kensei Posted July 27, 2008 Posted July 27, 2008 I'm just running XP. I'm wondering if there is a wire loose on the motherboard regarding the sound or something, but it can't be right if it's choking on Videos (all types avi/mpeg4/flv etc) and also just plain music.
mikeszekely Posted July 27, 2008 Posted July 27, 2008 I'm just running XP. I'm wondering if there is a wire loose on the motherboard regarding the sound or something, but it can't be right if it's choking on Videos (all types avi/mpeg4/flv etc) and also just plain music. When you right-click "My Computer" and bring up "Properties," how much RAM is showing? Is that the amount that it's supposed to have? You said it's a tablet, so I'm assuming it's got an integrated video chipset and that's going to borrow RAM, so remember to subtract for that. Because if you're computer is free of viruses and you're not running any extra processes, then I'm wondering if the tablet had a minimal ammount of RAM spread out over a pair of sticks, and one of the sticks died.
VF-19 Posted July 27, 2008 Posted July 27, 2008 When you right-click "My Computer" and bring up "Properties," how much RAM is showing? Is that the amount that it's supposed to have? You said it's a tablet, so I'm assuming it's got an integrated video chipset and that's going to borrow RAM, so remember to subtract for that. Because if you're computer is free of viruses and you're not running any extra processes, then I'm wondering if the tablet had a minimal ammount of RAM spread out over a pair of sticks, and one of the sticks died. If one of the RAM sticks was dead, the computer wouldn't boot at all, or at least give you an error message on boot. In the old days it would beep out a POST error. My dad knew each one of those cryptic beeps. I only knew the two short a-ok beeps.
Vince Posted July 27, 2008 Posted July 27, 2008 If one of the RAM sticks was dead, the computer wouldn't boot at all, or at least give you an error message on boot. In the old days it would beep out a POST error. My dad knew each one of those cryptic beeps. I only knew the two short a-ok beeps. good point, but xp will let you boot with 256mb, I was gonna say a bad stick would just not show up but on laptop it might only be a single 2gb stick -- then I would have been making an a** out of myself. Might be just bad memory stick rather dead one? I agree with Mike to look into the background processes with task manager, id those using the highest memory and cpu, and find out what applications those executables belong to. It could be as simple as some run away services running. Have you try to recreate the problem in safe mode? Have you try system restore? Boot you one memory stick at a time?
Knight26 Posted July 28, 2008 Posted July 28, 2008 quick RAM question, been a long time since I bought any, how do you determine what type of RAM to get a computer, without counting the pins, yes it has been that long.
kensei Posted July 28, 2008 Posted July 28, 2008 (edited) good point, but xp will let you boot with 256mb, I was gonna say a bad stick would just not show up but on laptop it might only be a single 2gb stick -- then I would have been making an a** out of myself. Might be just bad memory stick rather dead one? I agree with Mike to look into the background processes with task manager, id those using the highest memory and cpu, and find out what applications those executables belong to. It could be as simple as some run away services running. Have you try to recreate the problem in safe mode? Have you try system restore? Boot you one memory stick at a time? Thanks guys. Mike, I've certainly got a tablet, and 95% of the time you would be right, and I would have a integrated graphics card. But I don't. Mine is a Tecra M7 from Toshiba with an NVIDIA GeForce 128 MG dedicated graphics card. Two GBs of RAM are still showing up on my system. Vince my man, I turned off system restore, cause it often doesn't solve the problem for me (in the past anyway). Safe mode struggles as well. This is really weird, I might go for a reformat, but I hope, I really hope, that it isn't a hardware issue. This was an expensive tablet due to the Core 2 Duo processor, dedicated video card and screen size. Edited July 28, 2008 by kensei
azrael Posted July 28, 2008 Posted July 28, 2008 quick RAM question, been a long time since I bought any, how do you determine what type of RAM to get a computer, without counting the pins, yes it has been that long. Quick way: CPU-Z. It will tell you what CPU, motherboard, and memory you are using.
VF-19 Posted July 29, 2008 Posted July 29, 2008 The other quick way is to see if it will fit. If it doesn't fit, it's the wrong one! Oh and bad RAM is even more tricky than dead RAM. Bad RAM can cause all sort of problems that would never make you suspect the RAM was bad...
Vince Posted July 29, 2008 Posted July 29, 2008 (edited) Thanks guys. Mike, I've certainly got a tablet, and 95% of the time you would be right, and I would have a integrated graphics card. But I don't. Mine is a Tecra M7 from Toshiba with an NVIDIA GeForce 128 MG dedicated graphics card. Two GBs of RAM are still showing up on my system. Vince my man, I turned off system restore, cause it often doesn't solve the problem for me (in the past anyway). Safe mode struggles as well. This is really weird, I might go for a reformat, but I hope, I really hope, that it isn't a hardware issue. This was an expensive tablet due to the Core 2 Duo processor, dedicated video card and screen size. hay man, I'd like to help in anyway, I'm no expert on hardware, but my guess is some of the system went bad since it is having trouble with both audio and video. I wonder if your problem affect productivity softwares? Why not open a large Word document, spread sheets and such, at the same time and see how they perform? I have Norton antivirus on my work laptop, and every time it runs, it affect everything else badly. If the Offices type softwares works fine, then I'd uninstall the media player in question with windows' software removal from control panel, remove the directories and reboot a couple of times before reinstalling the player. If you think it might be bad system memory, I'd suggest boot with only some of the memory install. The cpu would normally not be the problem, but if it turns out to be the mb, then its good luck to you. I had a bad stick of memory in my pc a while along, and it did show up in system but the system was having trouble accessing it. It tested it as I mentioned to you, replaced the bad stick and everything is fine. They don't cost much either. Almost forgot, with xp you can reinstall windows on top of itself, these days they don't come with a disk but part of your hard drive would have been partitioned to hold the original disc image. You can usually burn that to disk and restore your system. If you reformatted your hard disk, your warranty would be void. good luck. Edited July 29, 2008 by Vince
mikeszekely Posted August 1, 2008 Posted August 1, 2008 While waiting for Newegg to restock the EVGA 9800GTX+ that was the first 9800GTX+ they were carrying, a second one popped up; a BFG, and one of their overclocked editions. Yeah, it was $10 more than the EVGA, but it was in stock, so I ordered it. I arrived today, and I installed it tonight. It was a royal pain to install... the card is so big that I had to move my hard drives. The SATA went into a lower bay (my case, an Antec P182, has a bay for hard drives in the usual place, where mine were, and another in a lower chamber), but I had to put brackets on my IDE and stick in into a 5.25". Absolutely worth it, though. My computer is still whisper quiet, and I ran Crysis at 1024x768, 4x anti-aliasing, textures set to Very High, and everything else set to High. I checked several games at the System Requirements Lab Can You Run It site. My computer now not only exceeds the recommended requirements for every game I checked, in pretty much every case it hit the far right end of the meter. In short, yeah, it might not be up to a GTX 280 or a Radeon 4870, but it didn't cost $500, either. At $200 ($210 for the overclocked one), the card's a bargain for anyone looking to upgrade their video.
David Hingtgen Posted August 1, 2008 Posted August 1, 2008 Yeah, but what about heat/noise? (My specific 8800GT was chosen because it is far cooler/quieter than just about any other card on the market--I never ever hear it over the basic PSU hum and fans)
mikeszekely Posted August 2, 2008 Posted August 2, 2008 Yeah, but what about heat/noise? (My specific 8800GT was chosen because it is far cooler/quieter than just about any other card on the market--I never ever hear it over the basic PSU hum and fans) I'm assuming you're only concerned about heat so much as it makes the fan blow. From what I've read, it's supposed to run cooler than the stock 9800GTX, but I'm upgrading from a 8500, so I couldn't say. I can say that after installing it, I booted the computer and a hard drive wasn't showing up, so I shut it down to check the connections and the card was already rather warm to the touch. That said, my whole computer is no louder than it was with the 8500, and the loudest component is easily the DVD drive (a Pioneer), which is one of the quietest I've owned.
kensei Posted August 2, 2008 Posted August 2, 2008 Had to nuke my hard disk and recover everything. It works! Dunno what happened though. The last thing that I did for awhile was to install Iron Man. That didn't cause any trouble on my friends computer though.
Vince Posted August 2, 2008 Posted August 2, 2008 Had to nuke my hard disk and recover everything. It works! Dunno what happened though. The last thing that I did for awhile was to install Iron Man. That didn't cause any trouble on my friends computer though. good for you . sales tax holiday here, I might buy me and extra laptop for the heck of it.
Akilae Posted August 8, 2008 Posted August 8, 2008 Could somebody recommend a good router? I'm sure it's been discussed sometime in the past, but I'm a bit lazy to go through 40+ pages... I'll be hooking it up behind a Verizon FiOS router... something that has a stable wireless G and doesn't reset every so often would be nice, since that's what my Buffalo router has been doing.
Chowser Posted August 8, 2008 Posted August 8, 2008 Well, personal experience, my Netgear g router took a dump. My Linksys G router is still going strong (as well as my ancient linksys B router), and my new Dlink draft-n router has been great for about 4 months now.
Sketch Posted August 8, 2008 Posted August 8, 2008 (edited) Could somebody recommend a good router? I'm sure it's been discussed sometime in the past, but I'm a bit lazy to go through 40+ pages... I'll be hooking it up behind a Verizon FiOS router... something that has a stable wireless G and doesn't reset every so often would be nice, since that's what my Buffalo router has been doing. WRT54GL is an awesome device; lots of 3rd party Linux based firmware available that give it a lot of advanced features that are usually only available in commercial grade units. Besides that it's only like $50 up here in Canada, so probably even cheaper in the US. I've been running Tomato firmware on mine for like 6 months without having to reset it. http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato Edited August 8, 2008 by Sketch
VT 1010 Posted August 9, 2008 Posted August 9, 2008 Could somebody recommend a good router? I'm sure it's been discussed sometime in the past, but I'm a bit lazy to go through 40+ pages... I'll be hooking it up behind a Verizon FiOS router... something that has a stable wireless G and doesn't reset every so often would be nice, since that's what my Buffalo router has been doing. If you chose Linksys, be careful about which model you choose. My WRT54GS has acted rather strangely. For some odd reason, I can't seem to access Macross World at all through my router. It's the ONLY website that I can't access. I now have to use a web proxy to get on here (and it doesn't work perfectly either). I'll probably have to get a new wireless router myself, when I get the funds.
Valkyrie addict Posted August 15, 2008 Posted August 15, 2008 what exactly is a 'msn messenger bot' for, is it dangerous to allow this person into your contact list?? lately I've been getting a couple of 'shady' request for my messenger and when I accept it has some chic name with a provocative picture, I forward the address to a friend of mine who's into this 'meeting new people over the internet' but he moaned to me that I send him a bot is there any way to tell if it's a bot or not?!
David Hingtgen Posted August 15, 2008 Posted August 15, 2008 Ummm, yeah. EVERYTHING people send that you didn't ask for is a bot/virus/spam/trojan. That's how you can tell.
CoryHolmes Posted August 15, 2008 Posted August 15, 2008 Is there anyway to update the Bluetooth protocols on my cellphone? I have a music phone that I use nigh-continuously but I'm having a hard time finding stereo headphones. Everything is monophone or a single Bluetooth earpiece that leeches all the fun away from having a music phone (seriously, all I'm after are two earbuds and microphone. Think I can find one frigging cheapo set?). There are some new Bluetooth stereo headphones that really caught my eye but they require Bluetooth 2.0 and some specific profiles that my phone doesn't have. Here's what I'm after
akt_m Posted August 18, 2008 Posted August 18, 2008 Wow, i just developed this new prblem with my tablet in the space of a couple of hours. Fired up everything as usual, played videos and music, all fine. Went to a birthday party, and then when I came home, everything started to really struggle. Windows were taking longer to switch, restart and shutdown was abysmally slow, mouse pointer lagging like crazy, and most of all speakers have fits and bouts of the snap crackle and pop. WHen I play videos now, even on Youtube or from the HDD, sound and video go out of whack, you hear static, and the computer really really struggles. I ran AVG Antivirus scan, Ad-aware scan and it all came up clean. Reinstalled new K-Lite codec pack too. STill the same result. Any ideas what this could be? CPU usuage is at 48% av, and also around 500 MB/2000 MB RAM used. I don't know if this the problem, but i had to do a downgrade from AVG 8.0 to AVG 7.0 after i bought a new tablet. Don't know why everytime i use the usb tablet, AVG 8.0 used around 50 - 60% of CPU.
azrael Posted August 18, 2008 Posted August 18, 2008 Is there anyway to update the Bluetooth protocols on my cellphone? I have a music phone that I use nigh-continuously but I'm having a hard time finding stereo headphones. Everything is monophone or a single Bluetooth earpiece that leeches all the fun away from having a music phone (seriously, all I'm after are two earbuds and microphone. Think I can find one frigging cheapo set?). There are some new Bluetooth stereo headphones that really caught my eye but they require Bluetooth 2.0 and some specific profiles that my phone doesn't have. I believe Bluetooth is hardware dependent, i.e. unless you have a Bluetooth chip that supports Bluetooth 2.0 or higher, you can't upgrade via firmware or via software to Bluetooth 2.x.
Scream Man Posted August 18, 2008 Posted August 18, 2008 Listen, maybe this isnt the place to ask but what the heck: is there any reason why Vista doesnt have thumbnail views for files and images? My wifes seems to, but my version at home doesnt. Is there a setting somewhere Im missing?
azrael Posted August 18, 2008 Posted August 18, 2008 Listen, maybe this isnt the place to ask but what the heck: is there any reason why Vista doesnt have thumbnail views for files and images? My wifes seems to, but my version at home doesnt. Is there a setting somewhere Im missing? View->Large Icons
emajnthis Posted August 18, 2008 Posted August 18, 2008 (edited) I believe Bluetooth is hardware dependent, i.e. unless you have a Bluetooth chip that supports Bluetooth 2.0 or higher, you can't upgrade via firmware or via software to Bluetooth 2.x. to further elaborate, your phone also requires that you have support for A2DP (stereo bluetooth) otherwise you'll have this nice expensive stereo bluetooth headset that you'll be listening to in mono (although if your phone doesn't have a2dp it probably wont' let you listen to music on your bluetooth anyway). My phone has bluetooth 2.0 with EDR support but no A2DP so i can pair it up with bluetooth 2.0 devices and get the more powerful bandwidth, but i'm SOL if i want to listen to music via bluetooth since i don't have A2DP. Also, if you plan to get a bluetooth module for say a netbook or a laptop, go with the newest bluetooth standard 2.1 as it supports encryption and a slew of other cool stuff. Edited August 18, 2008 by emajnthis
CoryHolmes Posted August 19, 2008 Posted August 19, 2008 Actually I was hoping to avoid updating my phone at all, since it's only two years old and still works fine. I guess this means I'm back on the hunt for some basic frigging wired headsets. You think they'd be easier to find...
mikeszekely Posted August 19, 2008 Posted August 19, 2008 Actually I was hoping to avoid updating my phone at all, since it's only two years old and still works fine. I guess this means I'm back on the hunt for some basic frigging wired headsets. You think they'd be easier to find... Only two years old? Isn't that when you're supposed to replace it?
Duke Togo Posted August 19, 2008 Posted August 19, 2008 Only two years old? Isn't that when you're supposed to replace it? Usually you can upgrade after a year and a half.
CoryHolmes Posted August 19, 2008 Posted August 19, 2008 Only two years old? Isn't that when you're supposed to replace it? Usually you can upgrade after a year and a half. I know I'm going to lose some GeekCred for this, but it still works just fine. I fail to see any need to replace a perfectly working music phone.
mikeszekely Posted August 19, 2008 Posted August 19, 2008 I know I'm going to lose some GeekCred for this, but it still works just fine. I fail to see any need to replace a perfectly working music phone. Because most carriers will pretty much give you a new one at that point just for renewing your contract. And hey, having an extra "perfectly good" phone around is handy. My wife lost her last phone (and we never did find it). It was a little too early to renew the contract and get the freebies, but close enough that we didn't feel like shelling out for a new phone. We got Verizon to reactivate her old phone for free. Although, that assumes you have a CDMA carrier. If you've got a GSM carrier, I guess you lose your SIM card with the phone, and you're just screwed. In any case, working or not, I can't hardly stand to put up with the same phone for two years. My contract is up in March, and I'm already counting the days.
azrael Posted August 19, 2008 Posted August 19, 2008 I know I'm going to lose some GeekCred for this, but it still works just fine. I fail to see any need to replace a perfectly working music phone. That's perfectly fine. As an example, I'd upgrade to an iPhone or some other smart phone except I fail to justify the price for stuff I might hardly use.
Vince Posted August 19, 2008 Posted August 19, 2008 That's perfectly fine. As an example, I'd upgrade to an iPhone or some other smart phone except I fail to justify the price for stuff I might hardly use. iphone does not support stereo bluetooth, and the gps is not turn by turn yet. App store makes it very handy.
emajnthis Posted August 19, 2008 Posted August 19, 2008 iphone does not support stereo bluetooth, and the gps is not turn by turn yet. App store makes it very handy. With as great as the device is it still lacks many features that are standard on all similarly priced phones, i guess that's the sacrifice for interface and form factor.
kensei Posted August 20, 2008 Posted August 20, 2008 With as great as the device is it still lacks many features that are standard on all similarly priced phones, i guess that's the sacrifice for interface and form factor. That's just it. i see no reason to get it to replace my Nokia N95. To me, its worlds better than the iPhone. Give me one reason to choose the iPhone over the Nokia N96 when I upgrade.
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