Computer Repair n Tips

It's under Ease of Access as a sub-submenu of Accessories in Win7.... might be XP too.

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It's a wireless keyboard. I just thought of something. I'm gonna try to turn it off and unplug the wireless connection and see if maybe it resets itself.

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We are both the source of the problem and the solution, yet we do not see ourselves in this light...

Thanks Aus, found it.

OK, gonna reboot and see if it still does it.

Seems to be working for the time being. I just turned it off and rebooted. I love computers.

Riiiiiiiight. I think my current build is getting near the end of its life so here's what I'm thinking of getting:



ASUS M4N68T-M LE V2 Motherboard
AMD Phenom 1075T X6 Six Core Socket AM3 Processor
4GB DDR3 RAM

£250 delivered.

My HD4870 GPU will have a new lease of life (I hope ) with this set-up and I don't need any new hard drives, power units etc.

Has anyone got experience with that Phenom in particular and can guide me either towards or away from it? The RAM looks pretty generic but I can upgrade that later and I've never had a problem with Asus motherboards.

Not worried about on-board audio as I'll be connecting it via HDMI to my AV receiver.

I can screw the things together all right but processors in particular are beyond me right now and I'm only plumping for AMD because they historically have a much better bang for buck ratio than Intels.

Thanks.

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Looks like a sweet setup. My only (and it is a personal thing) issue would be with having only two RAM slots. It is rare that one would go out, but if it does it would suck. Other than that looks good. I like Asus.

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Thanks buddy, it's little things like that which I'd miss until the thing was sitting in front of me. The two RAM slots wouldn't totally rule this one out (I'd still be able to get two 4GB sticks in there should I so wish) but, as you say, what if one of them fails?

Never happened to me before but I can bet my bottom Zloty it will happen when I've got two slots rather than 4.

I'll have another look around.

This one looks a slightly better package, doesn't it?

Faster processor and a snazzier looking mobo (with what looks like 4 RAM slots! ). It's also got better RAM, for £20 more.

I'd definitely go with the one with the extra RAM. That's a decent deal.

Just by shopping around on Amazon I can buy the parts separately with 8GB of better quality Corsair RAM for £20 less. Been having a few crashes lately - Screen going black, nothing else happening and no errors reported but always when the PC is under load.

Graphics card fubar-ing?

If so I'll have to bring forward the GPU replacement and buy it first, fitting it to this PC then transplanting her to the new one. I'm more at home with the ATI cards these days because the nVidias are just a collection of letters and numbers to me ever since they re-jigged their branding a few years ago.

Thus: I'm looking seriously at this bad boy -



Has anyone got any ideas what the comparable nVidia card is?

It's going to be an expensive few months.

I usually prefer NVIDIA, but that is a great ATI card there. I installed this for a customer not long ago and the benchmarks were great. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814130686

Have you checked your system log as far as the "black screen" goes? Could be video, power supply, overheating, etc... Maybe if you have an onboard video you could test it with to rule out the card one way or another. Good luck, and yeah I like that motherbaord better as well.

That GeForce is a similar price to the HD6870 (wee bit more but manageable), I'll have to check it out further.

The only things I can find relating to the crashes (I had one today and one yesterday) were a couple of 'The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down' which was initiated by me pushing the reset button after the black screen. No reference to the actual crash at all - To be honest, it didn't seem like the PC had crashed. Fans were normal, it wasn't hot, CPU and GPU temps have been fine even under load.

I had the card overclocked, but not by a lot, so I've reset it to default values and will monitor it for a few days. There's an onboard graphics system which I'd love to see trying to cope with the PC running on a 42" 1080p TV, which it is right now. As you say, it might be handy to track down a problem with my HD4870 though.

EDIT - Been looking around and can get a GTX 560 Ti for £20 more than the HD6870 and, according to some comparisons, it beats the ATI card significantly in everything except power consumption. It's comparable, in fact, to the 580. The standard 560 is practically identical to the 6870 so I'm edging toward the Ti.

Thanks mate.

Well, I've finally ordered (almost) everything. Had an unexpected bill this month so the graphics card will have to wait until November - It'll actually be interesting to see how the 4870 performs now that it's been unshackled from the CPU and RAM which I'm sure were bottlenecking it.

I'm getting:

A Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition - The 6 core CPU I'd earlier thought about was just overkill.

An Asus M4A87TV USB3 EVO motherboard - A better mobo than I'd originally chosen.

8GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3 RAM - Vengeance is mine! Why don't they call computer parts names like Water-lilly? Or Colin?

500GB Seagate SATA3 hard drive - I realised late in the day that all my existing hard drives are Sata 2 so added the drive in to take advantage of the improved speeds. I could have gone for a bigger size but it's pointless because I have 1.5TB of perfectly usable hard drives now available as storage.

An Antec 300 case - I've got a slight totally fierce head cold so I'm not doing any 300/Sparta jokes.

GPU-wise I'm actually edging back towards a 6870 and its lower power consumption. This'll depend on how the new rig and 4870 do in my new 'Witcher 2 at Max settings' test.

Everything should be here on Friday and I only overspent by £50!

Make that - Everything should be here Wednesday morning!

This is the first PC build I've done which hasn't had a ****-up somewhere along the line. Everything screwed in and installed without a hitch - the longest part was getting bloody Windows 7 SP1'd and updated.

Not done any benchmarks yet but the PC feels noticeably quicker than the old one at startup and while opening windows etc. Gonna install The Witcher 2 (which was the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back when it came to me deciding to upgrade) and see what the improvements are, even though I'm still running the old graphics card.

I don't need to post pics, do I? I'll do it later once my back has unknotted itself (Friday, then ). The old decrepit spine is in such a state these days that the next PC build will probably kill me. Not that I'm a drama queen, or anything.

Can anybody help? I just upgraded my macbook pro 17inch to osx lion. Now my computer logs off like every 10 minutes and i have to put in the password and login again. Its getting very annoying and i can't seem to find anything online. Infact it just happened now again lol..

Try turning off any power saver modes or scheduled times. Also (not sure how been awhile since I looked on a mac) there should be an admin log that shows what happens during and before the logoff.

Good luck Tat - wish I could have helped put it together for you, looks like a great build. Pics would be awesome.

Cheers, bud. I'll whack some pics up tomorrow.

Y'know when I said this was the first build I've done which didn't **** up? I lied. I realised today that I'd put my PSU in upside-down - The case has the PSU in the bottom and I stuck it in at the same orientation as I would have were it at the top.

Seems minor but the cooling fan on the PSU was now 1/4 of an inch away from the very bottom of the case. Thankfully I've got a modular PSU so it wasn't hard to unplug the cables and reset the power unit without fiddling around with what's plugged into the motherboard. Dunno if leaving the PSU with the fan covered would have done much damage, but I didn't want to take the risk.

I only went £60 over budget, too.

EDIT - Yeah, I said £50 before (I'd forget my head if it wasn't screwed on) but the extra tenner was postage. Not bad for guaranteed AM next-day delivery from England to Ireland.

And here's a couple of very bad photos. Next job - cable-tidying!

Well, I think it's about time. My computer died on Friday; I suspect it was the power supply, and my suspicions were kinda-sorta confirmed when I swapped in the old one and it ran for awhile, though now it's not starting again. It's probably academic, though, because it's been a few years and I'm probably going to get a new one.

Quick question: I notice while poking around Dell's customization options that they have an upgrade ($120) for the GeForce GT 530. My first thought was "well, do they upgrade the power supply, too?," seeing as how that's the single most important thing I learned while installing one last time. But looking at their site, it says the max power is just 50 W. Isn't that insanely low? Am I missing something, IE: the graphics card in question isn't that great, or are newer ones just really awesome about drawing less power and not needing PS upgrades?

It might not matter because apparently the Inspirons come with a surprisingly high 300W power supply. I guess that's becoming standard? The budget PC I upgraded last time came with one that was something ridiculous, like 90.