Random thoughts.... [Tech Edition]

Shawn said:
So following up on my computer troubles...

I didn't reformat because at this point I'm pretty damn sure it's not an OS thing, it's acting up sometimes way before the OS even loads.

Last night the computer froze, I restarted but it gave me that message about a messed up boot disk. I figure maybe the MBR has gone bad or something so I pop in the Windows CD to try and see if the repair option can get my OS back up and running. But to my surprise the Windows installer couldn't find any Windows installations, and as I found out it hadn't even recognized a hard drive in the machine.

At this point I think I'm screwed with the hard drive having gone kaput... but after frantically rebooting a few times it loaded back into Windows normally (well not entirely normally, with the graphics glitches still happening) without any sort of error message.


Now, this turn of events has me confused. On the hand I think okay, it's definitely the motherboard because different parts of the computer are acting up at different times so it could be the thing that brings them all together that has gone bad. But on the other hand I think maybe it's purely a faulty hard drive, and the video problems are occurring because the relevant files reside in the part of the hard drive? Or are video drivers always solely loaded into the RAM?
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Hopefully you've backed stuff up regardless...:S
 
ahpadt said:
Not digging the new Chrome-like UI. Wish there was a "Classic" theme...
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Try re-enabling the menu bar, it basically turns out like the classic theme but with more aero.... which looked terrible for me since I have high transparency but YMMV.

(assuming Windows Vista or 7 of course)
 
I have almost full transperency - it looks terrible, but I use the menu bar quite often so it's gotta stay.
 
OK, some more questions. My desk has a PC compartment that is like a wooden box opened at the front and back of the case and closed at the sides. It's got less than a finger between the sides of the case. After some L4D2 SpeedFan says something like >50C for the GPU and CPU. I'll cut some round holes in the sides but I should be OK for now, right?
 
Yeah. 50c is kinda high, but not dangerous, usually. Take the side cover off until then though, that will help some.
 
NecroJoe said:
Well, I MacGuyver-ed a solution. Used a tutorial I found that uses a Sketch filter to make lines, pasted a 90* rotated set of lines over the other to make a grid. Then I selected the black grid, inverse-selected the white open squares, feathered the selection, and cleared out the new rounder-but-not-quite-round openings. Then, I slide one row over 1/2 hole, copied-and-pasted the two lines until I got 4 staggered lines, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V until I had 8, then 16, then 32, etc. Close enough.

"If at first you don't succeed, get a bigger hammer."
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That "proper" method would be to make a pattern. For that mesh you would make a circle, duplicated it a few times, make sure the spacing is even, make a selection that looks like the below, edit > define pattern. Take out the fill tool, set it to pattern, bob's your uncle. Oh, actually, you would probably want transparency, so make another layer, fill it, select the circles (ctrl+click the layer, if the circles are on multiple layers ctrl+shift+click them), clear that on the totally filled layer, make sure there's no background (so you see the checkers that indicate transparency), THEN define the pattern.

https://pic.armedcats.net/r/ra/ramseus/2011/03/23/Untitled-1.jpg
 
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smib said:
Yeah. 50c is kinda high, but not dangerous, usually. Take the side cover off until then though, that will help some.
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That's not in idle, that's in the game after I minimized it to desktop and ran SpeedFan. Idle is 38C for my i5 and 35C for my GTX 560.
 
maxtortheone said:
That's not in idle, that's in the game after I minimized it to desktop and ran SpeedFan. Idle is 38C for my i5 and 35C for my GTX 560.
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50?C at full load (gaming) is totally fine. my i5 runs >50?C as well when under pressure... nothing to worry about imo. GPU usually is way hotter, so 50?C with your GTX560 are pretty nice :thumbsup:
 
I'm currently trying out Firefox4 on my MacBook Pro..

Couple of issues I have with it..

First of all, it triggers my discrete graphics card. Second, it makes my computer runner hotter for some reason. Right now I've got Firefox with 3 tabs (with nothing demanding in any of them), and Adium messnger app open, and I'm idling at 55-60 degrees C. Using Safari I would be in the 35-40 degree range :b

And when I forced it to use the onboard graphics instead og the discrete card, the temp shot up to 70 degrees..

It's a shame too, because I quite like it. Fast, and always been a fan of the minimalistic approach - I loathe toolbars in a browser, I just need a small mail icon, and a small RSS feed icon, and I'm good.
 
smib said:
I would probably try a new hard drive first. If you don't already have another one, just buy one and if it wasn't the problem you'll have a backup drive.
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Yeah, that's what I'm gonna have to do. I have an old 120GB IDE drive in an enclosure that I can pop into the computer just to try a fresh install of Windows.


rickhamilton620 said:
Hopefully you've backed stuff up regardless...:S
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Luckily I have. Up until a few months ago I only had bits and pieces backed up but a few months ago I bought an external 2.5" drive for backing stuff up so I wouldn't really lose anything if/when the hard drive goes.
 
Buktu said:
I'm currently trying out Firefox4 on my MacBook Pro..

Couple of issues I have with it..

First of all, it triggers my discrete graphics card. Second, it makes my computer runner hotter for some reason. Right now I've got Firefox with 3 tabs (with nothing demanding in any of them), and Adium messnger app open, and I'm idling at 55-60 degrees C. Using Safari I would be in the 35-40 degree range :b

And when I forced it to use the onboard graphics instead og the discrete card, the temp shot up to 70 degrees..

It's a shame too, because I quite like it. Fast, and always been a fan of the minimalistic approach - I loathe toolbars in a browser, I just need a small mail icon, and a small RSS feed icon, and I'm good.
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Opera on a mac is your best bet
 
Buktu said:
I'm currently trying out Firefox4 on my MacBook Pro..

Couple of issues I have with it..

First of all, it triggers my discrete graphics card. Second, it makes my computer runner hotter for some reason. Right now I've got Firefox with 3 tabs (with nothing demanding in any of them), and Adium messnger app open, and I'm idling at 55-60 degrees C. Using Safari I would be in the 35-40 degree range :b

And when I forced it to use the onboard graphics instead og the discrete card, the temp shot up to 70 degrees..

It's a shame too, because I quite like it. Fast, and always been a fan of the minimalistic approach - I loathe toolbars in a browser, I just need a small mail icon, and a small RSS feed icon, and I'm good.
Click to expand...

now that you mention it... i'm on win7 x64 and FF4 regularly makes my GPU clock up from idle-clocks... which is quite annoying because it does increase its temp by quite a bit... nothing from the CPU though.
 
Hidden_Hunter said:
Opera on a mac is your best bet
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Well, I'm really trying to see if I can't live with the temperatures, because besides that I really like Firefox.

I don't actually have a problem with using Safari, I like the way it's layed out.. It just feels sluggish compared to the other top browsers like Firefox and Chrome.

I tried switching off hardware acceleration, but that doesn't seem to have made any difference.
 
Chrome ftw.
 
eizbaer said:
now that you mention it... i'm on win7 x64 and FF4 regularly makes my GPU clock up from idle-clocks... which is quite annoying because it does increase its temp by quite a bit... nothing from the CPU though.
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ok i'm back. disabling hardware acceleration solves this problem without any noticeable change in performance... maybe Buktu you should try this as well? see here.
 
As I mentioned before, I've tried that, and haven't made any noticeable difference.. :/
 
Buktu said:
As I mentioned before, I've tried that, and haven't made any noticeable difference.. :/
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ah, i must've missed that somehow. thought you had just disabled the discrete graphics, not disabled FF's hardware accel... damn. oh well, mine works now, so i'm out of ideas :dunno:
 
So, I have this.

It's really very sluggish.

Based on the specs, and the fact that it has Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit...

What should I be doing to it to make it more "snappy"? What settings should I be changing? Is a ram upgrade possible? Would that even help it?

Hulu is the WORST on it, for some reason.
 
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