Quick [tech] Questions Thread

[Hammond]

I agree I would try rolling back from the newest drivers first. I generally stay far away from the bleeding edge of the ATI drivers historically I have had nothing but issues. As far as ram goes its a cheap upgrade so why not?

[K9]

I have a printers question.

My mother wants a new printer, and although I have tried to convince her that for the amount of stuff she needs to print she'd be better off using the printer at the local library, she's set on having one at home. My inclination is that a monochrome laserjet should offer the cheapest solution in the long run, given that she prints maybe 1-2 pages per week, and it's almost always text (nothing that requires colour).

Does this seem right, or would an inkjet/bubblejet be a better option? It seems that ink is horribly expensive, and might not last well given how infrequently she prints.

[Viin]

I would recommend a laser printer, a good-ish one. Mostly because inkjets suck and cheap printers turn into doorstops after 6 months.  Something like this: http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&sku=225-4114

I have a middle of the road Dell home office color laser printer - works great, always picks up the paper, never smears. Had to replace the black & color cartridges once in 4 years, and that was with me printing a lot for school.

[schild]

I realized I didn't even know what RAM was in my machine. I have an ASUS P5KC and I'm running 4GB of DDR2 800 whereas my mobo can also take DDR3 1333.

I'm a fucking idiot.

[Hammond]

Laser is a good choice for a simple printer. At the volume she is talking about most likely the cartridges would go bad on a inkjet before they ran out. I would probably recommend one of the small office versions and just monochrome rather than color. You get a decent sized cartridge for a relatively cheap price and at the volume you are talking about the one cartridge would probably last 10 years :).

And schild looks like you can only put 8 GB in that board so you are out maybe 80 bucks shipped for decent ram. I would still downgrade your video drivers though I noticed the newest ones crashed a few games for me.

[schild]

I'm trying to dig around for the most stable drivers for the 4890. No good answers that are less than a year or two old. Bleh.

[schild]

Guess I'll swing up to Fry's today and pick up some more DDR2-800. Hope they have 4 year old Corsair memory.

[Chimpy]

I have a printers question.

My mother wants a new printer, and although I have tried to convince her that for the amount of stuff she needs to print she'd be better off using the printer at the local library, she's set on having one at home. My inclination is that a monochrome laserjet should offer the cheapest solution in the long run, given that she prints maybe 1-2 pages per week, and it's almost always text (nothing that requires colour).

Does this seem right, or would an inkjet/bubblejet be a better option? It seems that ink is horribly expensive, and might not last well given how infrequently she prints.

The brother small laser printers are great for the price. I bought one for like 55 bucks a couple years ago and it works good for the rare occasions I need to print something.

I have an HL-2230 which is the monochrome USB only version of their basic printer.

[schild]

Put 4 more gigs in of the same type of ram. Graphics card aint outputting anything wtf halp

[Trippy]

Do you see your startup BIOS stuff? If so can you boot into Safe Mode? If you don't see any startup BIOS output take the new memory out

[schild]

Could not see the BIOS stuff. Actually took the OLD memory out and left the new stuff in and it booted like nothing had changed.

I didn't click to go into BIOS setup to see if I had disabled the 2nd RAM slot, but why would i do that, that's goofy.

[schild]

I just went into CPU-Z. Maybe I did fuck something up. This mobo has 6 slots for RAM but is only seeing 4 of the slots.

Granted 2 of the slots are for DDR3. So maybe it's only recognizing the DDR2 slots. I don't fucking know. Goddamn computers.

[schild]

I'm gonna try rebooting with memory just in the 2nd and 4th slot and see what happens.

TRIAL AND ERROR WHOOOO

[Yegolev]

Goddamn computers.

Fucking-A

[schild]

There's no reason this shouldn't be working. I'm just going to return it and get 2x4GB chips instead of 4x 2GB chips. Just, ugh.

[schild]

Anyone have 8GB (2x 4GB matching sticks) lying around since everyone has moved from DDR2 to DDR3 except for me? =D

[schild]

I can not find a fucking concensus of any sort for the most recent & most stable radeon drivers on the goddamn internet. If I wanted an answer from 2002 though, that's readily available. 

[Yegolev]

There aren't any stable Radeon drivers, that I know of.  Also I believe it's called Catalyst now?

[schild]

I thought Catalyst was the control center and drivers were still just drivers. I don't know "or care" hurrrr.

Ok, here's a better question then.

What is the best & most cost-effective graphics card I can find for this mobo: http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P5KC/

Edit: Should probably include my power supply, which is a uhhh, Zalman ZM-600HP: http://www.zalman.com/eng/product/Product_Read.php?Idx=633

Edit 2: Bonus points if they carry it at Fry's and I can get it while I return this RAM.

[Trippy]

http://www.frys.com/product/7311574?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG

[Yegolev]

My point was that you might find more info if you use "catalyst" instead of "radeon".

[Hammond]

Strange motherboard, I am reading that it will only take 4GB of DDR3 ram total. But it will take 8 GB of DDR2 ram. There was talk of a BIOS upgrade but since ASUS site is shitting the bed here at work I cannot look it up for you.

For the video card I would try the 12.X series of drivers. When windows 8 came out they pushed a ton of crap out pretty quickly and switching to something earlier might be the solution. Since this is considered a "mature" product you will probably not see many bug fixes in the future to resolve the problems you are seeing. So maybe a newer card makes sense. Shrug. Trippy linked a decent card that should work fine.

[schild]

At frys now. Simply buying the nvidia 660.

[Yegolev]

You probably should have just put that on your registry.

[schild]

Naw, that's ghetto.

[schild]

Finishing part of the install that failed (PhysX unload/reload) but things seem to be going well. Also, this thing is a lot quieter than the 4890 beast and sucks up less power. So, yayyyyyyyy. Oh, and for whatever reason the NVidia shit takes up about 200mb less RAM, so that's a plus. I idle at 2.0-2.2 now instead of 2.2-2.4GB used on boot.

[schild]

Launching a game. Let's see what breaks.

[schild]

Graphics card solved my problems. RAM is more stable, after full install and cleanout of other shit, I'm down to 1.8GB used at idle. Games aren't stuttering anymore. YAYAYYYYYYY IT'S LIKE A NEW PC.

[Rasix]

Flip dem cards. Scare yo self.

Glad you got it fixed.  I went for the nuclear option.

[schild]

I will next year probably.

[schild]

Was able to play Dishonored, among other things, on max settings for all the things.

Felt good.

[Numtini]

If you haven't done it, track down the ati removal tool to make sure all the crap is cleaned out. Sometimes the catalyst un-installer doesn't get it all, particularly if you're switching companies.

[schild]

I just manually did it and freed up another 6GB of space. ATI really likes just keeping shit around on a computer. Backups of every driver package I ever installed. Bleh.

[Ragnoros]

To be fair, I just cleaned out 2GB of old Nvidia drivers the other day as well.

Anyway, I just bought a SSD to replace my grinding, ten year old HDD. Is there anything pertinent I should know for setup/general use specific to SSDs?

[Chimpy]

To be fair, I just cleaned out 2GB of old Nvidia drivers the other day as well.

Anyway, I just bought a SSD to replace my grinding, ten year old HDD. Is there anything pertinent I should know for setup/general use specific to SSDs?

Never defrag (windows shouldn't even allow you to if it properly detects it as an SSD), turn off search indexing on the SSD, make sure AHCI mode is turned on on your motherboard, if you can do a clean install on the SSD do so.