Hearsay and anecdotes are rampant among casual users of technology. Hitting your computer fixes it! Your phone is listening to everything you say! At one time, stuff like this sounded absurd, and everyone shook their heads. But a lot of those silly myths ended up being true.

Whacking the PC might fix it

At one time, this was actually a decent idea

We’ve all been there: a software freeze or a stuttering fan leads to a frustrated palm-strike against the chassis. For years, “percussive maintenance” was the ultimate joke, the mark of a barbaric user who didn’t understand how delicate silicon was and cared only to vent their frustrations.

Credit: 

Rich Hein / How-To Geek

It sounds a little counterintuitive, but this myth does actually have some basis in reality. In the days of early computing, components were often held in place by friction alone. Over time, the heat generated by the PC would cause parts to expand and contract, a phenomenon known as thermal creep. This process could potentially unseat chips from their sockets or loosen cable connections by fractions of a millimeter.

In such cases, a calculated smack against the computer could be just enough to reseat a loose component or knock a speck of oxidizing dust off a contact point. Today, the “thump” method is less effective, thanks to SSDs and soldered motherboards, but there’s still a pretty good chance that this old tactic can fix a problem for your PC.

Your PC is tracking you

Those conspiracy theorists were right

In the ancient times known as the 2000s, people who believed their computers were spying on them were often considered paranoid. Back then, the idea that a private corporation would monitor your every keystroke or mouse movement felt like the plot of a dystopian thriller.

Today, that concept is no conspiracy; it’s a standard feature called telemetry. From Windows 10 and 11 to macOS and almost every browser in existence, your activity is harvested at a staggering rate. Your OS tracks which apps you open, how long you stay in them, and your geographical location. And then there’s the “hot mic” phenomenon; tech giants deny they are constantly recording audio to sell ads, but the metadata generated by your browsing habits is so precise that it often feels like they’re listening.

Just like George Orwell and his book 1984, all of those people claiming the tech giants are watching us were ahead of their time.

Planned obsolescence

Technology is intentionally outmoded by corporations

Speaking of paranoid conspiracies about the ill intent of corporations, there was a long-standing belief that software updates were secretly designed to slow down older hardware and push consumers to buy a new machine. The people who believed this were often dismissed as “anti-progress” for refusing to update their drivers or OS.

Those “conspiracy theorists” were ultimately proven correct. While often framed as “battery management” or “security overhead,” the result is the same: older hardware is often intentionally throttled or bogged down by increasingly bloated code that the manufacturer knows the older architecture can’t handle efficiently. Whether it’s “feature creep” or intentional performance capping, the feeling that your once-blazing PC has been nerfed by a mandatory update is backed by years of benchmarking data.

Gold-plated cables are better

There really is a difference between $5 and $100 cables

Back in the day, there was a heated debate on the quality of cables. On one side were the “elitists” who claimed $500 HDMI cables with gold-plated connectors produced an objectively better picture. On the other hand were the “casuals,” arguing that since the signal is digital (1s and 0s), the cable literally cannot change the quality of the image. It was a zero-sum game; the cable either worked or it didn’t.

And yet, when we moved into the era of 4K, 8K, and high-refresh-rate gaming, the “premium cable” myth found a foothold in reality. Make no mistake, gold-plated cables are still just a marketing ploy, but bandwidth rating does make a huge difference between cables. A low-quality cable doesn’t cause a fuzzy picture, but it can cause signal dropouts or a total failure to reach high frame rates. If you’re using an old “high-speed” HDMI cable on a modern 144Hz monitor, you actually are losing performance.

It took the advancement of technology to prove it right, but no one can deny now that the delivery pipe between devices matters a ton when it comes to quality. There is absolutely a difference between “good” cables and “bad” cables.

Magnets, the ultimate computer killer

Millennials everywhere are unreasonably scared of magnets near PCs

Many millennials, including yours truly, were told as children to never bring a magnet near a computer, lest it somehow wipe all of its data or do some other irreparable damage. In 2010 and beyond, this notion was widely panned as being absurd: modern electronics are shielded, and magnets would need to be industrial-sized to do any real damage.

Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek

Unless, of course, you’re still using a traditional hard disk drive. HDDs store data using magnetic fields on spinning platters. A sufficiently strong neodymium magnet—the kind found in many modern magnetic iPad covers or high-end desk toys—can indeed corrupt data or ruin the read/write head’s alignment. SSDs might be safe, but magnetic threats still haunt the millions of servers and backup drives that keep the internet running every day. Most consumers don’t have to worry about magnets destroying their PCs, but this “myth” was always a valid threat.

Every rumor has some speck of truth

There are plenty of computer myths out there that are definitely false hearsay: Apple devices can’t get malware, you should always let your battery die completely before recharging it, airport x-rays erase laptop memory… all a bunch of hogwash with no basis in reality. But there’s usually some kernel of actual truth hiding in these rumors, and for every myth that’s busted, there’s another that is totally true. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet; for the good of your PC, do your own research and verify the facts yourself.