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Twice in the past week I've had to repair my windows install before it will boot. I'm assuming this means my HDD is on its way out, and considering it's about 10 years old I wouldn't be surprised. What utility should I use to verify that the HDD itself is the issue before I go and buy a new SSD?
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Oct 29, 2014 17:16
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It's from the interim period where they had both IDE and SATA compatibility, thankfully. Otherwise I would have gotten rid of it two or three motherboards ago. I'll admit I don't know what I'm looking at, but this seems like it's saying the drive is fine. 
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Oct 29, 2014 17:40
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I've got an old inspiron 1525 from 6 years ago, and recently after it gets used for a while, the screen goes dark. Not completely black, the picture is still there, but it isn't lit up at all. It seems like overheating is causing either the inverter board or the backlight to fail. It looks like I can get either for about 15 bucks shipped, so I'm planning on fixing it myself. I just don't know which to try first. Any advice?
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Nov 29, 2014 19:10
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When I tried to boot up my tower today, everything spun up for less than a second, then shut off. It would repeat this process as long as the power was on. It did sound like the heads on the HDDs were searching, but I'm not sure if that had to do with the problem or if that's just what they do when they first get power. It finally started up, but I want to fix this ASAP. My first inclination is to say PSU. It didn't POST, it didn't get to BIOS, it seems like the power just wasn't consistently available. Does that sound right?
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Dec 16, 2014 04:49
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I just got a refurbished T430. When I plug in or unplug the power cable, the screen goes black for a second. Any idea of what it could be? I'd hate to have to send it back after I just got it, but I don't want to let a problem sit until the warranty expires.
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Feb 28, 2015 08:47
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It turned out to be switching to a different refresh rate on battery than on the cable. edit: Okay, now when it's plugged in and tilted away from me (so it's making a v shape) it says there's no battery detected. When I unplug it and tilt it forward, it recognizes the battery just fine, and doesn't power down. Any idea what could be going on? The battery does feel a little bit loose. At least this one is not a real problem, since it functions just fine. 22 Eargesplitten fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Mar 1, 2015 |
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Feb 28, 2015 16:29
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Testing it again, it got fixed once I pulled out the plastic tab marking the SDCard slot. Not sure why they even put that in there.
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Mar 2, 2015 02:47
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My laser printer power cable is too short. I'm looking at getting a 3-5 foot extension. I see on home depot's website some of them have amperage ratings. Do I need to be concerned about that? I figured any cable that size would handle it.
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Jun 9, 2015 19:41
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My wife's WD Elements external HDD just lost the contents of an entire folder. Is there any way to try to recover those files aside from taking it in to a shop? I'm going to help her back up the rest of her art stuff to Google Drive, since you get 15gb free out of that.
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Dec 7, 2015 21:31
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My T430 stopped powering on, but I'm pretty sure I left it in sleep mode so the battery might have run out. I have a multimeter and want to test the knockoff power brick and see if that went bad before I look at getting a replacement motherboard, especially because replacing a motherboard in a laptop is like stabbing yourself in the dick for an hour. The thing is, the plug looks like this: I only see one pin, so where would I touch to check for voltage?
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Mar 7, 2016 08:57
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Is a T430 laptop going to have a power supply of some sort that the battery plugs into, or does the battery pop straight in to the motherboard?
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Mar 10, 2016 01:17
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Wilford Cutlery posted:The latter. gently caress  . I still need to check the power brick because I'm lazy, but I'm not optimistic. I hate working on laptops. Is there a reputable dealer for Lenovo replacement parts? The warranty just passed 3 weeks ago.The voltage is at 20. If I'm reading this right, the resistance is at 2.2 ohms, that's showing 2.2 on the 20k ohm setting of my multimeter. The amperage is supposed to be 4.5, but I'm getting fluctuations between .3 and 1.7 at best. Am I right in thinking that having the current that low would stop the laptop from charging? The page on the power supply's resistance says that it's not connected, which I would think means the resistance wouldn't read, right? I very rarely used the multimeter at my last job, so I'm not very good with it, and this is a new model to me. It doesn't have anything between 10A and 200mA, but 4.5 should read fairly accurately on 10A, right? 22 Eargesplitten fucked around with this message at 02:00 on Mar 11, 2016 |
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Mar 11, 2016 01:05
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Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear. I checked the cable, it's at 20v, but it's barely pushing 1.7 amps at best, which brings the wattage to around 40 instead of 90. It's also showing 2.2 ohms of resistance when the page I found on it listed resistance as "Not Connected." I tried checking the transformer itself, but it wouldn't register any sort of voltage/amperage/ohms. The cable would, so I'm guessing there's something built in to avoid letting the ungrounded output plug from doing anything? The replacement parts question was about a motherboard / system board. I found one seller that was out of stock on Amazon, but they wanted $240, even when they were in stock.
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Mar 11, 2016 05:33
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Saukkis posted:Have you tried running the laptop without the battery when connected to the mains power? The weirdest loving thing. I had, but I double-checked just now. As soon as I plugged the cable in, the charging light came on. The only conclusion I can make is that my poking around with the multimeter and repeated unplugging and plugging of the business end of the cable from the transformer dislodged something preventing proper operation. Well, at least I don't have to buy a brand new motherboard for my $420 refurbished laptop.
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Mar 12, 2016 09:53
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I've been losing connectivity once in a while for the past week or two, and it seems to be getting worse as time goes on. I've got a cheap Netgear USB dongle that I bought in person because I didn't realize where I was moving had no ethernet jacks. When it goes out, if I reseat the dongle, it starts working again. Everything else with WiFi keeps working. Is there anything it could be other than the adapter? I just want to make sure before I order a new part. I'm pretty sure I've got a PCIE x1 slot that my graphics card doesn't obstruct, so I'm probably going to get one of the ones recommended in the PC building thread.
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Mar 22, 2016 16:24
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I had hooked up my laptop to an external monitor for the first time. I set the external monitor as the primary (I think), and when I unhooked the laptop, my resolution has gone down to 1280x720 instead of 1600x900. When I try adjusting the resolution, it says that's the maximum. Is there a setting I need to change? I'm going to try plugging the laptop back in to the external and swapping it so the laptop is primary, that just occurred to me as I typed this. E: Didn't work. EE: there was a projector button on my computer, just hit that and it went back to 1600x900. 22 Eargesplitten fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Apr 5, 2016 |
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Apr 5, 2016 17:20
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[s]I just got my desktop up and running again. I thought I fried the motherboard, turns out it just needed the CMOS reset. One thing I noticed while in the CMOS was that I was running at 94 centigrade. So I tore down, cleaned off the thermal paste, and applied it new. I used about a 5-6mm bead, so I don't think I overdid it. But it's still running hot. I noticed that my fan, the default small one that comes with the processor, isn't spinning above 2100RPM, usually below 2050. Is the fan not running as fast as it should? Should I get a coolermaster or something? For now I'm going to avoid gaming, although who knows how long it's been like this. i3 4310, by the way. edit: I forgot I had prime95 running, someone on Tomshardware suggested it like it was a monitoring program. Then at the advice of a thread on reddit (  ) I pushed my cooler up against the CPU, I guess it was kind of loose. Now it's down under 80, although I'm going to keep an eye on it as I go tonight. Is compressed air okay to clean out a fan? One guy bitched at me for using compressed air when I was working on a server because he said it could cause condensation and fry the parts. Was he full of poo poo? I haven't cleaned out my fan in way too long. As I have typed this, it's gone from 80 down to 71, and the fan has gone from 2700RPM down to 2100. I must have gotten the fan in better, it's kind of in lovely condition.
22 Eargesplitten fucked around with this message at 03:51 on Apr 25, 2016 |
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Apr 25, 2016 02:41
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I'll do what I can. It must be somewhat better now, because it's cooled down significantly. The pins are just kind of hosed up, I think. In my experience the pins on these default Intel coolers stop working right after just a couple of installs. I might buy one of those coolermasters with the tax return that's supposed to come in tomorrow if I can't get it to work right. The ventilation on the case isn't great for the way that it doesn't blow straight out opposite the processor, not sure what to do about that. It's an old lovely case, the only vents are on the service panel. Maybe I'll have to buy a new case too. Hopefully I can avoid that, I've got speccy running to test the temperatures. Just tested it, 0 wiggle in the fan now. I need to get the fan fixed ASAP, though. Working in Unity on a laptop is terrible. At this point it's probably all the dog hair that's gotten in in the past year, I haven't blown it out since I moved in with a permanently shedding dog. edit: Blowing it out while socketed didn't work. I'm going to remove the sink from the board, blow it out thoroughly from both sides, reapply thermal paste, and put it back in. Thermal paste should still be good after about a year and a half, right? I used a tube from my last job that I left last April. 22 Eargesplitten fucked around with this message at 01:12 on Apr 26, 2016 |
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Apr 25, 2016 19:56
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Alereon posted:They don't throttle until 100C, but I would strongly suggest cleaning out your heatsink and if necessary remounting it with a fresh layer of thermal paste. Also don't use CoreTemp, it contains malware, RealTemp works fine on older Intel CPUs. Remove Coretemp and then do malware scans. Well, I'm glad to know that my chip isn't completely killing itself by running above 90. I'm still not using it right now, though. If a fresh coat of paste and a clean heatsink doesn't work, is there anything else to do than a new heatsink? Or does that mean a bad motherboard or processor? If it's running that hot, should the air coming off the fan be scalding hot?
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Apr 30, 2016 02:41
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Alereon posted:He has an old CPU that is much more tolerant of high temperatures. Yes, you should buy a new heatsink. It's hard to draw conclusions about how hot air will be, because for example if you can't get the heatsink securely mounted to the CPU the cores will be very hot but the CPU won't be.  I was thinking that it was a 6 series i3/5/7.I guess that's what I was getting at. The air from the fan didn't seem all that hot when I pressed it against the board to see if that brought the temperature down. And it did bring the temperature down a little bit. That was a sort of probing question, if the air coming from the fan isn't that hot, it means that it isn't transferring that much heat. I'll give my old heatsink one last shot and then buy a coolermaster. I've got plenty of thermal paste to try it.
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Apr 30, 2016 13:01
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Well, installed a Coolermaster 212 (what a pain in the dick). Now even while running around in a game I'm sitting around 30-35 after running a while. Is that more reasonable? Does that give me enough headroom? I think my thermal paste might suck. It looked weird after I took the sink off after a failed install. I also have a pretty old case with not very good airflow. I'm going to keep monitoring it while I play some games to make sure it doesn't spike too high. My network card apparently only wants to work in the first PCIe x1 slot, which is really cramped between the heatsink and graphics card. Is there any way to fix that? 22 Eargesplitten fucked around with this message at 18:45 on May 4, 2016 |
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May 4, 2016 03:28
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Is it bad to keep a computer on for a long period of time? I pretty much only restart for updates, I just put it to sleep otherwise. Old habit. I guess I could schedule a task to restart it every X days at 4AM or something. I never used to do that because my sleep was so erratic that I never knew what time I would be off the computer.
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Aug 13, 2016 20:35
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fishmech posted:Only if you're still using something older than Windows 98SE, as the earlier versions would become increasingly unstable after months on since boot when not patched. You don't need to worry about that in newer versions, unless you happen to have some software you run with similar defects. Cool, thanks. It seems like I get parts failing more often than I should, although given that it tends to happen when I upgrade other parts I might just be bad at that.
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Aug 13, 2016 23:27
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How would I check that? I actually just put in an older 620W PSU to hold me over until a blown PSU can get RMAed. It's not being strained very hard right now, just an SSD, DVD, HDD, and wireless card. I took my graphics card out. Integrated graphics can do everything I need for now. Really, I'm lucky that nothing else went when the 4.5 month old PSU blew. It was a 650W Rosewill capstone, too. 1 OCed card with 8gb ram and the above parts shouldn't strain that.
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Aug 14, 2016 00:32
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I just got a Missing or Corrupt NTFS.sys file error just now. After using the computer last night, it wouldn't wake up, so I restarted it. It took a while to come up, and when I came back I was getting that error. I restarted it again, it came up fine. I wish I had gotten the exact error number. It's not in the event log, presumably because it didn't boot enough to be recorded in the event log. It was either 0x(some number of zeroes I forget)22 or 21. Is my hard drive dying? It's an 850 Evo I bought last Black Friday. I'm not sure where the hell my thumb drive I used to install 10 is. I'm sure it's around here somewhere, though.
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Dec 8, 2016 23:13
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Well, I just about poo poo myself at first, but after I reread and saw you said the raw values, I'm good. I even checked my ~6 year old storage drive while I was at it. That one's fine too. Thanks, I had forgotten about CrystalDiskInfo.
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Dec 9, 2016 06:44
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What sort of cable are you using? It could be a bad cable.
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Dec 11, 2016 18:50
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Good catch.
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Dec 12, 2016 00:49
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Not sure whether this goes in the Windows thread or here. A week or two ago, two nights in a row I had to reset the CMOS. It was spinning up for a few seconds, stopping, repeating automatically until I shut the computer off. I looked it up and that had apparently been a known problem with Windows 10 at one point. I had fallen behind on updates, so I updated, it's been fine since. Except tonight it did the exact same thing. I don't know if that's a coincidence or what. Have people been getting the spin-up loops attempting to load BIOS again? I'm really getting tired of resetting the CMOS. It's not a huge ordeal, but it's a pain in the rear end.
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Dec 29, 2016 06:38
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Like I said, it was apparently a known issue back in October. Where would I find an error log for something that early? All three times it has started while the computer was sleeping. I'll test and see if it might be related to locking it vs telling it to sleep vs letting it sleep by itself. I don't use the computer that much, just a few times a week. I'll look to see if there are any event logs for around the time I notice it. Maybe that's what you meant to the first place.
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Dec 29, 2016 09:03
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My brother installed Windows, then his mouse stopped working. Then he changed either Legacy USB or PS/2 emulation in the BIOS, and the keyboard stopped working too, so he can't even get into the BIOS. He tried swapping ports, that didn't work. Any ideas before I tell him to reset the CMOS?
22 Eargesplitten fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Jan 1, 2017 |
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Jan 1, 2017 00:04
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Reset it, now the mouse is working in BIOS, but not in Windows. Turn off PS/2 emulation, nothing works in Windows. Legacy USB is enabled. This is the kind of situation where it would be really nice if I were there and could just throw poo poo at a wall until something sticks.
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Jan 1, 2017 01:47
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Geemer posted:Have him try another mouse if available or have him try to unplug and re-plug the mouse after logging on. That's a weird one. He ended up giving up and going out for the night, then today he could install the drivers for the motherboard and it's working. At least for now. E: No USB 2.0 ports, I'll keep the top 2 thing in mind if this comes up again. I guess I've always unintentionally dodged a bullet there. That's where I put them without even knowing that it mattered.
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Jan 1, 2017 22:50
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My brother is having trouble with his USB headset on his computer. He's running Windows 7 on a i3 6100 with an ASRock Z170A-X1/3.1 motherboard. It seems like the computer thinks it's being plugged in an unplugged repeatedly. It (as I understand secondhand) makes the plug in / unplug noise without him doing anything. This is both on the front case USBs and the rear USBs. I don't remember his case brand or model. I'm going to make sure his USB drivers are up to date, but I'm wondering if that particular motherboard is known to have problems with Windows 7? I only thought of it because as I understand it Kaby Lake doesn't even work with Windows 7 by default, so maybe some of the newer Z170 boards don't play well?
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Sep 2, 2017 17:44
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The USB keyboard and mouse works fine, FWIW. I forgot, but I actually do have a USB headset lying around I could test. It's less than a year old, so I guess we could RMA if necessary. It would be a pain in the rear end, but he would get more experience setting up a computer. His 3.5mm jacks aren't working either. The more I think about it the more it sounds like the sound card. But then again, the speakers are working. I was thinking the 3.5mm might just be the playback devices menu being funky.
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Sep 2, 2017 22:23
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Not sure if this is a question for here or the GPU thread. I turned my Nvidia control panel setting for power to maximum performance, and it actually made PUBG run worse. Any ideas why? All I could think was temperature throttling, but the card never went over 70 and the processor never went over 60. GTX970, i3 4130, 8GB ddr3.
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Sep 25, 2017 03:25
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Paul MaudDib posted:Increase your power limit using Afterburner and see if that helps. Using more aggressive voltage can run you into the power limit harder and actually reduce performance. It's a common issue on Pascal but it's worth a shot on Maxwell too. I'll try that. Should I up the power limit a little bit at a time? How do I test it?
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Sep 26, 2017 04:14
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My wife’s computer overheats sometimes. The fans seem fine, I think it’s just a piece of poo poo. Is there goon recommended program to put in a custom fan speed profile?
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Oct 17, 2017 00:31
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Maybe, but it started literally months after we got it. I checked the fans at that point. I guess hair might be exacerbating it now. Bad thermal paste might also be worth a look. IIRC these laptops had a trend of this problem when googling too (HP Envy x360).
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Oct 17, 2017 02:41
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How bad is a "Hard Disk Error" message in pre-boot? My wife just got that this morning (and let me tell you, that woke me up very quickly). It booted up fine after that. My initial response is  but I want to make sure I'm not overreacting. I've never had that happen to my computers, but I have had to fix computers that had that error. In that case it was replace the whole hard drive, but it was at the kind of enterprise where the time spent troubleshooting something like that cost more than a new pre-imaged hard drive.
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Dec 27, 2017 15:20
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