(R.I.P Dad — miss you)

It's the mid-90s. My Dad was recently retired. I lived many states away and was working as a EE design engineer at a PC company.

He wants a laptop to work on his personal history. I buy it, set up the software and send it to him. Although its main use was to play Solitaire, he did write his history which is a great blessing for the family.

One day he calls me. The conversation goes like this:

The computer starts beeping at midnight.
What?
Every night at midnight the computer starts beeping.
Do you turn it off before you go to bed?
Yes

I don't think this is possible but we walk through all the steps to turn it completely off. The next day he calls, the computer was beeping again at midnight.

I'm puzzled. I have him go through all BIOS settings & PC settings I can possibly think of just to make sure nothing got changed. The next day he calls, the computer was again beeping at midnight.

I pull the schematics for the notebook design and make sure there is no hidden hardware wakeup feature. I finally tell him to ship it to me so I can take a look at it in person. He puts it in the mail.

He calls the next day and sheepishly admits that there was again beeping at midnight. A portable clock had fallen behind the desk the computer was on and he couldn't see it and didn't realize where the sound was coming from.

When his computer arrived I simply changed the shipping label and sent it back.