Topic: No, I will not fix your computer. (Read 65332 times)

Aintaer · « **Reply #340 on:** November 14, 2010, 06:11:38 PM »

Quote from: Classic on November 08, 2010, 10:30:35 PM

But Aintaer's guess is that the noise from the audio wire was interfering with the wifi. I didn't know they were carrying enough juice to get a big EM signal around them.

Actually no, of more concern is that the signal pumped through the speakers would cause this interference. Speakers are driven mostly by induction coils around a core that is connected to the cone membrane. When you apply a current in this coil, a magnetic field is created around the coils that moves the core and membrane, making the compression and rarefaction for audio.
But if there is a noisy source signal, the amplification could result in a lot of magnetic flux, inducing unintentional currents in any nearby bundles of wires, such as any radio receiver like your wifi device.

Classic · « **Reply #341 on:** November 14, 2010, 06:23:42 PM »

That makes way more sense. I guess I've just never put my speakers close enough to my antenna to get noise from them before.

Royal☭ · « **Reply #342 on:** December 10, 2010, 06:19:57 AM »

My computer is giving me a hell of a time. I think my friend brought back a Korean computer voodoo curse, and it's affecting my PC. First was the hard drive failing in its spectacular way, then about 2 weeks ago my onboard LAN went out. This happened after my friend had brought his busted ATI card over to see if the freezes and crashes were a result of his card or his motherboard. After his card managed to crash Fallout, the onboard LAN just stopped responding.

Now about 4 days ago, after removing a really old GeForce card I had in my PC for some reason to lend to him, my video card went out. Though I suspect it may be more complex than that. First my computer just used to load from it. I came home to find it in hibernation, and when I tried to wake it up it didn't do anything. And on reboot, the BIOS never came back up. The computer just wouldn't boot. So I got a replacement card, and it started working again. The only problem now is that when I hibernate, one of two things happens. 1) It doesn't come back on and I have to reboot twice to get it working again. If the BIOS detects my backup hard drive while booting up, it never loads Windows into memory, and I have to reboot again. or 2) It loads back into Windows, which is followed by about 5 minutes of the computer freezing about every 10-15 seconds, with it occasionally blacking out and coming back on and telling me "Video driver has stopped responding and successfully recovered." It did this with either video card I used, either the new one or the old backup one. Once while trying to re-install the drivers the whole computer just shut down.

I really suspect I'm having motherboard problems, which is not something I want to happen for rather obvious reasons. Any other ideas?

BusyZombieLord · « **Reply #343 on:** December 10, 2010, 08:03:54 PM »

Last Christmas my dad received a cheap netbook from my aunt. The next day he called me asking how he could move his entire business computer on to the junky net book. I tried to explain that it was not a good idea and gave him a dozen reasons why. He then said yeah but how do I do it anyways. I finally understood why my cousin that lives near by him stopped doing all his tech support.

Classic · « **Reply #344 on:** December 11, 2010, 09:25:09 AM »

You could always decline.

"Anyone who lets you shoot yourself in the foot either is not good at their job or does not have your best interests in mind."

Or something like that.

Mongrel · « **Reply #345 on:** December 19, 2010, 08:19:12 PM »

*sigh*

Okay, I did something which seemed like a sensible enough idea.

Got the new computer up with Windows 7. I plugged in both of my old hard drives to the new box, thinking I would copy my old files off tot he new drive and do some housecleaning while I was at it. But it seems I'm in for some fun because an unknown number of old WinXP folders and files have disappeared as if they never existed.

For instance, I was going to copy my old Firefox bookmark file using the following instructions:

Quote

Recovering Your Firefox Bookmarks
•This is documented elsewhere, but perhaps comes across as too nerdy for some. If you're using Windows XP, recovering from a crash or whatever, and find that your Firefox bookmarks (and bookmarklets and bookmark toolbar) have disappeared, here's what to do:

- Find your profile in x:\Documents and Settings\[your XP user name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

- There should be a subfolder there called bookmarkbackups. Find the most recent bookmarks html file in there (usually with a date after the 'bookmarks' bit.

- Copy it to somewhere safe and rename the existing one bookmarks.html.

- Copy it to the default profiles folder (up one level from the bookmarkbackups folder, deleting the existing bookmarks.html file.

- Close Firefox if it's running and relaunch it. Your old bookmarks should be restored.
•An easier way is to find file as above in ....\profiles (bookmarks-2009-04-27.json) from old disk and copy back to same location on new disk, go to browser bookmarks then organise bookmarks (ctrl shift b) import and backup then restore your file will be there, restore this and confirm (this will overwrite existing ones) original bookmarks returned

However, when I navigated to my old [XP username] file on what used to be the C: drive, the Application Data file is completely gone!

I was fishing around in some other folders and seemed to notice other curious absences.

Any help? Google is as clear as mud on this issue.

Brentai · « **Reply #346 on:** December 19, 2010, 08:21:35 PM »

I think Application Data may be hidden by default. Make sure your file browser is set to show hidden files.

Mongrel · « **Reply #347 on:** December 19, 2010, 08:28:42 PM »

Oh for... Bah!

Well, at least it was an easy answer.

Mongrel · « **Reply #348 on:** December 21, 2010, 11:09:23 AM »

So let me get this straight, if I want to change file icons in Win 7 I have to fuck directly with my registry?!

Man, I don't have any huge complaints about this OS, but so far it just seems like every small intuitive thing that windows DID do right for XP and older versions was just thrown right the fuck out.

Like I have a set of regular speakers and a USB headset and on XP, the speakers would play normally, but when I plugged in the headset, the sound would switch to the headphones. When I unplugged them, the speakers would come back on. CRAZY! WOW! But in Windows 7, the only thing you can do is leave them both plugged in and switch manually between the "default" device in the sounds menu (this was confirmed with fairly extensive Googling on Win 7 sound, so no, I'm not asking for help with the speakers).

It's better than Vista I suppose, where the tech recommendation from most sites was "Don't buy USB sound devices, they don't work properly with Vista". HURRRR WHAT.

None of the little things I've run into so far are the end of the world, they're just stupid.

patito · « **Reply #349 on:** December 21, 2010, 05:37:38 PM »

Actually Vista has less stupid shit than 7 at this point.

Mongrel · « **Reply #350 on:** December 21, 2010, 08:55:39 PM »

I did eventually find a way to change the icons without fucking with the registry... but it involved downloading an indie-created widget and spending a long tiem manipulating each file type association manually.

I really shouldn't complain. Starr and my friend who conspired with her to get the new computer put Win 7 on, because the new box is a six-core with 8 Gb RAM and blah blah blah fancy-pants. But I would have been just as happy with half the computer at half the price, running Win XP. At least until Win 7 Service Pack 1 comes out.

At least I won't have to get a new computer for a lonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng time.

Thad · « **Reply #351 on:** December 22, 2010, 08:58:13 AM »

It bears repeating that Win7 IS the service pack.

Anyway, yeah, that's pretty lame. But any longtime KDE user can tell you he's seen worse.

yeoz · « **Reply #352 on:** December 22, 2010, 10:10:48 AM »

Quote from: Mongrel on December 21, 2010, 11:09:23 AM

Like I have a set of regular speakers and a USB headset and on XP, the speakers would play normally, but when I plugged in the headset, the sound would switch to the headphones. When I unplugged them, the speakers would come back on. CRAZY! WOW! But in Windows 7, the only thing you can do is leave them both plugged in and switch manually between the "default" device in the sounds menu (this was confirmed with fairly extensive Googling on Win 7 sound, so no, I'm not asking for help with the speakers).

Um, my usb headset actually works fine without having to toggle things as default ... My usb headset is set as "default communcation device" and my speakers are the "default device", and unplugging my usb headset sends audio to my speakers as expected. I'm not sure why this doesn't work for you though. :(

Mongrel · « **Reply #353 on:** December 22, 2010, 10:34:41 AM »

Not sure myself. The system seems to see my headphones as an alternate set of speakers. Microphone works fine though.

DUNNO.

Rico · « **Reply #354 on:** December 23, 2010, 03:47:09 PM »

One of my monitors is starting to die (distortions on the bottom third of the screen, swapping cables, ports, etc. has no effect), and I'm starting to look for a replacement. Does anyone have any particular recommendations for a good LCD in the $100-150 range, or should I just blindly click Newegg?

Thad · « **Reply #355 on:** December 23, 2010, 04:17:53 PM »

Plenty of deals to be found on Dealzmodo. I find Samsung's probably the best price for name-brand, but from what I understand the cheapie monitors generally use the same components as the name-brand ones.

Mongrel · « **Reply #356 on:** December 24, 2010, 01:43:58 PM »

Latest hilarious UI flaw in Windows 7: So let's say you like all your file folders displayed in a certain way. For instance, I much prefer "list" view.

Now we all now how to change a given folder in any iteration of windows. And in XP (or older) we know how to apply this to all folders. But in Windows 7, there are 5 different folder "templates", so if you change one folder and then hit the "apply to all folders" it.... DOESN'T apply to all folders! And the bet part is that it doesn't TELL you there are 5 different templates! It doesn't mention this ANYWHERE!

So you can either hit "apply all" to any folder you see that's out of whack, in the hopes of eventually hitting all five templates, or there's a lengthy process where you muck around with the root filesystem.

GOOD JOB, MS. *golf clap*

Mongrel · « **Reply #357 on:** January 03, 2011, 12:24:15 AM »

Okay, odd question.

Sometimes, for no apparent reason, some of my keys (usually not the letters) will randomly start remapping themselves. So for instance, I'll press "/", but instead of a slash, I'll get "é". Or my punctuation marks will go through a blender, or other things. I've had it happen in Firefox, in Steam chat and a couple others. Usually it happens just within an application, so closing the program and restarting it makes things work (no reboot necessary), but its happened with multiple programs.

Google is hopeless here - I can't seem to find anything even halfway close to what I'm experiencing. Anybody ever heard of this or have any clue what I'm talking about? it only happens once in a while and it's easy to fix. But it's still quite strange and annoying when it does happen (hard to be a good team player in TF2 when your messages start turning into random gobbledygook).

François · « **Reply #358 on:** January 03, 2011, 01:19:16 AM »

Yeah, I used to get that every once in a while; the keyboard input language was switching on me between French (Canada), English (Canada) and English (United States). That's because there's a hotkey for doing that on the fly if you need to, and by the default that hotkey was Left Alt + Shift. If restarting the application fixes it, it's because the keyboard layout is changed only for that instance; you can have, say, TF2 on one layout and Notepad on another, at the same time.

I don't know the exact process for correcting this in Windows 7, but if it hasn't changed too much from XP, you want something like Control Panel / Regional and Language Options / Languages tab, press "Details..." in the "Text services and input languages" box, and then "Key settings...".

I don't know how I managed to hit Left Alt + Shift by accident, but it hasn't happened since I murdered the hotkeys, so I'm not gonna spend a lot of time thinking about it.

Mongrel · « **Reply #359 on:** January 03, 2011, 09:04:02 AM »

Oh, it's easy to hit those keys in TF2: Shift-tab brings up the steam overlay, so if your fingers confuse that with alt-tabing, well, there you go.

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Author Topic: No, I will not fix your computer. (Read 65332 times)