How can software damage hardware

Overclocking tools. Another one, some motherboards provide overclocking tools, allowing you to change CPU settings from within the OS. Stress-tests and intensive applications. Over-exerting your CPU to its limits could spike temperatures, which can eventually damage it. As already mentioned by other posters, pushing and stressing components, excessive computations, things like that. For a while there Linux was excessively parking hard drive heads on laptops or something like that, causing premature disk failure.

Apple is well known for hardware failure, a long lists of class action suits. Some driven by software. Not that other brands dont have bad stuff from time to time, but other brands normally dont control the hardware and software in one package making it harder to isolate one company, or worse a company that should know better than to destroy its own stuff. Apple often likes to get their name in the news anyway, free or cheap advertising.

It has been shown, or at least I read, that you can infect a mac battery, batteries are smart now in laptops, with a virus, such that after a clean wipe and re-install of the operating system the battery will re-infect the system with the virus. You can software control the disc tray in desktop computers, you could open and close it until it fails I saw a thereifixed it where the cdrom tray was used to rock a baby cradle this way.

With fanless handhelds, smartphones, tablets. I bet you could defeat the temperature limits and stress components to create heat, probably causing the battery to go.

A lot of stuff uses ftdi chips to interface usb to pretty much anything. Being someone who likes to build and overclock computers, I can name a few very extreme cases where this could potentially happen. I emphasize potentially because such conditions are somewhat unrealistic in most machines today.

The first example is a BIOS flash. This opens a backdoor for malware to flash the BIOS to something that will damage the processor. In a second case, some motherboard provide overclocking tools that allow you to change CPU settings from within the OS. If a virus takes over that - then like in the first example, set your CPU to settings that are damaging and fry it. In a third example possibly the most realistic ones are the stress-tests and intensive applications.

For example, if a system gets too hot, it can turn itself off to prevent damage. There are many stories floating around that a virus can cause a computer to explode or catch fire; they are not valid. Malicious code could damage or cause computer controlled equipment to explode e. However, it would only be possible if the controlling software could make hardware do something dangerous and would have to disable any warning or prevention systems.

It's worth mentioning that software designed to adjust system settings, like the system clock settings , fans , or active heat sinks , can cause system problems with the computer. Also, in some rare situations, improperly adjusting these settings may even damage the hardware. However, these program settings are not computer viruses, and as mentioned earlier, modern systems are also designed to help protect hardware if it reaches a critical point.

Can a virus damage computer hardware? Note It's plausible that someone could write malware designed to target a person or company to damage hardware. Additional information How do I scan or check for computer viruses? Macs are almost never vulnerable to a hardware attack, because they are Darwin-UNIX based, meaning that they have a strong neural network running within to protect the hardware. Plus, not to mention that Apple has created the best electrical systems for their machines since the G3.

Plus, not to mention that Apple has created the best electrical systems for their machines since the G3… Windows created a whole new architecture that includes UNIX and other Scalar additions. Your previous post even mentions the Olympic Torch virus… a very well known hoax. Are you trying to troll a technical forum? Just websearch: New Scalar enhancements in Intel processors. This means better performance and longer life. Hardware and software are being used rapidly together to prevent intrusion and attacks on a network, and some examples of it are Manual Failover Cluster Managment and SAN-IDS … These are each hardware-based and software-based components that are put in blade servers to keep a hacker from tearing down the walls of defense.

A Tipping-over-Protection module surprisingly uses special scalar-based instruction-sets, which are created using neural networks running in Unix. There was a time when Apple used Motorola processors, and Apple-designed support components; all the peripheral interfaces were unique to Apple.

Ultimately, Apple switched to Intel processors, standard PC-compatible interfaces, and support for peripheral devices designed for PCs. Certainly, in those days, one could say that Apple was playing catchup with their hardware designs. Do you mean apple has built the best hardware systems but Mac OS which is used on apple is not strong enough to protect the system, I was reading an article which was written in or , which showed that Mac OS is 10 years behind windows in terms of security.

Chris Robert I am well aware of the terms and how they are used which is why I suspect you are trolling us. There is no integration with any OS. Again, no integration with any OS.

Darwin Unix has nothing to do with neural networking. There is a data mining software called Darwin which makes use of neural networking but the two are completely unrelated. Also, neural networks have nothing to do with hardware abstraction layers or hardware protection.

Microsoft is a software company with some hardware. Most Windows machines are based on intel architechture. It does not have Unix additions. Scalar in computing is nothing more than another name for a variable. Do you mean apple has built the best hardware systems but Mac OS which is used on apple is not strong enough to protect the system,. Your links only show that Dell makes a more efficient desktop than Apple and Raspberry makes a more efficient small form factor.

You do understand that energy efficiency has nothing to do with software damaging hardware right? Thank you. It looks awesome, but if you leave your monitor on this setting longer than a couple of hours you can actually burn-out the oscillator-tube in the unit. Same goes for some of the older LCDs. Burnout of the cathode caused by constant display of images that used a lot of power — such as very bright images.

The real mechanism that software can use to damage monitors both CRTs and LCDs is to set the display rates to values that are not supported by the monitor.

That is, selecting a combination of the horizontal refresh rate and the vertical scan rate that is outside the values for which the monitor is designed can damage the deflection electrodes in a CRT or the row and column drivers in an LCD.

Of course, more sophisticated LCDs have electronic circuits to detect out-of-spec timing and simply shut off the display, preventing damage.