If your ThinkPad boots into beepy tunes, trouble is afoot

Nero Vanbierviet's ThinkPad started playing a tune instead of booting into an operating system. These turn out to be an unusually elaborate system of BIOS error codes–and it turns out the application that decodes them is no longer available for Android. So he used a spectrograph to record and decipher them manually.

Last week, I woke up to my broken laptop making music upon booting. Not the kind of music that makes you happy after getting out of bed. After a quick Google search, I learned that this is called a "Musical Tone Error". It's my laptop singing a song to tell me what is wrong.

The best thing about this story is that the denouement is pure "windows 95 tips" material. The Error Song turned out to mean "I have a mysterious hole you have never noticed before. Find it and put something in it."

Embedded below, Lenovo's official video explaining the Error Songs.