syntheticgerbil Posted May 28, 2014 I have this 500 GB hard drive sitting around and I'm trying to save money. That's about it. Otherwise I might just buy a separate 2.5" HDD with enclosure. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
JonCole Posted May 28, 2014 I'd probably just get a $60 1TB WD Ultra if I was trying to pinch pennies. I bought a used 500GB model a while ago for around $45 for my Wii and it's been running like a charm for almost 12 months now with sporadic use (that I'd consider to be similar to portable laptop HDD usage patterns). Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
syntheticgerbil Posted May 28, 2014 Weird, the WD My Passport externals are $60. Why are they so cheap? I thought I would save money by buying a 2.5" HDD and enclosure separately but this seems to be the way to go. Is there any reason why this would be a bad idea? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
elmuerte Posted May 28, 2014 Note, most external hardrives, especially the cheaper ones,cannot be used as a source for a cheap drive. These harddrives are bound to their enclosure and usually don't contain connectors to be used in PCs. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Gormongous Posted May 28, 2014 Note, most external hardrives, especially the cheaper ones,cannot be used as a source for a cheap drive. These harddrives are bound to their enclosure and usually don't contain connectors to be used in PCs. Is that a recent development? After the 2011 hard drive shortage from the Thailand floods, I knew quite a few people online who made good money buying up external drives, trashing the enclosures, and selling the bare drives for 150% or 200% markup. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
elmuerte Posted May 28, 2014 They started doing that before the floods, but after the floods they increased the practice. The smaller the enclosure, the bigger chance that it's not a stock drive. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Roderick Posted May 28, 2014 Alright, related to complicated things on computers, I have a website building problem. To my layman's mind it should be relatively simple, but maybe it isn't and I'm an idiot. I have: 1. a self-hosted Wordpress site on bluehost.com 2. bought a URL from another place to be the official URL of the site How to link these two? The URL registrar offers the option to link the address to the site, but either it takes over the whole thing as an iFrame, or it only links you to the actual URL of the site, which consists of ugly directories and numbers. How to properly link the two? Is that even possible from an external location? Apparently I am the only person in the world with this question, since an hour's worth of googling spawned no answers and not even the same question. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
JonCole Posted May 28, 2014 Yeah, you can rip the HDD out of one of those My Passport drives but it doesn't have a SATA assembly so there's no way to interface it with a different enclosure or directly in your PC. The upside is that these more integrated drives tend to be a bit smaller and generally quieter than what you'd get if you bought a 2.5" hdd and slammed it in a cheap enclosure. I bought an enclosure for my PS3's old drive after I upgraded it and it sounds probably twice as loud as the My Passport Ultra (that may point to the quality of the stock PS3's drive, but still). Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
JonCole Posted May 28, 2014 Alright, related to complicated things on computers, I have a website building problem. To my layman's mind it should be relatively simple, but maybe it isn't and I'm an idiot. I have: 1. a self-hosted Wordpress site on bluehost.com 2. bought a URL from another place to be the official URL of the site How to link these two? The URL registrar offers the option to link the address to the site, but either it takes over the whole thing as an iFrame, or it only links you to the actual URL of the site, which consists of ugly directories and numbers. How to properly link the two? Is that even possible from an external location? Apparently I am the only person in the world with this question, since an hour's worth of googling spawned no answers and not even the same question. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I haven't done this in a long time and I'm not personally familiar with Bluehost/the unnamed domain registrar, but I think you need to change the nameservers rather than use it as a forwarding URL (the latter of which you seemed to do in the part I bolded). You change the nameservers on the domain registrar's site and in your Wordpress hosting site you update your "Primary Domain" to what you bought. Those changes usually take a couple days to actually work out and propagate to DNS servers. Sometimes nameserver mapping incurs an additional charge by the domain registrar, which is why I used to buy the domain and hosting from the same place whenever possible to minimize fees like that. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Roderick Posted May 28, 2014 Thanks, that already helped me along a few steps. Let's see if I can figure out the rest over the coming days, while the nameservers swap. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Roderick Posted May 29, 2014 Mother of pearl, I did it. The thing is online and operational. http://www.uitgeverijleeuwenhart.nl For posterity, here are the steps it took: 1. Change the nameservers at the registrar to point to the servers you have hosting at (in this case Bluehost) 2. Go the the domain options at your host and make them accept and verify that the URL is yours and link it to your cPanel. Direct the URL here to whatever folder you installed Wordpress in 3. Go to the Wordpress admin panel and change the Site address and Wordpress Address to the new URL And that's it! And it was documented exactly nowhere on the internet, so this is literally the first proper to do list! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Gormongous Posted June 12, 2014 Came home, booted up my computer, and opened Microsoft Word, only to have white squares appear everywhere and the computer freeze. Fun! After a couple hours of work, downgrading the drivers, and underclocking the graphics card, I can get it to run for twenty or thirty minutes before freezing up. If I do anything more graphically intensive than opening a web browser, which apparently sometimes includes using a word processor, it'll die in mere seconds. I'm writing up a paper to give at a huge conference in a couple weeks, so this is the worst time possible for me to have a broken computer. Anyway, I paid fifteen bucks extra to have a new card sent overnight from Amazon. I'll probably have to ask for it to be my birthday present from my parents two months early, but such is the life of a grad student, and in this instance time is more valuable than money. Honestly, I'm just surprised that it took this card four years to fail. I always knew it was a piece of junk. The memory was impossibly sensitive to voltage and crashed the driver at a moment's notice. Never buying Galaxy again, no matter that they're thirty bucks cheaper than the competition. Twin Frozrs all the way from now on! EDIT: Also, I really hate how every forum thread on every hardware problem ever has someone chiming in that it could be the power supply. I mean, yes, it could be the power supply, but it's probably the piece of hardware that's actually showing failure symptoms. At least, that's what I need it to be right now. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Roderick Posted June 12, 2014 Have you tried turning it off and on again? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Gormongous Posted June 12, 2014 Have you tried turning it off and on again? It does that on its own now. Feature, not bug! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Justin Leego Posted June 12, 2014 On the topic of graphics cards, I'm still surprised that AMD's management software, Catalyst Control Center, interferes with sound getting transmitted over HMDI every time the drivers are updated. It's really strange to me that it won't retain pre-update settings. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Dewar Posted June 12, 2014 If it makes you feel better, I always say it's probably overheating instead of immediately blaming the power supply. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Gormongous Posted June 12, 2014 If it makes you feel better, I always say it's probably overheating instead of immediately blaming the power supply. Well, it's something. I opened up the case, ran the fans at double-time, and turned on temperature monitoring. Even though the card remains relatively cool, it freezes and crashes the moment it comes under load. That makes a small part of me worry that there's something wrong with the 12V rail, but I'm trying to reassure myself that, since it's easily reproducible and the graphical output remains corrupted for about half an hour after the crash, the problem really can't be situational demands on the power supply causing it to make the graphics card fail. At least, that's not how I've ever seen a power supply fail, although I've only ever had a couple fail on me in my lifetime. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Dewar Posted June 12, 2014 Sounds like heat related warping of the board or circuitry. Not that it's hot now, but it got hot in the past and screwed it up, similar to what used to happen to the X360s. So yeah, crappy card needs to be replaced. Besides hard drives, video cards are the piece of hardware I see die the most. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Gormongous Posted June 12, 2014 Sounds like heat related warping of the board or circuitry. Not that it's hot now, but it got hot in the past and screwed it up, similar to what used to happen to the X360s. So yeah, crappy card needs to be replaced. Besides hard drives, video cards are the piece of hardware I see die the most. Yeah, those old GTX 470s run so hot, I wouldn't be surprised. Also, seriously, fuck this card. I am literally going to toss it out of my apartment window into a dumpster. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
JonCole Posted June 13, 2014 So, pretty sure my video card is messed up. Anyone seen anything like this before? One screen flickering like crazy, it is actually semi-readable on the restarting screen but totally unreadable on the desktop. If I disconnect the flickering monitor, the second screen adopts the flickering. A restart fixes it. Generally begins while I'm watching some web video. I took a video of it at this link: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JonCole/posts/farsFm173cM Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Ben X Posted June 13, 2014 It could be the power supply. Also, I get an error page for that video. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Merus Posted June 13, 2014 Bizarre. If it switches monitors like you describe it's almost certainly the hardware. If your system's running at an appropriate temperature, it's either the driver (that looks like a boot screen and the boot system uses its own drivers) or the card. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
JonCole Posted June 13, 2014 I really should do some temp monitoring. Maybe I'll try it out this weekend and see if it correlates with my weird issues. If it's not that, I'm fairly sure it's not the drivers as the issues have persisted through three AMD driver updates. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Gormongous Posted June 14, 2014 Knock on wood, but the new card seems to have fixed it. At the very least, the things that made the old card crash don't make this one. It's also quieter and faster, sooo... Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Gormongous Posted June 15, 2014 I spoke too soon. Apparently the shock of multiple hard crashes followed by an entirely new piece of system hardware has brought my install of Windows to its knees. The .NET framework stuff that keeps half the programs on my computer running won't stop corrupting, meaning that basic things like Winzip and iTunes will suddenly refuse to run until I reinstall everything, and my computer is about four times slower than it was before my card failed, judging from the twenty minutes a basic registry search now takes. It looks like I'm heading towards a format, but thankfully everything's in good enough order for me to back it up at my leisure, as opposed to the middle-of-the-night, tears-in-my-eyes, copying-files-from-safe-mode way I've always had to do it. Also, hilariously, several people on different tech support forums blame a weak or failing power supply for a generally slow computer. It never ends! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
