Maybe your home should be dumb! | Illustration by Adrián Astorgano

It turns out your TV can actually mess up your computer — at least if you’re using a Hisense TV and Windows.

Kevin Snow, a video game narrative designer, wrote on Cohost that they’d been having trouble with their PC. The “Display Settings” menu didn’t open. The “Task Manager” started hanging. Then things necessary to making the computer work started to fail. Spelunking in hidden comments on Microsoft forums revealed the problem: Snow’s TV.

Basically, the TV had been generating Universal Plug and Play IDs and had, over the course of several years, convinced Snow’s computer that there were essentially an infinite number of devices on their network. Snow’s smart TV, a Hisense 50Q8G, had inadvertently…

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