Quick [tech] Questions Thread

[Engels]

I'd say a 1GB 460gtx but you're also hurting for RAM. I'd say if you expect to spend $200 to play games on the highest graphic settings, invest in some weed instead.

Joking aside, I'm gonna concur with Sky here. Your system needs a full overhaul. You could get an upgraded vid card, but it would bottleneck with your current CPU. Your ram's also a bit tight for most games coming out right now. I would hang tight, save some money, and then get a new system. With the new line of Intel CPUs coming out, there's probably going to be a price drop in current i5s and i7s on the 1156 chipsets. We picked up a Gigabyte motherboard, i5 750 cpu, 4 gb corsair ram & gold standard Seasonic psu for 700 bucks, and that was a few months back. You'll probably be able to get the same within a few months for around 500 to 600.

[Sky]

A 460 might be bottlenecked, but it would give a small speed boost and be portable to a new system. That was my thinking in getting mine (well, really it was more that my 8800gtx died). The RAM would probably not carry forward as well, though. I'm also eying prices on the i5 750, 4GB, mobo for an upgrade, possibly to SLI the 460 next xmas.

[Brolan]

Actually as I said before this system does a pretty good job, so I don't think its time to trash everything and start over.   

Adding another 2 gigs of memory is cheap so I might go with that for now.  Then I can update the video card later as that can be reused in a new system.

[Chimpy]

Anyone have a preferred piece of equipment that can act as a wireless bridge?  I guess you need internet access to your direct tv box to order on demand items (unless you want to call every time).  BTW is it normal for the AT&T installers to not do any of this shit?  They pretty much just made the wireless router hot and hooked up the satellite then left, they did not configure the mail clients or make sure the satellite receiver had internet access for the aforementioned on demand ordering.

Personally I never let the cable guy touch my shit but leaving it all in the hands of my 70 year old parents with the comment that it is so easy an 11 year old could do it doesn't seem like the best customer service model available.

You probably want to go to the DDWRT forums and find which routers work with their firmware, then buy 2 of those and flash them and turn them into bridges. There are a lot of cheap devices that will take DDWRT.

But honestly, less hassle and fuss if you just buy enough cat5 cable and hard wire it.

[Sheepherder]

I'm also eying prices on the i5 750, 4GB, mobo for an upgrade, possibly to SLI the 460 next xmas.

The i5 760 is the new beast.  It's pretty much the same deal with higher stock clocks, and the price difference is marginal.

[Sky]

I blame Engels.

[Engels]

again!?

[Yegolev]

The i5 760 is the new beast.

I have one of these on my desk in front of me.

Win7 question: I'm building a new rig and traditionally I just transplanted the hard drives into the new system and went on my way.  Since I haven't the time or inclination to experiment or read books about a OS that I am not paid to support, I wanted to ask if this is a good idea or do I just need to do a fresh install?

[rattran]

Fresh install, I've had 2 people turn to me so far when just moving over the drive win 7 drive with a new motherboard. It seemed to work marginally (occasional bsod) for a while, but over time the amount of bsods increased. Had one guy drive his computer from Phoenix to Denver this summer for me to fix.

[Engels]

During a manual installation of Windows 7, the installer puts in a gob load of registry entries specific to the hardware you're using. The motherboard, as you can imagine, isn't just one piece of hardware; it has dozens of individual components that need to be identified by the installation routine.

When you slap a hard drive into new motherboard, Windows 7 does its best to identify the new hardware, and more often than not these days there's enough software lying about in the Windows 7 driver repository to launch the OS to desktop.

From here, however, one would still want to install the drivers that came with the new motherboard by hand.

After that, make sure you've uninstalled all the old motherboard specific drivers/programs using the 'uninstallers' in Control Panel > Programs.

Finally, I'd try to find and remove the old registry entries created by the old hardware by running CCleaner's registry fixer.

You may be ok then, but again, its no guarantee.

[Yegolev]

Sounds like a reinstall.  Maybe a good excuse to get a SSD for the OS.  I can get the new machine mostly built and then move over my hard drives, perhaps.

[Rasix]

Well, when I installed Win 7 over XP (kept my HDD), it left my data alone.  A reinstall is pretty low risk/hassle.

But yah, get the SSD.  I would. 

[lamaros]

Computer has locked up flashing bios on my laptop. Nothing doing at all. At stage of verifying block 9 of 32. What should I do?

[Engels]

Wait, the block being verified is on the ROM of your BIOS? Will it boot at all? Or just 'dead'? If the latter, then could there be a bios reset jumper on your laptop's motherboard? May try that if its not booting at all, but if the ROM flash process got permanently and irrecoverably corrupted, its beyond my level of expertise.

[lamaros]

Wait, the block being verified is on the ROM of your BIOS? Will it boot at all? Or just 'dead'? If the latter, then could there be a bios reset jumper on your laptop's motherboard? May try that if its not booting at all, but if the ROM flash process got permanently and irrecoverably corrupted, its beyond my level of expertise.

I don't know really, I'm a bit daft to be doing this. Hard reset the computer and it seems to have booted so mayhaps I've survived.  Though it's hanging again but that is prob another issue.

[Engels]

I asked because 'blocks' are normally associated with a failing hard drive, not a BIOS flash, but it may be referring to ROM 'flashable' blocks/sectors/whathaveyou.

If you saw your machine boot and then run into a disk check and it reported bad blocks, then I'd recommend backing up your data asap. Disk failures like that tend to cascade fast into utter unreadability. Then its time to get a new hard drive, and reinstall everything.

[lamaros]

I asked because 'blocks' are normally associated with a failing hard drive, not a BIOS flash, but it may be referring to ROM 'flashable' blocks/sectors/whathaveyou.

If you saw your machine boot and then run into a disk check and it reported bad blocks, then I'd recommend backing up your data asap. Disk failures like that tend to cascade fast into utter unreadability. Then its time to get a new hard drive, and reinstall everything.

Hmm. Well I was voluntarily updating the BIOS and the computer just locked up completely halfway through. It managed to work when I reset it via taking out the battery, and the BIOS version now says it's the one I was attempting to update it to. So I guess I will just eave it as it is now and if it fails later on so be it. All my important stuff is backed up normally.

Thanks for the help.

[Engels]

Good to hear. I have sometimes flashed a rom and it takes a bit to read it at first boot, specially with dells. Glad that taking out the battery fixed it/knocked it back into place.

[Salamok]

Anyone have a preferred piece of equipment that can act as a wireless bridge?  I guess you need internet access to your direct tv box to order on demand items (unless you want to call every time).  BTW is it normal for the AT&T installers to not do any of this shit?  They pretty much just made the wireless router hot and hooked up the satellite then left, they did not configure the mail clients or make sure the satellite receiver had internet access for the aforementioned on demand ordering.

Personally I never let the cable guy touch my shit but leaving it all in the hands of my 70 year old parents with the comment that it is so easy an 11 year old could do it doesn't seem like the best customer service model available.

You probably want to go to the DDWRT forums and find which routers work with their firmware, then buy 2 of those and flash them and turn them into bridges. There are a lot of cheap devices that will take DDWRT.

But honestly, less hassle and fuss if you just buy enough cat5 cable and hard wire it.

I ended up trying out a wireless adapter which worked fine for the laptop but when I tried switching it over to the DirecTV box it wouldn't work.  Ran out of time messing with other stuff so I will probably just hardwire it in a few months when I am next out that way.

[SnakeCharmer]

I didn't want to make a thread to ask this since it's just kind a general tech question....

Either Comcast or Bellsouth is running new fiber just outside of our neighborhood and they have some decent sized canisters of nitrogen at different points.  What's the nitrogen used for?

[Sheepherder]

Purging subterranean lines probably.  Maybe welding if they're using one of the processes that require inert gas.

[Morat20]

Question -- sadly this is for Vista:

The hard drive in my wife's laptop decided to eat itself again. While probably repairable (the issue was a bad block somewhere in the OS or boot area. I couldn't even get chkdsk to work, it'd cancel itself even on autorun at startup) since it'd still boot and work, just badly, I've had such problems with her drive that I just up and bought a new one.

I reloaded Vista (shudder), office, built her new profiles, and attached her old drive via a USB drive enclosure to snag her data and port it into her new profiles. I managed to get all the important data out of her user profiles, but ran into a PITA permission issue.

I finally managed to get access to everything I need and get it to copy, but only after a long and painful process of explitly taking ownership of the folder and all it's children and files, then granting myself total permission (as administrator on her computer). Is that the only way to do it, or did I miss something simple?

Because I can't really understand why a drive I have slaved to the laptop, of which I am an administrator, was locked off from me to begin with. (I think that's my old Unix stuff saying "You're root. If it's connected, you can do whatever the fuck you want with it).

[Murgos]

Question -- sadly this is for Vista:
<snipped>

I think I recall that in Vista the Administrator account is disabled by default and has to be explicitly enabled.  I don't think that if you just add yourself to the administrators group you get the same level of access...

[Morat20]

I think I recall that in Vista the Administrator account is disabled by default and has to be explicitly enabled.  I don't think that if you just add yourself to the administrators group you get the same level of access...

I booted it in safe mood, hooked up the drive, planted my flag via Ownership, and declared that all the Hard Drive belonged to me. Strangely, it still refused me access to some of the boot files. However, the Users directory fell beneath my awesome mouse-clicking powers.

Nonetheless, it was a real pain.

I can understand Microsoft's security goals, and their absolute and justified fears of what casual users would do if they could (for instance) find the registry, but jesus.

[Ingmar]

Just plugging a drive into a machine doesn't do anything to change the permissions on the files that are already on it - those are explicitly assigned to the administrator account et. al. on the other machine. It might have worked if you used the exact same machine name, I've never tried that, but I suspect that the SIDs would still be wrong. It isn't a security paranoia thing, that's just how NTFS works.

[Morat20]

Just plugging a drive into a machine doesn't do anything to change the permissions on the files that are already on it - those are explicitly assigned to the administrator account et. al. on the other machine. It might have worked if you used the exact same machine name, I've never tried that, but I suspect that the SIDs would still be wrong. It isn't a security paranoia thing, that's just how NTFS works.

It doesn't. The SIDs are different, even with the same machine name. (It does, however, make it a bit tricky to determine which machinename/user account you're assigning permissions with). I was replacing her drive, so I kept the name and user account names, which was a bit tricky. :)

My complaint was more that there simply wasn't a way to brute force ownership of the drive -- the equivilant of an override or something. Like I said, I tend to think of "Administrator' as 'root' which to me means that I automatically have permissions for everything. I can theoretically understand why it's done the way it's done, it just caused me a lot of grief doing it. In my head, hooking up the drive means the new OS should own it's ass. (And technically does, since the OS can declare itself owner of the drive. Making me explicitly do it, however, instead of just saying 'You are in admin mode, this is a hard drive access via the OS you are admin of, everything is open to you" was obnoxious.

I can see the security reasons behind it. Doesn't make it any less obnoxious.

[Lantyssa]

You have to brute-force it as far as I've ever been able to find.

[Brolan]

I think I recall that in Vista the Administrator account is disabled by default and has to be explicitly enabled.  I don't think that if you just add yourself to the administrators group you get the same level of access...

I booted it in safe mood, hooked up the drive, planted my flag via Ownership, and declared that all the Hard Drive belonged to me. Strangely, it still refused me access to some of the boot files. However, the Users directory fell beneath my awesome mouse-clicking powers.

Nonetheless, it was a real pain.

I can understand Microsoft's security goals, and their absolute and justified fears of what casual users would do if they could (for instance) find the registry, but jesus.

If Microsoft built cars it would be a 12-step process to open the hood.

[Sheepherder]

This isn't the thread for "lulz I h8 M$ 'cause I wear a beret."

[Hawkbit]

Newb question time.  How do these speakers attach to my PC?  My system has onboard sound, simple setup.  I've used stock cheapo 3.5mm jack speakers for the longest time and I'm looking to take it up a notch.  

Can they simply hook directly into the 3.5mm on my MB, or does it need other hardware?  Thanks!

http://www.amazon.com/M-Audio-Studiophile-AV-Powered-Speakers/dp/B000MUXJCO/ref=dp_cp_ob_e_title_1

They will most likely have either an RCA connector on the back for left-right or a TRS jack of some size. All you will need is an adapter.

While I love me some M-Audio (and I love me some studio monitors), I have been very happy with my Alesis M1Acitve 320USB speakers which are about half the price. LINK

My 10yr old speakers finally died.  They're popping and all sorts, a bad connection somewhere and I don't feel like fixing what I don't like anyways. 

Are there any speakers out that are good in the sub-$50 range?  I suppose I could do those Alesis, but hoping to get the price down.  Don't need a subwoofer set, though I have been listening to a lot more music on my system lately.  Onboard sound.  Thanks!

[Yegolev]

My 2007 Mitsubishi TV is dying.  Not so suddenly that I can grieve and get over it with a replacement, however this gives me time to carefully consider a purchase.  It occurs to me that maybe Mitsubishi makes shit TVs but they also make very thin frame TVs.  Searching for thin frame TVs makes my brain baby kick, and besides this the first thing I find is a Mitsubishi.  The determining spec is "less than 48 inches wide" and ideally "exactly 48 inches wide".  I suppose my question is: anyone have a Mitsubishi TV that has lasted longer than three years?  It looks good on paper.

[Salamok]

Is there even a way to search for a TV by total width, other than hitting the stores with a tape measure or manually navigating your way through hundreds of manufacturer specs online?

[Yegolev]

Not on Amazon, and any sort of measurement in a Google search gets hits on the diagonal.

Mathematics tells me that it cannot possibly have a diagonal longer than 55 even if there was no frame.  Past history tells me that if I downgrade from a 52 to anything under 50, I'm liable to spend lots of time stewing in a pool of hate.

I'm also pretending that I actually have the money for this.

[Sky]

Is depth an issue as well, or are you just talking about a thin bezel? The Mitsu DLP I have has about a half inch bezel. I never realized how large the Samsung's bezel was until I got this set, it's almost all screen. It's less than a year old, though, so no word on reliability.

What exactly is 'dying'?

[Yegolev]

There are vertical lines of LCDs that don't twist.  The first ones appeared on the right edge so I was pretending they did not exist.  A few months ago, one appeared in the center.  These all go away eventually if you leave the TV on long enough.  Then this week I notice some minuscule color artifacts in a band on the left side.  Difficult to see, but at first I thought my PS3 was dying again and my eyes got red.  In any case, I don't expect these issues to get better over time.

From my brief searches, if you need a thin bezel then you have to get a Mitsubishi.  My problem is that I have a large cabinet system built into the wall and the opening for the TV is 48 inches wide.  This is very deep, designed in 2002 when CRTs ruled the fern-laden swamps, and it even opens into the room behind so depth is not an issue.  Having the TV jut out from the opening, if it's more than 48" wide, has been kiboshed by the wife, but I'm keeping this idea in my back pocket for when she is dead and/or gone.  Looking at TV reviews, I see brands such as Sony and Samsung, not Mitsu, getting high marks.  My decision is then to either get a smaller screen size of a different brand, or get a Mitsu and cross my fingers.