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Erkki

Damn it, but computers have become really complicated

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I have my PC HDMI'd to a Panasonic plasma and it's pretty sweet.

 

 

Me too. HDMI across the room to my TV. I used to play XCom one night, and then i haven't used it since, caus I've been playing keyboard games!

 

I thought about buying a plasma, but gave up after seeing the price of them here in Brazil: about 2000 dollars. There are cheaper plasmas, but they are not even Full HD (not even a proper HD, just 1024x768). Considering the price and the extra caution about burn-in (I know this issue is very rare now, but still happens sometimes), I decided to go for a LED.

 

And well, considering that I'm a very impatient guy, I actually just bought a TV. It's the Sony W6 I've mentioned above, 42", and it's amazingly good, at least comapred to the other TVs I know. Gorgeous image, no smearing/inverse ghosting at all, it's just the opposite of the cheap LG diisplay I've returned to the store a couple of months ago. I'm really surprised, I didin't thought that the difference would be that great. I recommend this TV if there's anyone interested.

 

I decided to buy it already because this TV apparently is going to be discontinued here in Brazil, according to some stores I visited. Could find it in only one place on the internet, and on the mall only the same store had it as well. The salesman told me that Sony usually spare only a small amount of these intermediate sets for Brazil, because the big sellers here are their entry series, so their focus goes to those. I don't think it's going to be already discontinued in other countries though, considering it's part of their 2013 line.

 

Just played Enslaved and it's beautiful, PC gaming with a Full HD TV is so glorious.

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I have a kind of... very odd problem I've noticed with Chrome as of late.

 

First off, web pages started lagging ever so slightly -- i.e. if I swap from one tab to another, the page for the tab I am switching to will remain blank for a few seconds.  Same for closing tabs, it's just general lag but I'm not sure what is causing it!

Around the same time, this weird graphical error started occurring - when I right click anywhere in Chrome to bring up a menu (or if I click on a folder in my bookmark bar, for example), mousing over lines causes them to go invisible until I mouse over them again.

A couple of examples below...

 

Any ideas? 

I've had this lately too. It started happening shortly after I'd read that Chrome was switching to an OpenGL based renderer for web content. I think they probably made the switch over in the main versions and it's still got some bugs and artifacts.

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I installed Bioshock the other night, and every time I try to play it the sound cuts out just after the plane crash at the beginning. I've been trying various recommended fixes for an hour or more now. Hopefully this last thing will work, but man this has been frustrating.

 

EDIT: I fixed it. Yaaaaay. OuO

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Any thoughts on the new nVidia tech? I am talking about the GTX 750 ti stuff. I have been thinking about upgrading my PSU and GPU to something nicer but anything lower watt is appealing to me.

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Very impressive leap from 650 (Ti (Boost)) to this 750/750 Ti. For general gaming purposes at 1080p though, you really should go at least 660/760 or R9 270X unless you're quite concerned about power consumption. I think the 750 (Ti) is incredibly compelling for HTPC/Steam Machine variations where you're going to be aiming for 24hr operation and 60w is so much more enticing.

 

I currently have a 7850 2GB in my HTPC (it's what I had lying around) and I'm really thinking about making this slight graphical downgrade for ~2-3x better power efficiency. I'm hoping that some company releases a low-profile version of this series of cards, I'd take it almost immediately for small form factor mini/micro-ATX cases that fit better into my entertainment center.

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For the last few weeks, I've been having problems with either my computer or my router and I'm hoping someone with more networking knowhow than I can help.  At seemingly random times, my laptop will drop internet.  It's still connected to the router (or so it says) but the actual connection to the internet is down.  Other devices such as my phone and tablet connected to the same router are fine and the router itself doesn't seem to be showing any signs that the internet is down.  The laptop will reestablish the connection a minute or so later, only to repeat the process after about an hour or so. 

 

If I manually disconnect and reconnect, it works right away but still does nothing to prevent the problem from recurring.  Windows built in troubleshooting gives me different answers, such as a bad gateway, problems connecting to the dns server, or just being unable to do anything.   Sometimes it will reestablish the connection, but most of the time the troubleshooter just turns the wifi card off and on and declares the problem solved.  I've updated firmware on the router and drivers on my laptop.  I've uninstalled a bunch of software I don't need that I thought might be doing it, tried using static ips and disabling dhcp, but nothing prevents the drop.  The laptop is several years old now so it might just be failing hardware, but I wanted to see if someone here might have an idea.

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Do you have a USB-based wireless adapter? I don't have a ton of networking know-how and I would have take the same troubleshooting steps as you. For me, the next step would be trying such an external adapter. Nowadays you can even buy "nano"-sized ones that barely protrude from the port, making it a semi-permanent solution for a laptop.

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It's an integrated wireless card.  I've considered picking up a usb card to see if it's my laptop's hardware, but I'd rather not have to buy a potentially useless piece of equipment.

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Could be an IP address conflict? Can you ping any other machines on your network while this is going on?

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I've checked the IP addresses of everything connected to the router and everything is unique, so there's no conflict as far as I can tell.  I've even had the router manually assign a specific IP to my laptop's MAC address just in case.

 

The weird thing is when the connection goes down, my laptop seems to be unable to communicate with the router despite Windows telling me it's still connected (with no internet access).  When I ping the router after losing the connection, all of the packets timeout.  When I check the address of the gateway/dhcp/dns server, my router's IP is still there but I can't seem to communicate with it, so I'm not sure if I'm actually still connected or not.

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No services crashing in the event log? Wireless drivers updated? It's certainly starting to sound like a hardware failure.

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The drivers are up to date.  The router's event log is weird.  It's full of a lot of dhcp requests and acknowledgements, but many of them don't coincide with the connection drop.  I haven't tried seeing if any services are being interrupted on my computer, but honestly I'm not even sure which ones to check.

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The drivers are up to date.  The router's event log is weird.  It's full of a lot of dhcp requests and acknowledgements, but many of them don't coincide with the connection drop.  I haven't tried seeing if any services are being interrupted on my computer, but honestly I'm not even sure which ones to check.

 

Have you ruled out it being a signal issue? Some of your symptoms look like drops from Bluetooth interference or something, but I don't know how to diagnose or fix that.

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I'm pretty sure it's not a signal issue.  When it is connected, it's a strong signal and I'm less than 10 feet from the router.  The Bluetooth is off.  I once left my phone upstairs just to see if that was doing anything and it made no difference.

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I'm pretty sure it's not a signal issue.  When it is connected, it's a strong signal and I'm less than 10 feet from the router.  The Bluetooth is off.  I once left my phone upstairs just to see if that was doing anything and it made no difference.

 

Interesting. Do you think it's a software issue? How old is the laptop and does it have heat issues or anything?

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It's about 6 years old (gee, has it been that long?).  I'm thinking it's a hardware issue since the problem started rather suddenly, not after installing any new software or firmware.  Heat doesn't seem to be a problem because ironically the ONLY time it seems to have a stable connection is while I'm playing TF2, which is probably when it's under the most strain.

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Depending on your laptop, you could just get a new wi-fi module and swap it out. On some, it's a simple task and others a herculean one, as you might guess.

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My ipad has been doing very similar the last few weeks:/

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I ended up ordering a cheap usb wifi dongle while looking for some other stuff on Amazon so I'll try it out and see if it's my laptop's internal card that's the problem like I suspect it is.

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Just installed my first CPU water cooler on my gaming rig.  Been having some concerns about heat with it ever since I built it.  I just used the stock heatsink and fan, as I never worry about overclocking.  It's been borderline running hot in some games, but not enough to make me freak out.  Just finally decided to bite the bullet and get an aftermarket cooler though.  Got a Corsair H60.  Gotta say I'm pretty happy with it from testing everything out this afternoon.  Idle temps are running 14+ degrees C cooler, and load temps are now about what my idle temps used to be. 

 

It was surprisingly easy to install, much easier than some of the aftermarket big heatsink air coolers.  That's the biggest reason I went with the H60 over an air cooled system.  Something like an 212 Evo was going to require that I remove my motherboard to mount the heatsink.  The lighterweight water system could just use the existing AMD mounts. 

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Brief update on my networking problem.  After ordering the dongle, my wireless card decided to behave and I didn't have any disconnects for 2 days.  Then after that I had one or two.  I was hoping one of the many fixes I tried worked, but over the last couple days it's come back along with a few other problems that didn't occur before.  They seem to be hardware problems, which is strengthening the conclusion that my laptop is just getting old.  I've switched over to the dongle now and so far it seems to be fine, but I've only used it for a few hours.  Hopefully this will at least stabilize the situation until I can get my desktop running again, which I now have increased motivation to do.

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It was definitely my wireless card because I haven't had any problems since turning it off.

 

In other news, I FINALLY got my desktop working again.  I missed having giant monitors and the ability to play games on something besides the lowest setting.

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I have a new problem now.  As I previously posted, I finally got my desktop working again after putting it off for what is probably years now.  It seems to be working fine, with one exception.  I had to take the wireless dongle I was using with my laptop and use it on the desktop because my router is too far away to run a wired connection.  The dongle worked great on my laptop.  On the desktop, it works fine for a few minutes (maybe 5 or 10) then the speed will drop from 30-50 Mbps to about 0.44 Mbps.  If I disconnect and reconnect, it's fine for another few minutes, then it drops again.  I replaced the router with my old one to see if that was the problem, but it had no effect.  No other devices on the same network are having this issue.  My desktop is in the exact same place my laptop was, give or take a foot.  I've run speed tests on my phone and tablet while sitting at my desk next to the desktop and they're getting the correct download speeds. 

 

My current thinking is that there's some weird setting in Windows that's causing this to happen.  I'd like to try a wired connection to see if that makes a difference, but it's not really an option given the placement of my router.  Another thing I'm considering is getting an ethernet powerline adaptor, but I have my doubts about those devices.  Has anyone used one before?

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When I was having that problem, I found out I was getting a ton of dropped packets. Buying a USB extension cable to get the wireless card a little further from the desktop seemed to help a bunch. I'm not sure if there was interference coming from my Desktop or what, but 10 feet made a huge difference.

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I don't think it's an interference problem because it works just fine for those first few minutes and it worked all the time on my laptop in the exact same location.  I do have an extension cable though so I'll probably give it a try anyway.

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