I think my PC is gonna conk out soon . . .

Discussion in 'Computers & Tech' started by cerberus, Oct 19, 2016.

  1. cerberus

    cerberus Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    'cos when it set it to Sleep the dreaded blue screen appears with all kinds of gobble-de-gook on it. It's no good suggesting anything because I'm too thick to follow even the simplest of instructions. Just a minute, what's that smell?

    [​IMG]
     
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  2. waltky

    waltky Well-Known Member

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    I recently had a similar problem...

    ... whenever I used the sleep button on my keyboard...

    ... I switched to using the Start>Shutdown>Sleep option...

    ... voila', problem solved.
    :wink:
     
  3. cerberus

    cerberus Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I didn't know there was any other way!
     
  4. cerberus

    cerberus Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Sorted! I had a guy from a local home visit fault-fixing outfit here yesterday (he watched the Russian ships going past with me) - within minutes he diagnosed a corrupted graphics driver, downloaded the latest version, and Bob's your proverbial uncle, job done. £55, and I thought I was looking at circa 20 times that for a new PC.
     
  5. StillBlue

    StillBlue Well-Known Member

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    Or you could install just linux. I use Mint myself. Feel like you own your computer instead of MS. That and easier to use.
     
  6. Hotdogr

    Hotdogr Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    If you don't have your data backed up, do it now. Don't doubt me. Graphics drivers don't usually just become corrupted out of the blue. I'll bet your hard drive is failing.
     
  7. Deckel

    Deckel Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Yep happened to me earlier this year on a desktop. It came back to life once which allowed the IT guy to pull all the files I needed and then went out again. By then I had already gotten a new one. I just wanted the files off the old one. I now keep external back up drives on my critical pooters.
     
  8. Hotdogr

    Hotdogr Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    The thing I try to impress on people is this: Every hard drive fails..... Every single one..... 100% failure rate.... No exceptions. And when it does, there is usually little warning, and almost no hope of retrieving any of your data.

    So, [MENTION=69395]cerberus[/MENTION] heed this warning: If there is anything near and dear to your heart stored on that computer, make a backup now. Lucky folks have chest pains before the big heart attack. Most just suddenly croak. You're computer is having chest pains right now, and its asking you for help. Don't ignore the message.
     
  9. Deckel

    Deckel Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    This was the first one I have ever had fail like this. I usually replace the computer before it gets to that point simply because of the need to upgrade for software compatibility (a fancy way of saying "so I can play the newer games"). The failure was on a machine about 2 years old which was atypical. It wouldn't boot up at all after a billion attempts. Got the new one and sent old one to geek who was going to try to turn the hard drive into a slave drive on another unit to see if he could recover it, but lucked out and it booted up for him once. After that, it never booted up for him again. He was taking it for parts in exchange for the recovery anyway, so no big deal.
     
  10. cerberus

    cerberus Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I've learnt that the hard way, Hotdogr, and I lost 3 of my novellas and 15 short stories!! [​IMG] [​IMG] Thankfully my DD was dating a software developer who was a high-flyer at Capita at the time, and although he warned me not to raise my hopes he actually somehow was able to get them from an apparently dead-as-a-dodo PC. Sequel: Unfortunately they were incompatible and split up but you can imagine how grateful if was to him. [​IMG] They're all on a flash drive now!! :wink:
     
  11. StillBlue

    StillBlue Well-Known Member

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    For anyone that loses a drive or accidentally erases something. If the drive still turns you can possibly/probably recover your data for free. Install a version of Linux onto a USB drive, Mint will probably be most familiar as it looks like windows 7 the way you wish windows 7 looked (menu programs grouped by function and alphabetized, why does Windows find that so hard to do?). After it's installed on a USB you can start your computer from it rather than the hard drive. To it install testdisk. Testdisk includes a second program Photorec. Testdisk will allow you to recover your files, even erased files, even if you've reformatted your hard drive and it's pretty simple. Photorec will recover everything not written over and that takes a loooong time and recovers stuff you never knew you had.
    When you erase something or reformat your drive it's like you've erased the label on a cassette tape, it's still there you just can't find it. Unless you've overwritten something it's still there and recoverable as long as the drive still spins. This is why the Clinton people used a program called Bleachbit, as opposed to the chemical which has caused no end of confusion. Bleachbit overwrites the files in question with all 0s and all 1s, several times if you request it, so that it takes the NSA to recover them using electron microscopes or black magic. Bleachbit is not a "very expensive" process, in fact it's free and the time to do the job is not too much more than simply deleting. It's a good and cheap way to clean a drive before you sell a computer or throw it away.
     
  12. Pollycy

    Pollycy Well-Known Member

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    I never, ever use "sleep" or "hibernate". I've seen both of those cause all kinds of weird problems in the Windows OS.

    If you think your computer is going to croak, I'd suggest that you get a new hard drive (or a spare of at least equal size), and clone it! I prefer Acronis for this. Then if your existing drive craps out, you've got a complete bit-for-bit copy of the entire thing. You can pop out the dead or dying drive, put in the clone, and go right on with life.
     
  13. Mushroom

    Mushroom Well-Known Member

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    I only use sleep mode if I am leaving for 2-3 days. Otherwise I just leave my computer on and turn off the monitor.

    Cloning is good, but then you can have the problems with a copy of a corrupted system. Just copy your data. Or if you want to be really sophisticated, work off of a virtual machine that is fresh every time you boot it up.

    My lab machine is a basic Windows Server, with VM ware and probably 5 or 6 different virtual machines, running everything from MINT and REDHAT to DOS, NT4 and Win10.

    And before anybody asks why, my lab machine is a dual processor Opteron blade server. Windows Server lets me effectively use both processors for running the various virtual machines.
     
  14. Pollycy

    Pollycy Well-Known Member

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    Point well taken, although I never leave spindle hard drives running. I always power the system down, even if it's just for a few hours. But if you have an SSD then I doubt it makes any difference.

    For copying files I use software that you can download for free called "Ycopy". Make sure you open all access to the folders and files first or it won't copy them, though. Link: http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/System-Miscellaneous/Ycopy.shtml Cheers!
     
  15. Mushroom

    Mushroom Well-Known Member

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    Yea, other than the lack of software to run on it for the layman.

    Do not get me wrong, I GIT Linux, I can CHOWN down with the best of them. But I also recognize what over 30 years of IT has taught me, it is the software that drives the industry, not the OS or hardware.

    And the software for Linux is just not there. I have been hearing of the "Linux revolution" all the way back to when XENIX was expected to be the next new wave, and it has never developed.

    Great for geeks, not gonna really be good for every day people. And yea, I know Apple uses a kind of bastardized Linux. But only Apple people bought into it. The nightmare even us techies have to go through to make Mac work with plain old Linux are a nightmare and far beyond what most people would ever understand.
     
  16. Mushroom

    Mushroom Well-Known Member

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    Most operating systems have a setting in the sleep settings to power down hard drives. I generally set mine to 15 minutes. Monitor to 60 minutes, and leave it at that.

    And while they have been out for a while now, I am not a big believer in SSD drives. The cost and size limits has me seeing them more as a novelty for FPS braggarts than anything really useable.

    Kind of like in the day when many of us used that upper memory to turn into a virtual drive. Kinda cool, sometimes useful. But ultimately, meant almost nothing to 95% of users.

    Hey look! I made a virtual E drive! Since I boot with a floppy I shoved COMMAND.COM into that and configured the AUTOEXEC.BAT to look there, so I can change out the disk in drive A to something else!

    Most users: Huh? What? *yawn*
     
  17. Pollycy

    Pollycy Well-Known Member

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    I am about a 65 - 35 believer in SSD HD's at this point, but I think I know what you mean. I've built a lot of computers, honestly, and for 90% of them I'd have to say that a regular spindle-drive HD is just fine -- especially when the OS is Windows 10, which already boots at blinding fast speed. Up until about three years ago I was very unimpressed with the reliability of SSD's, but now I'd have to say that most of the name-brand drives are very, very good. But, yes, they are pricey. I'm at a point now where I really need to get a 1TB SSD to replace my 500GB Samsung EVO. In the Denver area we are fortunate to have a Micro Center, but I've had a great deal of success with Newegg.com .

    I've got two desktop computers in my house. One is a pretty damn good gaming rig, and the other is just one I sort of built for the hell of it, out of old parts I had left over from older rigs. The gamer has the SSD, a quad-core, and 16GB's of system memory (DDR3), but I've got a variety of spindle drives that I use as boot drives for the other machine. All of them run Windows 10 Home, and they run them fast and well.

    So far the only game I've run into that challenges the performance of my gaming rig's video card is "Deus Ex- Mankind Divided". More and more we will see games that require a video card with a minimum 4GB frame buffer in order to play the game in "Ultra". My GTX970 is over two years old now, and although it does have 4GB's of memory, I can't play this game in "Ultra". Bummer!

    I probably won't build a new computer any time soon, however. My old i7 Sandybridge is running plenty fast without any overclocking, and DDR4 just doesn't bring that much more to "the party" for me to cut over just for that. Maybe a new video card next fall (maybe), but right now a GTX 1070 is still pretty damn pricey (but the one I've looked at does have an 8GB frame buffer)....
     
  18. StillBlue

    StillBlue Well-Known Member

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    I work in Central Africa. I have taught thousands to use computers that had never even used a calculator before. I always put a dual boot on the computers except mine which is pure Linux. I teach people to use both windows and Linux and invariably the new folk always boot to Linux when given the choice because it is much easier than windows. Much, much easier. All the software they want is there. The only exceptions are those that have used windows before and have to unlearn bad habits. Heck even windows is catching on and includes BASH.

    If you are a gamer then windows makes sense for you, if you use the computer for work or to navigate the Net then Linux makes sense. I would never connect a windows machine to the Net here. There is hardware that is incompatible but that is becoming more rare since Android, which is Linux, is on so many things that to not be Linux compatible greatly reduces your market.
     
  19. ChrisL

    ChrisL Well-Known Member

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    That happened to me once when my monitor kicked the bucket. It flashed red sometimes. It was really weird.
     
  20. Mushroom

    Mushroom Well-Known Member

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    Well, I have been involved in the retail side off and on since 1990. And starting in 2001 (at my instance) every store I have worked at has offered Linux as an option over Windows.

    And out of the hundreds of computers I have built-rebuilt-fixed, not a single user opted for any version of Linux. I am opening my own store in 2 weeks, and I will once again be offering Linux.

    But I am not expecting many sales. Most users simply do not want to mess around with it, and will pay more for the MS operating system. Especially with the new licensing program that MS is offering for companies like mine that will be offering refurbished computers.

    Legal licensed copies of Windows for $35. At that price it is hard to turn down.
     

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