a problem anymore but this was definitley
a problem in the past. I suspect that a strong enough magnetic field can
still permanently magnetize portion of a display to the point where it
cannot be repaired. (I know there are magnetic fields internal to the
display but they are supposed be there. So I again recommend not exposing
a PC to an unshielded speaker. The speakers you see mounted on displays
are magnetically shielded to contain the magnetic field within the speaker
enclosure. If a display does become magnetized, you can sometimes fix it
by degaussing it. My Sony has an internal degausser. A TV or PC repair
shop might have one you could try.
Other things may be affected by stray magnetic fields but these two are
the one's that I think might cause permanent damage or that don't require
unusual conditions to cause permanent damage. Audio circuits in the PC
might get noisy. LAN, voltage regulators, or other circuits with
inductors, might be flaky but this shouldn't do any damage. The power
supply could be affected but that would probably be an unusual situation.
The electronic circuits, i.e. cpu, memory, chipset etc., have some margin
designed into them that may prevent them from being affected even though
they may experience additional 'noise' created by being subjected to a
moving magnetic field. That noise could make the circuits less stable but
I think that is also an 'unusual' situation.
I may be overly cautious but I think 'Better safe than sorry' is the
way to go for both the display and the magnetic media.
P.S I don't know if displays have internal magnetic shielding. Anybody
know? My Sony has an internal metal grille that looks suspiciously like Mu
metal but I'm not sure.
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