Damn it, but computers have become really complicated

[JonCole]

My graphics issue mentioned earlier is growing more mysterious by the day. I swapped the video card with the one in my living room, reinstalled Catalyst drivers, and thought everything was fine. Then the weird flickering issues cropped back up again in exactly the same form. Since the problem has persisted, I've noticed that it only occurs when I'm watching some kind of web video. In fact, I've actually managed to completely close Chrome while a web video is running and the screen is flickering, and closing it reduces the flickering almost completely. Some kind of motherboard issue? Chrome being fucked up? I'm considering switching to another browser to see if it's literally just Chrome or a web video thing in general. Such a strange issue.

[clyde]

My graphics issue mentioned earlier is growing more mysterious by the day. I swapped the video card with the one in my living room, reinstalled Catalyst drivers, and thought everything was fine. Then the weird flickering issues cropped back up again in exactly the same form. Since the problem has persisted, I've noticed that it only occurs when I'm watching some kind of web video. In fact, I've actually managed to completely close Chrome while a web video is running and the screen is flickering, and closing it reduces the flickering almost completely. Some kind of motherboard issue? Chrome being fucked up? I'm considering switching to another browser to see if it's literally just Chrome or a web video thing in general. Such a strange issue.

If you don't experience any problems with a different browser, I'd check for ad-ware. I had web-videos crashing my computer in Chrome and removing ad-ware took care of it.

[Gormongous]

My graphics issue mentioned earlier is growing more mysterious by the day. I swapped the video card with the one in my living room, reinstalled Catalyst drivers, and thought everything was fine. Then the weird flickering issues cropped back up again in exactly the same form. Since the problem has persisted, I've noticed that it only occurs when I'm watching some kind of web video. In fact, I've actually managed to completely close Chrome while a web video is running and the screen is flickering, and closing it reduces the flickering almost completely. Some kind of motherboard issue? Chrome being fucked up? I'm considering switching to another browser to see if it's literally just Chrome or a web video thing in general. Such a strange issue.

 

This is a thought, but have you checked in chrome://flags to see if the different forms of hardware browser acceleration are on? Particularly, I'd look at the D3D11 option, which makes browsing fast as all get out but is incompatible with something in almost any setup.

 

 

Also, check your power supply.

[JonCole]

If you don't experience any problems with a different browser, I'd check for ad-ware. I had web-videos crashing my computer in Chrome and removing ad-ware took care of it.

 

I have continuous scanning running, but I'll try a deep scan for the hell of it.

 

This is a thought, but have you checked in chrome://flags to see if the different forms of hardware browser acceleration are on? Particularly, I'd look at the D3D11 option, which makes browsing fast as all get out but is incompatible with something in almost any setup.

 

 

Also, check your power supply.

 

I just enabled this option, which I think is what you were talking about:

 

Disable hardware-accelerated video decode. Windows, Chrome OS

Disables hardware-accelerated video decode where available. #disable-accelerated-video-decode

 

It's weird to enable a function that disables decoding, but that's seemed to be the only applicable option re: h/w acceleration.

[syntheticgerbil]

Hey does anyone have any recommendations for a good autoback program? Maybe one for a low cost or even free.

 

What I want is not something to clone any of my hard drives, but to take certain folders from two drives and automatically back them up to a TB harddrive I have. I don't really want to have to tell it and I want it to do it maybe once a week. I also want it to delete files and reconfigure folders so that it always matches what's in the original folders at the time.

[SecretAsianMan]

Hey does anyone have any recommendations for a good autoback program? Maybe one for a low cost or even free.

 

What I want is not something to clone any of my hard drives, but to take certain folders from two drives and automatically back them up to a TB harddrive I have. I don't really want to have to tell it and I want it to do it maybe once a week. I also want it to delete files and reconfigure folders so that it always matches what's in the original folders at the time.

 

Once upon a time I used a program called Belvedere to do this, but that program hasn't been updated in a few years.  A quick search for an alternative came up with DropIt.  You'll have to tweak the rules to get what you want, but I think it might work.  I haven't used DropIt myself so I don't know for sure how well that works.  Both are free and open source.

[JonCole]

Seems like disabling hardware decoding worked! I haven't seen the issue in a few days now, except for when I stupidly used Internet Explorer to watch a video that was acting up in Chrome. Now I've disabled hardware decoding in all my browsers, yay.

[Gormongous]

Seems like disabling hardware decoding worked! I haven't seen the issue in a few days now, except for when I stupidly used Internet Explorer to watch a video that was acting up in Chrome. Now I've disabled hardware decoding in all my browsers, yay.

 

Glad to hear it, Jon!

 

Okay, I could use someone's opinion, no matter how superficial. As you know, my graphics card melted down last week. I replaced it, under less-than-perfect circumstances, then dealt with the seriously corrupted Windows build that came of it. I'm almost certain I found and fixed all the problems there too, but my computer continues to run extremely slow. By that, I mean it's "time for another stick of RAM because it's 2000 and Baldur's Gate II is coming out this fall" slow. I can use it for basic word processing and web browsing, but really nothing else, which is absurd when it's an i7 overclocked to four gigahertz with eight gigs of RAM. It takes fifteen seconds just to pull up the Control Panel screen. Running an F3 search through the registry takes a quarter of an hour. CPU- and GPU-heavy tasks like decoding 10-bit .mkv videos go alright, but there's a definite hitch even loading a hundred-megabyte file into memory.

 

Anyway, I've decided that the solution is probably just to format.  I've tested the hard drive, the memory, and the power supply, none of which came up with anything. My RAM made it through eighteen hours of MemTest86, which surprised even me. Unless my new graphics card is broken in some obscure and perverse way, there's not a single piece of hardware that's at fault. Then again, neither is Windows, according to the diagnostics I've run. The .NET framework corruption is gone, the event viewer is empty, and I've rebuilt the registry and the system files, so there's nothing there that should be causing a system-wide slowdown either. On paper, my Windows install is like new.

 

I'm much more sure that the Windows diagnostics is missing something than the hardware diagnostics are, but I'm still fighting a lot of doubt. I'm in between things right now, so formatting is extremely inconvenient and will involve an intentional loss of data. I'd hate to go through the effort of doing it and then find the slowdown still there. Someone has to have more experience than my own two self-taught decades who can agree with me, or at least tell me why I'm wrong, to make this a bit easier. I'd really appreciate it if so.

[Professor Video Games]

You're not having overheating issues are you?

[Dewar]

Have you watched the performance monitor? It sounds like something might be redlining your HDD. Might also download Procmon and see if maybe a driver or service (maybe the old graphics card driver still hanging around, or the new one being a pain) is misbehaving. 

[Gormongous]

Thanks, guys!

 

You're not having overheating issues are you?

 

Nah, my processor is forty-five degrees on idle and sixty under load. The case itself is cooler than it was with my old card, which was a monstrous GTX 470.

 

Have you watched the performance monitor? It sounds like something might be redlining your HDD. Might also download Procmon and see if maybe a driver or service (maybe the old graphics card driver still hanging around, or the new one being a pain) is misbehaving. 

 

Drivers are clean as can be. If there's something secretly installed, it's not visible with any utility of which I know. I have spent a lot of time in the performance monitor and parsing process trees, though. CPU usage is always under twenty percent, but RAM weirdly spikes well above fifty at random moments. Looking at my hard drive stats, it's all just system process like Superfetch writing to and reading from the hard drive, though they're all a bit fatter and more active than I remember them being in the past. No obvious culprits, none that make my computer behave as if I'm always installing some massive piece of software.

 

EDIT: Yeah, just watching the performance and resource monitors over the past day or so, I can see huge spikes in CPU, RAM, and hard drive usage almost at random and with no one program responsible. There's obviously some serious corruption deep in the system that's making Windows behave so strangely, I can only hope that a format will fix it. Now to find someone to burn me a disc...

[Ben X]

I'm happy to report that things are going pretty well with Lightworks. The 10-part official tutorial videos are very helpful, and it's easy to grasp the basics. I had an issue with it not accepting my weird mp4s, but I sorted that by converting them to constant framerate with Handbrake. This is definitely a good freeware option for amateur editing (it apparently is used professionally as well, but I won't vouch for it in that arena).

 

EDIT: having said that, the freeware version is nerfed in two big ways - you can't choose the location of your project, and you can only export to YouTube format.

[Gormongous]

Two observations from reformatting, which otherwise went really well:

• Chipset software is terrifying. I know of no other program or driver that looks at the obsolete installed version, compares it with the new downloaded version, and says, "Eh, not enough difference to risk rocking the boat."
• Given a Steam list of around seventy installed games, you would be shocked how many bury their save games and settings deep in some lost corner of the AppData file, rather than in the My Games folder or the cloud.

[dibs]

SO, there is little flame symobls in this tool. Any ideas? My fans seem to be making a lot of noise. For ref, playing Age of Wonder III.

 

[Dewar]

That CPU temp is fairly typical these days under load (especially for an older K processor,) but high for idle. If that was taken right after playing a game I wouldn't worry.

 

This article shows that their 6900 got up to about 80c during testing with no problems, but that seems a bit high to me personally.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/12/14/amd_radeon_hd_6970_6950_video_card_review/8

[Merus]

What Dewar said, basically; they look pretty high, but if this is just after heavy load you're probably fine.

 

I replaced my stock CPU cooler with an after-market cooler and it's made an enormous difference. Because the CPU's no longer being throttled, everything runs so much better.

[Gormongous]

I replaced my stock CPU cooler with an after-market cooler and it's made an enormous difference. Because the CPU's no longer being throttled, everything runs so much better.

 

Yeah, I use a Coolermaster Hyper 212+ with two fans and Arctic Silver. I think I hit maybe forty-five degrees under load. Building this last machine has taught me never to cheap on case and cooling solutions.

[dibs]

Cool. Danke.

[elmuerte]

Looks like you need some Twin Frozr

[dibs]

Is that like disneys frozen!

[Twig]

Time for me to ask for help! Again!

 

I ran Dark Souls 2 and was excited to see a consistent 60fps. Then I got past the old ladies and my framerate got really inconsistent, anywhere from 30 to 60fps. It might have even dipped below 30 a few times. Way better than DS1, but still not optimal.

 

I think my computer is not running as well as it should. Here's my specs!

 

GeForce GTX 760

i5-3570K @ 3.4GHz

16 GB RAM

 

I know my PC should be able to run DS2 at 60fps consistently, and yet it can't. When I ran AC3 and had crazy FPS problems I researched and came to the conclusion that it was just the game's poor optimization, but now I'm not so sure. Anyway, how do I figure out what my problem is? ):

[osmosisch]

At the moment I would recommend locking the framerate to 30 instead, because otherwise your weapons' durability will degrade crazy fast due to a bug.

[Codicier]

I've become a little worried lately that someone may be using our wireless network.

 

Now our routers about 5-6 years old d-link which i've setup as WPA2, with 19 character password to log into the router itself, so I should feel secure to a extent, but some of its behaviour recently has seemed damn strange to say the least in particular im concerned by sudden slow downs that only affect the wireless devices on the network.

 

I've done a little digging into it and it seems most people say the best way to tell is to check connected devices when a problem occurs and to run a log if a router enables it, but i was wondering if anyone else had any tips i could try to check whether this is someone mooching, or if perhaps there's a prob with the ageing router itself

[osmosisch]

You could always try googling the model/make of your router plus some terms like 'hack' or 'backdoor' to see whether there's commonly-known exploits, and possibly fixes.

Besides that, yes, checking connected devices is the first and easiest step just to check what's using the device.

[Twig]

At the moment I would recommend locking the framerate to 30 instead, because otherwise your weapons' durability will degrade crazy fast due to a bug.

That's weird but also I don't really care about that. I want to fix my computer, not DS2 in particular. ):