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Erkki

Damn it, but computers have become really complicated

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The fan is squealing. ):

 

Check for something in the way? A piece of the packing jammed in there or something?

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No, the fan just had a noticeable resistance compared to the other one (cooler has two).

 

But then it stopped squealing like two days after I installed it and already set up the RMA. Man, it was driving me goddamn insane. But, completely silent now!

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I don't really know where else to post this so here it goes: I'm planning on running my PC for a long ass time while I go to work and set Steam to download every single game I have in my library. However, I want to keep an eye on the temperatures of the CPU etc. but I don't know where to get a trustworthy temperature monitor from. Can anyone recommend one they use or have used? 

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coretemp if that's still a thing?  I mean you shouldn't have heat issues unless your pc has cooling issues in the first place.

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So I just discovered that whenever I run my vacuum in the same room that our cable modem is plugged into, my internet goes out and I have to reboot my modem. I have been wondering for awhile now why our internet intermittently goes out and all of the lights on our modem go solid and just recently made the connection that it always happens right after we vacuum. Has anyone ever experienced this or know what might be the cause? I'm thinking either the modem is dying, there is shitty wiring in my house, or the large current draw from the vacuum somehow adversely affects the operation of the modem. 

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The initial turn-on surge of a vacuum pulls a lot of power. It sounds like it's causing a voltage drop that's big enough to cause the modem problems, but not long enough to completely reset it. I'd bet that either you have wiring problems, or that circuit is already close to over-loaded. Maybe move the cable modem to a different breaker (using an extension cord or something) and see if it still happens?

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The initial turn-on surge of a vacuum pulls a lot of power. It sounds like it's causing a voltage drop that's big enough to cause the modem problems, but not long enough to completely reset it. I'd bet that either you have wiring problems, or that circuit is already close to over-loaded. Maybe move the cable modem to a different breaker (using an extension cord or something) and see if it still happens?

 

Yeah, it's definitely only a problem when we plug the vacuum into the same circuit that our modem is on. Never an issue when we vacuum upstairs or anything. And I'm not sure about the circuit being overloaded. Breakers are designed to trip at 80% of the rated current for a circuit so the breaker would trip before the load could ever even get to what the circuit is rated for.

 

I guess I'm wondering if it's possible that the vacuum is producing some kind of "electrical noise" that is somehow interfering with the flow of data through our cable line.

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I hate my pc. A while ago it started BSODing for no clear reason. After a reformat this was fixed... Now it's back. Thing dies on me within a few minutes. Not really looking forward to another reformat.

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I have no idea, it's working again after pretty much the equivalent of shaking my pc around. Checked if everything was seated right, and it's ok. I don't ever move the thing.

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Video card or RAM not seated correctly sounds right if moving it around fixed the problem. A stuck fan causing overheating also comes to mind, but it could be any number of things really,

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I guess I'm wondering if it's possible that the vacuum is producing some kind of "electrical noise" that is somehow interfering with the flow of data through our cable line.

You could test with a voltage meter where the modem goes and see how much the vacuum effects it. Or something. Maybe it's just a bad modem that is not very tolerant of fluctuations?

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Video card or RAM not seated correctly sounds right if moving it around fixed the problem. A stuck fan causing overheating also comes to mind, but it could be any number of things really,

It's not heat...it's odd that something would come unseated given I never move the thing but who knows.  I remember checking logs the first time this happened and often it was attributed to random things.  Did not get around to checking anything this time.  The great BSOD mystery...annoying.  But again at least everything's working for the moment, and anything important is not on my main drive, though I should probably burn copies of my portfolio stuff for school.

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Jesus, never have just one copy of your important files!!!!!!!!!!!!! Get a cloud thing like Dropbox or Google Drive or Backblaze or Jottacloud and that's all the ones I know.

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Exactly! Actually it would just be inconvenient if I lost that stuff, as it's images of artwork, which I still have the originals of. Though I'm sure I'd hate having to spend hours taking photos again.

I like to live on the edge!

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Hmm, so I've been in the process of trying to get a new built computer going for nearly two months and something keeps going wrong. First bad motherboard I had to RMA, second it turns out that the copy of Windows 7 I have does not seem to have a working product key, and last my new video card seems to need to be replaced.

 

I have a Nvidia Geforce GTX 670 manufactured by EVGA. Before I had my motherboard replacement, early December I tried it out on my usual computer (the one I've had for years and I am using now), and upon booting I had green lines and shaking green dots in the bios and within Win XP which would then be replaced with red lines and dots everywhere the longer I used it. I tried installing drivers on the XP machine and still the same issues. I called EVGA and made sure I had the three year warranty (which I do) and told them that I think the videocard is bad because of how it is displaying. The guy on the line wouldn't do an RMA for something running on a Gigabyte motherboard from 2009 and running XP so told me to call back when I got my new PC set up if it still didn't work.

 

So the other day, I finally set up my new PC with my dad's help and the video card was doing the same kind of display crap, but this time only after booting Win7 from the DVD. After installing Win7, the problem continued until I finally got everything up and running and was able to install the latest Nvidia drivers, which is 331.82 for my card. Upon restarting, the screen was fine and no junk, so I was kind of happy to see it was just a software issue... except it might not be. So after using the PC for less than five minutes I start witnessing the screen going black and coming back on, usually with an error message saying, "Display driver Nvidia Kernal Mode driver, 331.82 has stopped responding and has successfully recovered." However sometimes the screen will go back and I can't get it back on no matter what I do until I reset. Also I did once see the green lines again during the bios screen but then it went away when Win7 started again. Either way, I can get about 10 minutes max on this video card before the screen goes black and I can't use it without a reset. Also when moving windows around quickly, playing a game, or changing a youtube video to full screen, I sometimes get a small row of black boxes that flash almost unnoticeably on the screen. I should note right now that this does not happen with the onboard video card. I'm not sure if the my Win7 copy begging for me to activate it has anything to do with this but I'm not sure.

 

The last thing I did before typing this was attempt to use older drivers from Nvidia, since searching around for the given error message I saw forum posts saying the newest drivers are unstable. I uninstalled all Nvidia drivers completely and then installed 331.56, which someone recommended as the last "stable" drivers. Still no luck, same black screen problems.

 

So what do you guys think? Is it a software or a hardware problem? I'm completely dumbfounded because I don't know why this is happening and if I can even RMA the video card if looks and runs fine until the black screen appears (plus intermittent graphic garbage that briefly goes away). Either way, I don't know if I've ever encountered a video card that looked like it was broken upon first plugging it in and suddenly looked fine after installing the drivers. I guess I just don't understand the technology.

 

I'll have to wait to talk to EVGA Thursday and this is going to bug me all New Years Day, so I'm hoping you guys can give me your opinion.

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Yea, sounds like hardware to me too. Something funky going on with that card.

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Spend today:

1) installing an SSD and making it the system disk (i.e. migrating the system to the SSD)

2) replacing my iPhone4s iOS6 with iPhone5s iOS7

 

 

1) I did prepare old system disk to be small enough for the smaller SSD so I only had to copy the partition and get windows running again. The last part took most of the time because windows is a PITA if you just copy a partition. So far the only thing I really noticed is the lack of noise. Windows boots quicker to the login screen, but that's made just 2 seconds instead of 5. Logging in still takes quite a while, but after that applications do start much faster. But I can't say I'm really noticing it. Anyway, I found out that this new Dell XPS case sucks, it wasn't as flexible as my previous XPS. So right now the SSD is screwed in with just one screw. Should be ok enough. I didn't buy a cradle for it, because I assumed a laptop disk could easily be mounted in this case (like it could with my old XPS case). But it turns out this case only has screw holes on the right places for big disks. Ah well....

 

So, now I more or less have my whole system on the SSD. But I don't like that much, I think. I have a Samsung 840 EVO which should technically should have a 10+ year lifespan with normal desktop write activity. But I wonder, should I go through the trouble of moving my home dir to the HDD? (and how would I do that). I am moving my DEV stuff to the HDD (100GiB worth of disk images doesn't work well on the SSD).

 

2) (it's a company phone, not mine) So what's the selling point of the iPhone5s!? It's just a bit long and a bit thinner... but other than that?! I do dislike iOS7 a lot. It looks fuck ugly, the animations are really annoying (even with "motion reduced"). And a lot of standard applications have an even worse UI (for example, the calendar).

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Spend today:

1) installing an SSD and making it the system disk (i.e. migrating the system to the SSD)

2) replacing my iPhone4s iOS6 with iPhone5s iOS7

 

 

1) I did prepare old system disk to be small enough for the smaller SSD so I only had to copy the partition and get windows running again. The last part took most of the time because windows is a PITA if you just copy a partition. So far the only thing I really noticed is the lack of noise. Windows boots quicker to the login screen, but that's made just 2 seconds instead of 5. Logging in still takes quite a while, but after that applications do start much faster. But I can't say I'm really noticing it. Anyway, I found out that this new Dell XPS case sucks, it wasn't as flexible as my previous XPS. So right now the SSD is screwed in with just one screw. Should be ok enough. I didn't buy a cradle for it, because I assumed a laptop disk could easily be mounted in this case (like it could with my old XPS case). But it turns out this case only has screw holes on the right places for big disks. Ah well....

 

So, now I more or less have my whole system on the SSD. But I don't like that much, I think. I have a Samsung 840 EVO which should technically should have a 10+ year lifespan with normal desktop write activity. But I wonder, should I go through the trouble of moving my home dir to the HDD? (and how would I do that). I am moving my DEV stuff to the HDD (100GiB worth of disk images doesn't work well on the SSD).

 

2) (it's a company phone, not mine) So what's the selling point of the iPhone5s!? It's just a bit long and a bit thinner... but other than that?! I do dislike iOS7 a lot. It looks fuck ugly, the animations are really annoying (even with "motion reduced"). And a lot of standard applications have an even worse UI (for example, the calendar).

 

In my experience, you cannot move the home directory without doing some major registry business. When I got a relatively small SSD and wanted to use it as the system disk, I went through the process of installing the home directory on the secondary HDD which proved to be a nightmare even on a clean install. Basically, you create a dummy user account when installing the OS, go into the administrator hidden account and change some registry values, delete the dummy account, create a new account, and go from there. That front-loads all the fiddling, but it again requires a clean install.

 

When I created my latest PC, I just setup analogous folders on the HDD to Documents, Pictures, whatever and used the Windows library system to make them the default directories for those purposes. That obviously doesn't cover the other half of what a user folder does, like hold userdata and hidden folders, but it does keep those personal files separate from the system disk.

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hmm... I thought it was possible in Windows 7 to move the home directory. But it looks like it's only possible for special folders like "My Documents" and "My Downloads", or at least in a nice way. How dumb.

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