A few weeks ago I saw this post: LALA - 微星B360M迫击炮主板没声音关不了机解决办法. It mentioned that motherboard static electricity might cause problems like sudden lag until the system freezes, or the machine not fully powering off after shutdown.
Symptoms
My MSI motherboard also had similar issues, for example:
- The computer suddenly becomes very laggy; only a reboot helps
- Shutdown or reboot takes a very long time
- Sleep also takes a while: the monitor goes to standby quickly, but the motherboard LEDs take a bit longer to turn off
- After sleeping, the computer wakes up by itself (this happened many times; I was already asleep and the screen lit up again)
I usually only use sleep, not full shutdown.
But after a few days it would become sluggish, and only rebooting would fix it.
I searched online before but couldn’t find much.
Cause
I used to think it was the OS or the GPU. So I switched from Windows to Linux, and even changed the GPU, but the same issue remained.
After reading that post, it seems likely it was motherboard static electricity (not sure if it’s a design flaw, or if the ground wire in my three-prong outlet isn’t properly grounded).
Fix
The fix in that post was: unplug the power cable, wait 3 minutes, then boot again.
But I didn’t want to shut down often, so I searched for motherboard static electricity fixes and found a method: manual grounding. Attach a wire to the case, and connect the other end to ground.
I found an unused signal cable inside the case. I taped one end to the metal chassis under the motherboard, and taped the other end to the wall (ground).
Grounding done.
To validate, I observed for a few weeks and it does seem effective.
Nice.
2021/10/31 update
Recently I changed the case and also changed the GPU again, and it seems fine.
So I’m not sure how much the motherboard static electricity actually mattered.
It’s too mystical. I can’t figure it out.