PC Troubleshooting...

[Tus]

ya dust is a pain.  My system the other day when nutz on me because it overheated.  Had to take my airbrush and clean it out (ahhhh, having a a compressor and airbrush is so convient now )

[E_Look NCC-9091]

Ay ya... do you ever draw pictures with it??

(Still, it's a great "precision" tool to zap away dust.  Ingenious!)

[Tus]

its for model work mostly, though the last time i painted was 6 months ago, i've been pretty broke saving up for my spring break trip so i can't buy paints... hopefully next month i can buy paints and paint my D 7 (i've decided to use k'tinga color scheme... i don't llike my ships w/o some color lol)

[pepperman]

Hmmm... filtered fan intakes!  Great idea.

If I come up with a way to install somethiing like that as nifty as yours, I'll post it, too.

A pair of your girl friends nylons cut properly will make a good intake screen...just remember to clean them regularly.  What is you input/output fan ratio.

[E_Look NCC-9091]

Yo!  Watch it!!

It's wife.

You can get me seriously hurt.

[KBF-Kurok]

 ok here goes i have a friend whos internet connection is going real slow in exp he  went to tools,internet options then deleted the temp files and cookies and  had no change. any ideas?

[E_Look NCC-9091]

Often, it's not that stuff; it may be the connection itself.  How's he connecting to the Internet?

[KBF-Kurok]

cable and his isp provider says he is operating at 6 megs per sec

[E_Look NCC-9091]

Hmmm... 6... that SOUNDS good...

... but I have a work PC and though it reports its connection speed as 10 Mbps, it's slow for a broadband (T1? T3?) connection.  I guess it may be due to its being on a big or big and poorly maintained network.

I don't know what to say to this.

Anyone else?

[KBF-Kurok]

im thinking your correct its cable so the net work might very well be real busy or porley maintained. Thanks for trying to help.

[Panzergranate]

A quick one from a PC/MAC repair guy....

If a MAC powerbook won't start open up the power unit and replace C27 with a 10uF electrolytic capacitor. This will re-enable the soft start again. It's the only fault we ever had on power books.

If your PC/MAC does POST and then refuses to read the hard disc, stating that the HD is INVALID MEDIA then remove the HD, find soemone with a HD E2PROM set up rig (a PC rigged with a special card costing £900 here in the UK) and have them reprogramme the HD's controller card E2PROM. The rig will detect all the heads, tracks and sectors and then allow them to be reinstated.

I'm occasionally contrated by 3PR companies to do this very job.

So when your HD acts up it isn't neccessarily  dead, its just forgotten the settings given at the factory.

Also watch out for Quantum Fireballs over 10 Gigs as they have a nasty habit of catching fire!! A small flame will appear out of the head controller chip on the card and slowly burn outwards to the pins, taking 8 seconds in all. (We timed one at one place!!) It's just like the mission impossible titles.

Aparently the arm motor seizes inside and causes this. Just a design fault.

Most reliable drives are Maxtor as I've seen very few to repair.

Andy.

[Don Karnage]

here another pc problem with anti virus.

i remove ca anti virus cause it was old and replace it with a trial version of pccillin, i discover that for intermittent i lost all sound, at first i taught it was the sound card that was dead but sudently i get sound back and i lost it again.

the only think i did was install pccillin, so i remove it and was the source of the problem, i taught i uninstall it but its still they're.

before that i install mc caffee on it and reboot the com, all was fine, but this morning the com keep rebooting and i can see that pccillin it still they're and so is mc caffee, normally pccilin will not acept another antivirus but maybe because it was already there that it let the other install.

i can't go to control panel to uninstall pccillin because there no time to show all and if i try to go by the start button to pccillin for uninstall it close because of all they software that want to run.

i will clean that soon since they're are software i no longer use and other i don't want to see at the start like quick time, icq and another stuff to download but not emule, another kind that share and suppose to be faster.

so its a pentium 4 that got that problem, i wont have news for my amd before Tuesday and this backup com is limited under win 98, i will ask for dual boot so i can run win 98 and win xp

[F9thCenturus]

here another pc problem with anti virus.

i remove ca anti virus cause it was old and replace it with a trial version of pccillin, i discover that for intermittent i lost all sound, at first i taught it was the sound card that was dead but sudently i get sound back and i lost it again.

the only think i did was install pccillin, so i remove it and was the source of the problem, i taught i uninstall it but its still they're.

before that i install mc caffee on it and reboot the com, all was fine, but this morning the com keep rebooting and i can see that pccillin it still they're and so is mc caffee, normally pccilin will not acept another antivirus but maybe because it was already there that it let the other install.

i can't go to control panel to uninstall pccillin because there no time to show all and if i try to go by the start button to pccillin for uninstall it close because of all they software that want to run.

i will clean that soon since they're are software i no longer use and other i don't want to see at the start like quick time, icq and another stuff to download but not emule, another kind that share and suppose to be faster.

so its a pentium 4 that got that problem, i wont have news for my amd before Tuesday and this backup com is limited under win 98, i will ask for dual boot so i can run win 98 and win xp

Out of curiosity, when was the last time you did a full reformat?

[E_Look NCC-9091]

Ah, one shouldn't have to reformat.  It's really for dire emergencies.  It's probably better to delete, delete, defragment, reorganize, and delete more junk... then run antivirus and antispyware just in case.

[AlchemistiD]

Okay, I recently had to reformat my hard disk after picking up a nasty ROOTKIT infestation.  I've reinstalled almost everything but my games, but I've noticed some odd behaviour out of my internet browser(s) Firefox 3 and IE7.

Images don't load, or they do, but not all of them.  Or they ALL do, but then the next page doesn't load any.  I'll show you what I mean in some captures I'm attaching.  Refreshing sometimes brings the images up, but only after about two dozen ctrl-r keystrokes.  This includes forum avatars, thumbnails, attachments, new post markers, posted images, logos, forum buttons, ect.  There are some things that remain unaffected, like the background image in Sci-Fi Meshes picture viewer or website backgrounds like at Bungie.net 

Still, I had to reload twice just to see the reply button and its fast becoming aggravating to say the least.  This has been happening since I completed reinstalling XP Media Center on my PC.

I've tried clearing my cache and reopening all the browsers, doesn't work.  I've tried disabling McAffe and Spybot, doesn't work.  I've scanned with every anti-malware program I have, nothing.

[Javora]

Well you are getting something form the Internet or you wouldn't see anything at all.  Looks more like a settings issue to me.

[AlchemistiD]

Nevermind, sorry for the bother.

Leave it to me to miss THE BLEEDING OBVIOUS.  The issue has been found and dealt with.

[Nemesis]

I got up Monday morning and tried to use my computer, no response from the keyboard.  I spent the day looking for a solution and backing up my data in case I had to reinstall.  (This is on Linux Mint 4 KDE version, I'm upgrading to 5 in a few days). 

The end result found in the evening?  Sometime late Sunday just before I went to bed I must have been trying to change the text size in my browser by holding down the ALT key and using the scroll wheel on my trackball as cookies popped up.  How did this cause it?  KDE has accessibility features and if you hold a key too long it thinks that you want to use the slow keys function and pops up to ask if you really do.  I think it must have popped up just as I clicked on a cookie (to deny likely) and been clicked on without my even seeing it.  The slow keys feature is so handicapped people who have trouble hitting the right key and hit several keys briefly but only the key they hold down will register.  The keyboard would have responded if I held the keys longer.   

I don't know if Windows has an equivalent feature or not (I haven't checked).  I do know that after not using Windows for much except the occasional game play going back was painful.  I kept trying to switch desktops (there isn't another desktop to go to) and scroll between open programs with the scroll wheel while pointing to the task bar. 

To each his own I guess.  But I learned something (and turned off the slow keys altogether).

[Tus]

If i'm not mistaken in windows its called sticky keys... would confirm but i'm on ubuntu w/ the lappy (which works nicely, though i think when i get my dell disks i'll put xp back on... need something so i can model on the road )

[Nemesis]

I have an old NEC Multisync 22" monitor and recently it has been giving me problems.  The top 1" or so "collapses" into a narrow line and the screen flickers.  I very reluctantly replaced it with a newer LCD (lower resolution unfortunately) widescreen monitor a few weeks ago.  I put it on my "spare" computer and was playing around with it the other day and found that it works ok if I lower the refresh rate.  So if you have a failing monitor you might be able to get some more life out of it by playing with the refresh rates.