My PC won't shut off this ugly red RGB light — my motherboard has become my biggest aesthetic annoyance

I've long been the butt of a joke on the Tom's Hardware team that I ride my tech into the ground. It's not so much of a joke — I get nice stuff and then I use it until it doesn't make sense.

But let me tell you, my motherboard is testing me.

My system still runs on AMD's AM4 platform. My motherboard is an Asus Prime X370-Pro, which has a small RGB lightstrip going down the left side, showing off the audio circuitry. When the system is on, I have it coordinating with my RAM and CPU cooler to bathe the insides of my rig in a cyan glow. When the system is off, all of the lights are supposed to be off.

They are not.

While I've changed many of the parts in this system since I first built it, that Prime X370-Pro has been a mainstay. But now it's getting on my nerves.

I tend to shut off my desktop when I'm not using it, and that's been the case even more with a little kid crawling around. While Asus offers all sorts of lighting options for motherboards, even when the system is shut down, I think that off should mean off. But in recent months, the board and the Armoury Crate software have been denying my request not to use RGB when the system is shut down. I always get the default red strip down the side. Even though I keep my case under my desk, I can catch glimpses of that red strip through the tinted glass on my Fractal Design Meshify C.

My colleague Sarah Jacobsson Purewal has written before about how bad apps that control peripherals are, and in my case, Asus Armoury Crate also controls my motherboard. I hold it to about the same esteem that Sarah does.

This is, as far as problems go, pretty low on my list. Heck, I've had versions of it before. So many PC chores fall down the list when everything else is running smoothly, including handling misbehaving RGB. (Now that I'm looking at that picture again, I really ought to get some compressed air in there.)

But even trying to solve it has been a giant pain. For instance, every time I decide it's time to try and shut the light off again, I boot up Armoury Crate, and it tells me it can't make any changes until I've updated the software. I've never seen software that needs so many updates. This is a motherboard that was first launched in 2017. Surely there's some security patches now and again, but how many updates can this thing need? (Funnily enough, they're almost always related to lighting.) And these days, the software is always trying to get me to log into an Asus account or to add an Asus desktop wallpaper.

Assuming the system recognizes the motherboard, it usually remembers what I actually want it to do: go totally dark on shutdown. If it doesn't, I change it.

I've had this problem before. Once, I went so far as uninstalling the software, which involves finding Asus' Armoury Crate uninstaller to do, and then reinstalling. I've looked in the BIOS, but there's no option there. And since I'm writing a few hundred words on this, perhaps the effort should be made to go the uninstallation/reinstallation route again. But the point is that this type of problem shouldn't be occurring again and again. I love to tinker, but I want what I set to stick.

Perhaps if I ever get around to starting a new build from scratch, I'll look into a whole bunch of components that use something like OpenRGB. Perhaps when I'm picking parts, having this in the back of my mind will lead me to a stealth build, or at least a case without a side panel.

Or maybe I'll learn nothing, try to go for something fun but classy again, and curse as something inevitably goes wrong. That's the point, right?

Time to go find the uninstaller. Again. Wish me luck!