Smacking lusers with the clue-by-four (the new tech support thread)

[Good Intentions]

Well, after 3 years of faithful service, my laptop has shit the bed. Last time I tried to pull it out of hibernation, it went into a reboot-loop. Hard drive and CPU fan spin up, then immediately stop again, POST nowhere in sight. I'm going to play around with re-seating the RAM and swapping the CMOS battery, but I'm not very hopeful. Perhaps this, and my more stable job situation, is the prompt I need to get a new desktop system - I only got a laptop because I was moving country 3 times in the space of a year, and that time is behind me now.

If anyone has any recommendations about a good desktop set-up, I'm all ears. What I've been looking at now indicates that an Intel Sandy Bridge is the thing to aim for (probably around i5-2400, which the Tom's Hardware folks seem to like). I haven't bought a graphics card in over 6 years - what should I aim for?

As for salvaging the laptop, if anybody has any hints I'm listening to. In my experience, no POST indicates either something quite trivial, or something disastrous, and I suspect it's the latter. Probably the on-board graphics went 'phoosh'.

[YojimboMonkey]

Does anything happen on the screen at all? Have you tried hooking it up to an external monitor? 'cause I have seen screens go bad a bunch of times, usually the backlight.

[Good Intentions]

Nothing on the screen, but I haven't had a chance to test with an external screen. Will try that as well.

[Good Intentions]

I pulled the trigger on a new desktop setup: hopefully running pretty visuals in 1920x1080 native resolution will distract me from the fact that I'm impoverished for the next fortnight till my next payday. This is made harder by the fact that even though the vendor is also in Auckland, the system didn't make it to me in time and is now stuck in a post-office warehouse till after the Easter break (ie Tuesday). The poverty, however, was immediate.

All of my tests on the laptop have had no result whatsoever - no matter what I plug in or out, I just get the reboot cycle. Sigh. I'd have liked a working laptop.

[slow west vultures]

i had this problem when my computer switched to internet explorer 8, and i never figured it out.  now its 9 and its teh same problem: everytime i log onto this site it shows me the same page i saw the last time like several days ago.  i have to hit the button compatibility view -which says it updates pages designed for older browsers - every page i go to.  even if i click on a thread i have to hit it.  any fixes?  othere than switching to a different browser.  i don't think i found a solution last time

[jebreject]

My computer won't turn on. What the hell.

[Good Intentions]

For the life of me I can't find the PC speaker in this new case. Don't they make those anymore? What if I need to hear the beep codes? I'm building a new machine, I need to hear the beep codes.

[elpollodiablo]

I think now there's just some minuscule speaker on the actual motherboard.

[Good Intentions]

Sometimes, yes, but this motherboard lacks such a speaker, and has the empty 4-pin plug for the PC speaker staring at me forlornly, as I try to figure out whether I need a DVI cable or got a bum motherboard (almost certainly the former).

[Good Intentions]

Turns out I just needed a DVI cable. OS installation in progress! Finally, after years of a laptop and weeks of no PC at all, I'll again be cruising cyberspace in a 18-wheel truck of a machine.

[alistarr*]

I plugged my MP3 player into my macbook to drag and drop some songs onto it, and they went across fine and I ejected the device and put it away, then when I turned it on this morning it couldn't find any files, and crashed in weird ways whenever I went into the folder browser. However, other bits of the software seem to work fine - there's a note-taking thing and a picture-drawing thing that both open fine and show all the various notes and pictures I've saved. When I connect it back up to either the macbook or a windows laptop it shows no files in it, but that 30GB has been used and 51MB is free. Is there any point in trying to recover stuff from it, or is it a lost cause that should be reformatted? There are some dictaphone recordings on there I'd really rather not lose if possible, but I guess I didn't love them enough to back them up.

[alistarr*]

* alistarr* breathes sigh of relief.

I changed the usb mode from MTP to MSC and connected to my windows laptop, and it said the disk looked broken and did I want it to try and fix it, so I ticked all the boxes and sent it on its way and about an hour later it's just finished up and I can browse the files! So I've grabbed my un-backed-up stuff and backed it up.

It looks like the thing itself is still broken so I guess I need to reformat it/reinstall firmware, but at least I didn't lose my stuff. Thanks, windows!

[fishjim]

Question for the animators -

I've got this idea to make a video that builds a flower-of-life out of circles in time to a Jack Rose song.

Is there any video-making software out there that would make this project easier? I suppose I could build it in Photoshop & iMovie, but that's a tedious prospect, which usually means I'll never start it.

[Nick Ink]

 I wonder if anyone knows why I'm suddenly having difficulty d/l~ing with mediafire? I get past the capcha and click on the light green d/l box, and the green arrow even appears at the bottom of my screen for a few seconds, but then it flickers a bit and returns to the d/l page, without starting the d/l itself.

I tried using IE instead of Chrome, as per someone else's suggestion, but something's still preventing the download from starting. Any advice greatly appreciated.

[Bernard]

To watch Netflix on my computer, it wants me to something something Silverlight something DRM something. Is this a snitch thing? I don't want any hairiness whereby it decides that Time Warner somehow owns the rights to my home videos of my baby because the radio was on in the room where I recorded her, or any crazy shit.

[dieblucasdie]

Nah, it's basically just Microsoft's version of Flash.

[Bernard]

Cool, thank you!

[elpollodiablo]

Can anyone recommend a good iPhoto alternative? I like a lot of the features but it's slow as fuuuuuuck and I really, really hate having to "update" my entire library every time there's an incremental version release. Why in the shit do I need to "reformat" 10K photos every couple of months? It's dumb!

[Thermofusion]

Hahaha at my old workplace we kept all of our project photos on a Mac, we had many thousands of pics on there and it got to where iPhoto was completely unusable. Even scrolling was a crisis. iPhoto sucks.

[Thermofusion]

Also having drank the Mac Kool-Aid for many many years now, I'm kind of to the point where I think they're overpriced pieces of fucking shit, to be perfectly honest.

Posted from my iMac

[peacocks]

Hi I have an old dell work computer running on windows xp with microsoft office 2003. I'm on excel and one of the worksheets has 39 different data sheets within it (I don't know why the people who set this data up 3 years ago did it this way) and I am adding data and formula to it. It started saying things like "too many different cell formats" and not letting me put my species names in italics, or adding a bold border where it needed to go, and then it started crashing. Then it started crashing every 5 minutes even if all I was doing was typing in letters in a column that is formatted for typing in letters. Well, actually there is a drop down list of indicator abbreviations but it is faster to type them. ANYWAY. I don't know if anyone can help, I'm mainly just complaining. But if you know what I can do aside from de-formatting the whole thing and starting over it'd be cool. bleh.

[dieblucasdie]

Quit your job?

[dumbfish]

Surely the data can be stored in something other than 39 sheets within one workbook.
The master file for my main project recently became too big, so I had to set up each of the four sites in its own workbook and now everything's fine, the end.
Alternatively, learn Outlook or some other proper database program. Excel is a lovely spreadsheet with mediocre database and ugh graphing options.
Or just get a bigger/ better computer.

eta: Yeah, my bad. Access, not Outlook, durr.

[peacocks]

does the outlook database program cost money? because we don't have enough money to buy me a new anything. How long will it take to separate the datasheets, is there an easy way to do that? Each of the qualitative transects has their own worksheet but for some reason they put all the quantitative data for 39 sites in the same worksheet. It wasn't an issue until now when I only have 10 more sites to add two little pieces of info into.

[YojimboMonkey]

Outlook is an email/contact/scheduling client

Access is a database program