Computer time! (IT Help thread)

[Marelo]

I consider widescreen a marketing scam to sell people "larger" monitors with fewer total real estates for more money.

The math says 1360x768 is less than 1280x1024.

Total screen area is not all that matters. If you think it is, then I would like to sell you this 1x1310721 monitor. Look, all the vertical space you could ever want! And it's bigger than 1280x1040!

Point is, it's not a "marketing scam," and your math about total screen area has nothing to do with widescreen versus 4:3. The products shifted that way because most people prefer widescreen monitors.

Interestingly enough, try to estimate the relative dimensions of your field of vision. Notice anything? It's much wider than it is tall.

[WordsHere]

Seriously, my 1440x900 single monitor is more than enough, personally at least. Much more and I wouldn't be able to see the whole damn thing at once any way.

[Unlicensed Busdriver]

Seriously, my 1440x900 single monitor is more than enough, personally at least. Much more and I wouldn't be able to see the whole damn thing at once any way.

I can get by fine on one, two is just more convenient.

[Doktor Sneeze]

I'd actually like the option to go with more vertical space, reading lots of text in a wide area is difficult for me, and when I'm working in Photoshop, I often find myself working on images that are taller than they are wide. I think a monitor that you could easily rotate to be wide, or tall would be pretty useful.

[NotASenator]

I'd actually like the option to go with more vertical space, reading lots of text in a wide area is difficult for me, and when I'm working in Photoshop, I often find myself working on images that are taller than they are wide. I think a monitor that you could easily rotate to be wide, or tall would be pretty useful.

There's tons of monitors like that.

This is the newer model of the one I have:

http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/def...px?EDC=1906060

It pivots easily to give you shit tons of vertical space.

[beesmygod]

QUESTION TO MAKE SURE I'M ON THE RIGHT TRACK: My friend recently rescued her desktop from a complete moron who did nothing with it for over a year and I went over this afternoon to try and fix it. He said he "wiped" the hard drive and it stopped working. I found out today it stopped working because he unplugged it.

Anyhoo, when turned on it goes through the whole boot process and then stops on a black screen with the words "www.bookdisk.com" and a command line for the A:\ drive. I went into BIOS on a reboot and changed it so it would try to read the CD-drive first instead of the floppy drive and told her to get a boot disk.

Does that sound like I'm on the right track?

[Doktor Sneeze]

What are you trying to get done? Do you need the data on the drive that's in there? If it's not letting you boot into the operating system on that drive, it seems like it's a distinct possibility the OS is going to need to be reinstalled, though it could just be a problem with the boot data on the drive. I had a problem with my system earlier this year where I managed to wipe out my boot instructions and had to use a boot disk with the XP boot menu on it to get into my drive. It sounds like it might have a boot disk in the floppy drive if it's booting to the A: drive like that.

[beesmygod]

What are you trying to get done? Do you need the data on the drive that's in there? If it's not letting you boot into the operating system on that drive, it seems like it's a distinct possibility the OS is going to need to be reinstalled, though it could just be a problem with the boot data on the drive. I had a problem with my system earlier this year where I managed to wipe out my boot instructions and had to use a boot disk with the XP boot menu on it to get into my drive. It sounds like it might have a boot disk in the floppy drive if it's booting to the A: drive like that.

We're just trying to get it to boot really. It sound like the dork before me probably did uninstall the OS for some reason but I have no way to contact him nor do I really want to.

When we set it to boot from the CD-drive we started getting BOOTMGR errors so I'm pretty sure we just need a boot disk to remind it of what it is before we get a copy of windows 7.

[Doktor Sneeze]

I am hardly an expert, but I've been able to get the OS installation disk to handle most problems if you're starting fresh. As long as the system can tell it has a hard drive, and the hard drive is functional it should be able to install to it. I've never installed anything newer than XP though.

[SYNDROME OF A DOWNS]

Seriously, my 1440x900 single monitor is more than enough, personally at least. Much more and I wouldn't be able to see the whole damn thing at once any way.

Rolling with 1400x1050 here.

[SYNDROME OF A DOWNS]

What are you trying to get done? Do you need the data on the drive that's in there? If it's not letting you boot into the operating system on that drive, it seems like it's a distinct possibility the OS is going to need to be reinstalled, though it could just be a problem with the boot data on the drive. I had a problem with my system earlier this year where I managed to wipe out my boot instructions and had to use a boot disk with the XP boot menu on it to get into my drive. It sounds like it might have a boot disk in the floppy drive if it's booting to the A: drive like that.

We're just trying to get it to boot really. It sound like the dork before me probably did uninstall the OS for some reason but I have no way to contact him nor do I really want to.

When we set it to boot from the CD-drive we started getting BOOTMGR errors so I'm pretty sure we just need a boot disk to remind it of what it is before we get a copy of windows 7.

Get an Ubuntu disc and see if it works.
You might be able to get one from a friend if you know one running Linux, or if you have a DVD burner and a DVD-RW:
http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download
Make sure you get the right one for his system.
(If it was previously running on XP or something, then 32-bit would be a safe bet)

If it works, then go ahead and put Win7 on it or keep Ubuntu. Whichever you guys like best.

[Mike McC]

Personally, for monitors I want to run one 1680x1050 and one 1050x1680. Id' have my chat programs, IRC, etc. on the vertically aligned monitor, allowing for more backlog to be viewed at once, an I'd have the other display for other normal PC functions.

Right now I only have the one 1680x1050, though.

[transistorTransistor]

If you have unusually high load, check if the load is created by plugin wrapper process as opposed to Firefox itself.

It was Firefox itself, I was actually expecting the plugin wrapper when I went over to help based on the kinds of trouble I have with it, but nope.

System can be brought to a crawl by using very little CPU time but allocating and accessing large amount of memory, or performing I/O. Firefox uses large number of small files for its cache, and I have no idea if Windows 7 handles this better than older versions, so just in case defragment your filesystem, reinstall whatever on-file-access antivirus you are using, and check if there are huge applications in memory.

Haha, oh boy, getting her to go along with any of that is... well an adventure. I'll see what I can do. When I was checking, I think Firefox was the only big memory hog open, and it seemed to be using a lot more memory than my system for far less running. She's not up right now and she doesn't like me messing around on there when she's not around so I can't check it out now.

So is it actually hung (not responding to input for some time), slowed down (operations take longer), visibly slows down other applications (other applications show some kinds of unusual hiccups), or number in process manager is the only symptom?

Other programs are responsive during the hang, but Firefox becomes completely unresponsive for far longer than reasonable. The only way you can even tell it's doing anything is the CPU usage shooting up in task manager. I could understand a big of a hang on opening a new tab, or something like that, but the thing stops for a good deal of time on just opening links.

Then most likely this is a result of multiple upgrades in a sequence somehow leaving inconsistent configuration. Back up your bookmarks, remove Firefox and its configuration directory, then reinstall from scratch, restore bookmarks and (optionally) reinstall extensions.

Solution: Download Google Chrome.

(okay, glib response, but tT actually covered the actual issue. But seriously not to start a browser war but Chrome is pretty goddamn amazing)

Hahaha, you clearly haven't met my mom. Change is not something she does. It took me forever just to get her to upgrade from Firefox 2 (despite the problems it was giving her) because nothing else supported Snap-links. Opening tons of pages at once is apparently far more important than performance and security.

Chrome is somewhat faster than Firefox when both programs function normally. This has absolutely nothing to do with situation when either program has a broken configuration, and it's a bad idea to run anything in such condition.

[transistorTransistor]

Anyhoo, when turned on it goes through the whole boot process and then stops on a black screen with the words "www.bookdisk.com" and a command line for the A:\ drive. I went into BIOS on a reboot and changed it so it would try to read the CD-drive first instead of the floppy drive and told her to get a boot disk.

Take the floppy out of the drive.

[transistorTransistor]

I just wanted to see a friend's opinion on my elementary attempts. But I found what the problem was anyways, apparently there's a setting for accessing the network or local files. Being the genius I was, I kept setting it to local files, which I guess tried to grab sensitive information.
Derp derp.

Email it to him.

[transistorTransistor]

Personally, for monitors I want to run one 1680x1050 and one 1050x1680. Id' have my chat programs, IRC, etc. on the vertically aligned monitor, allowing for more backlog to be viewed at once, an I'd have the other display for other normal PC functions.

Right now I only have the one 1680x1050, though.

I have one 1680x1050 monitor at home, and it's a little too wide for my tastes. At work 3x1280x1024 setup requires me to turn my chair when I use off-center monitors while keyboard and mouse remain centered, and this becomes rather tiring over long debugging sessions. Each monitor is attached to a separate computer and can switch between six virtual desktops/viewports.

Mind you, I recently TWICE asked to replace my chair because I got back muscle pain after spending 10-12 hours in the first two of them. The third one did not have this problem, and apparently company switched to that model for all new chair orders.

[beesmygod]

Anyhoo, when turned on it goes through the whole boot process and then stops on a black screen with the words "www.bookdisk.com" and a command line for the A:\ drive. I went into BIOS on a reboot and changed it so it would try to read the CD-drive first instead of the floppy drive and told her to get a boot disk.

Take the floppy out of the drive.

There was no floppy in the drive.

[transistorTransistor]

Take the floppy out of the drive.

There was no floppy in the drive.

Press the floppy eject button, it's there.

The only other explanation would be a CD with floppy-emulating image burned to it, but then you would notice it when trying to open the tray to load another CD.

[Moh Tzu]

so my laptop turns itself off after a half hour or so of use, the fan was making weird sounds and the laptop itself was really hot. could it be the fan is not properly cooling what it needs to or should i just leave the thinking to microcenter? (the doing will still be left to microcenter no matter what)

[Unlicensed Busdriver]

so my laptop turns itself off after a half hour or so of use, the fan was making weird sounds and the laptop itself was really hot. could it be the fan is not properly cooling what it needs to or should i just leave the thinking to microcenter? (the doing will still be left to microcenter no matter what)

Make/Model?

Also it certainly sounds like it is overheating, which could almost definitely be a fan issue.

[Moh Tzu]

it's an hp, that's all you're going to be able to get from me

and i know that's probably as unhelpful as saying "GM" if we were discussing cars

EDIT: for the sake of not looking dumb when i go to microcenter, would me leaving my laptop on my bed make it worse? like with overheating? could i just be Irresponsible and not have a Broken Machine?

[Unlicensed Busdriver]

it's an hp, that's all you're going to be able to get from me

and i know that's probably as unhelpful as saying "GM" if we were discussing cars

EDIT: for the sake of not looking dumb when i go to microcenter, would me leaving my laptop on my bed make it worse? like with overheating? could i just be Irresponsible and not have a Broken Machine?

Leaving it sitting on blankets and whatnot won't exactly help, but it still shouldn't be overheating to the point where it needs to do a safety shutdown, unless your room is an oven and you are wrapping it in a down comforter. Describe what has been happening and tell them you think it is the fan. If it is still under warranty then just leave it at that and let them figure it out. Otherwise you may want to try to narrow it down yourself to avoid paying for obscene labor costs.

Best practice would be to try to avoid blocking the vents when you put it on things that aren't level solid surfaces.

I don't know much about HP, I was trying to get a feel for the kind of service you should expect, but it really depends on your warranty.

[Moh Tzu]

i am pretty sure it is no longer under warranty, i've had problems with fans breaking twice now. i don't know i think i'll just switch to my desktop for a while but keep the hp with me since i don't think it's actually a problem, or let my parents use it and see if it continues to be a problem.

the room is pretty cool, though, and i just left it on top of the bed. i think i'll wait to go to microcenter though, it's too expensive for such a minor problem.

[beesmygod]

Clean out the fan! HPs run notoriously hot and when clogged with fuzz they'll shut down constantly.

[ARandomKid]

I really should go get one of those compressed air can things someday, because I always practically sleep on my damn keyboard (stupid online homework) and I'm almost positive that can't be helping it.