Be Excellent To Each Other

Of course I can compare it to using a console, and Windows 7 on a small, quiet, media centre PC with a wireless keyboard and mouse delivers a far better media experience than a console.

And why would you ever need to physically power the PC on? Just leave it in sleep mode and press a button on the keyboard or mouse and it'll wake up.

Horses for courses I suppose, but I find the current 360 dashboard to be an absolute fucking horror show compared to the nice clean Windows interface, which incidentally doesn't move things around or festoon itself with a million adverts whether I like it or not.

This has just turned up on Ebuyer for £44.99, reduced from £69.50, if you're still looking for one, looks pretty decent.

http://www.ebuyer.com/148872-logitech-i ... 2c_weekend

Lots of positive reviews too.

Thanks. I've not bought anything yet.

If this looks far too TL:DR then here's the summary - FUCKING BASTARD PCs.

So then, last night my PC turned on me.

I was happily working away on formuas in Excel to improve my online slots stats-crunching automation, when my PC froze, but in a really weird sort of way. Excel was completely hung, but Firefox and all its tabs remained responsive, and the online slot I had running in Chrome carried on just fine. (I keep my browsing and slotting separate, as the Flash plugin has a habit of crashing after slots have been running for a long time, so by having that in a separate browser it doesn't affect the Flash plugin for Firefox.)

Then after about 30 seconds Firefox and all its tabs stopped responding, but the slot carried on running in Chrome.

I tried to bring up Task Manager but that caused an Explorer hang, and it then dropped to the Windows backdrop screen with the egg-timer icon (or rather, the modern equivalent thereof) with a 'Preparing Secuity Policy' message, but I could still hear my slot running behind it.

Then the slot went quiet and the PC just sat there with its 'Preparing Security Policy' message and egg-timer icon.

I gave it another minute and nothing seemed to be happening, it was completely unresponsive to any keyboard or mouse inputs, so in the end I just powered it off and turned it back on again.

Thereafter all appeared normal, it POSTed, stepped through the BIOS checks, booted into Windows, all OK. But I was already perturbed, as Windows 7 doesn't do shit like that, so I was thinking I had a hardware problem of some sort.

I carried on working away for a bit, and then tried to do a search on my data drive, at which point it did a variation of the lock I'd seen earlier, but did carry on to let me perform the search after a hang of around 30 seconds, and seemed to be working normally again. Then a few minutes later it did a proper hang, and again it was 'one thing at a time' that stopped working, rather than an outright crash or total hang.

It finally locked completely, and after a last dramatic pause, I got a BSOD (which I quickly grabbed a photo of with my phone whilst it was doing the minidump), before it rebooted itself.

It then sat on the BIOS screen for about 90 seconds, attempting to auto-detect what was attached to the SATA ports, it failed to find my SSD, carried on forward and then attempted to boot from my data drive, which of course failed and left me sat at a nice old-fashioned DOS style boot disk error screen.

CTRL+ALT+DELETE reset it, and I hit DEL on the POST screen to get into the BIOS.

And, erm... My SSD has disappeared, it wasn't listed as a hard drive, and therefore had disappeared from the boot device priority list.

I physically powered the PC off, then back on and.... it worked normally, (I had to go into the BIOS to put the SSD back to the top boot device), detected all the drives, booted up, into Windows, Windows complained about the BSOD and gave me the error and minidump details, but other than that it was fine.

Now there was no doubt something was amiss, so I set about doing some diagnostics, I shut the PC down and physically unplugged the data drive to remove that from the equation, then turned it back on.

1) Scheduled a checkdisk for next reboot, it rebooted, ran a checkdisk, no errors.
2) F10ed into the recovery console at boot, ran the Windows Memory Diagnostic, no errors.
3) Windows event logs were no help, there was absolutely nothing to indicate it was unhappy about anything prior to the crashes, and all it logged on reboot was stuff like 'the last reboot was unexpected'.
4) The BSOD STOP messages weren't much help, Googling around revealed it to be a real sort of 'Windows has just completely lost its shit and has no idea what's wrong' type of STOP, with the list of potential culprits being potentially fucking everything.
5) Device Manager was happy, there were no recent Windows Updates that were known to cause problems, I did a full MSE scan just in case, that was happy.
6) Checked all temperatures and fans, all fine, nothing was overheating. And it would run a game just fine, it's not like it was falling over when it got stressed, it would play BF3 for five minutes just fine, and then crash opening my gmail.

Basically, there was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to indicate that the PC or Windows were upset about anything, and yet, here it was routinely hanging/crashing/blue screening after a short period of use.

(Whilst I was doing the above stuff it was still crashing and hanging, and I got a couple more blue screens.)

The only real lead I had at this point was the SSD disappearing from the BIOS, plus I had noticed some consistent behaviour.

1) If the PC was simply REBOOTED after a crash or blue screen, it would fail to find the SSD at POST, and thus fail to boot. Going into the BIOS at this point would show the SSD as completely missing.

2) If the PC was POWERED OFF and then turned back on, it worked completely normally (after putting the SSD back to the top of the boot priority list). But after some random amount of time, 10-45 minutes, it would do some sort of crash/hang and finally blue screen or stop responding completely.

I kind of figured my SSD was fucked, although I wasn't quite sure how, as when it worked it was 100% fine, data throughput was as fast as ever and so on, I always thought an SSD would either work or it wouldn't, since it's not a mechanical device.

Anyway, as my backups were up to date and in order, and I've been thinking about doing a rebuild for a while anyway as it's an old install of Windows 7 (not that it had been giving me any trouble prior to yesterday evening) - I figured I'd just go for a rebuild. If it was still fucked after the rebuild, I'd know for sure I had a hardware issue, most likely the SSD. (Although it could have been the SATA controller on the motherboard, or something like that, of course.)

So off I went with the rebuild, and since it's a pretty slow process with all the Windows Updates that are required, I did more investigation into the errors I'd been seeing and based on the assumption it was something to do with the SSD I refined my search terms (controller going west? dodgy NAND cell?). I used Mrs AE's laptop for this as my own PC was out of action of course, and she was out for the evening anyway so she wouldn't need it.

Eventually I found this, and I was like OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE, REALLY?

Fourth post down - http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State ... td-p/96549

A firmware update for the Crucial M4 that addressed this bizarre issue (who would have seen this one coming?):



I toddled off to Crucial's website and found the firmware (there's actually been another release since the one that fixed the clanger listed above), but it runs as an installer from within Windows itself and applies the upgrade on the next reboot, and of course I'd just blown away my installation of Windows

So as soon as my new install of Windows was in a usable state AND I'D INSTALLED .NET4 AS THE CRUCIAL UPDATER NEEDS THAT (FFS), and now horribly aware that my PC could commit hari-kari at a moment's notice because the issue was fundamentally to do with the firmware on the SSD rather than a Windows/hardware issue, I ran the Crucial firmware updater, it rebooted the PC, applied the firmware upgrade and carried on booting into Windows.

That was last night, (like, ALL of last night), I stayed up until about 2am getting all the Windows Updates on, and I'm still in the process of getting everything else installed/patched/configured. Office, Steam, Origin, backup software, Afterburner, FTP client, browsers and so on - fortunately my backup regime is very good so it's all fairly straightforward (even stuff like my Firefox bookmarks I regularly backup), and I keep all my usernames and passwords in an encrypted document for example - so nothing has been lost, it's just a lengthy process.

PC has been behaving itself fine so it's definitely fixed the problem, although annoyingly there was no need to rebuild it after all.

But seriously, what the fuck? Correct a condition where an incorrect response to a SMART counter will cause the m4 drive to become unresponsive after 5184 hours of Power-on time

I mean, really.

Reinstalling BF3, 34GB download.

It's going to be touch and go if I'm ready for our Saturday night games session.

Maybe in future I'll back up my Steam and Origin content as well, cloud saves are all very well and good but they don't help with a 34GB fucking download.

Well the only thing that's impressed me about this entire saga is that BF3 saves EVERYTHING in the cloud.

So after I'd reinstalled the game and fired it up, everything was present and correct. Stuff you'd expect like it knew what expansions I had, my friends list and favourite servers list was there, it knew what weapons and perks I'd unlocked etc etc, but more impressively it pulled down my control configuration (all keyboard and mouse settings, right down to mouse sensitivity), and graphics settings and audio settings too (I have the game volume right down so it doesn't interfere with Teamspeak, for example).

Every single last detail was perfect, and I didn't need to do a damn thing other than right-click on the game's entry in my Origin games list and select 'Download', and then wait.

Do you still need to defrag a hard drive? I remember having to do it years ago but now I'm on Windows 7, is it still a 'thing' to do?

I tried it once on Vista and it said " doesn't need doing mate, carry on if you want, but it's all good here".

Yeah, I still do it sometimes, but not often. I'm not really sure if it makes much difference though.

I've heard you shouldn't defrag an SSD though.

Watching the coloured blocks dance around the screen was always strangely satisfying.

Shouldn't, and there's no value in doing it, either.

If using NTFS I believe it handles data management much better than fat32. So little reason to defrag NTFS drives in general.

hello!

I turn the coputer on and it is all normal. Then it says "Starting Windows XP" or whatevr it daoes and then it jsut goes to a black screen and nothing happens after that. It just stops. I've beeng etting a "You need to check this disk for errors" message up a bit of late but I ignored it.

What should I do? I thought I could get another big HDD and then put a new windows on to it (I think 7 would work, Intel Celeron E3200 @ 2.40GHz 40 °C Wolfdale 45nm Technology and 1024MB GeForce 9500 GT (XFX Pine Group) 68 °C with 2 gig of ram ) I shall find it) or do I need to do soemthing else?

Ta.

You need to stop ignoring warning messages.

I think this is a wise idea.

Shall I throw £150 at this and get Windows 7 and then transfer all the other stuff over? I think I've got 3 or 4 physical hard drives in the other one. I'm 99% sure the HDD that runs XP is over 10 years old now, too. A computer needs to run Office10 and that is really it. And have dual monitors.

If the VGA and HDMI will run at the same time, you'll be fine.

Hmmm. I got it to boot.

The C: drive only has 3 gig free, so I am trying to make more space on it as maybe that is the problem.

I will run checkdisk on each drive, too.

It's not.

I'm not sure what I should be doing, then. Apart from running checkdisk.

Do you need to be doing anything at this point apart from running checkdisk?

Making sure any data you want is suitably backed up?

I'm making backups of important things across two drives in case it all goes wrong. that's a good idea, isn't it?

Yes.

It's doing something to a drive. I'll do them all in turn, then tell it to do the C drive next time it boots. Ta.

Chkdsk e:/r will get to 8% on step 4 of 5 and then the computer freezes.
Chkdsk e:/f shows no errors.

Strange.

I remember reading that you shouldn't use chkdsk on a failing drive as it secretly eats corrupted data rather than trying to recover it. A quick google finds a random webpage saying the same thing. Something like Crystal Disk Info will let you see the SMART error rates for your drives. Try that.

OK. I ran Crystal Disk and it said this:

Is there a "Fix it now" button, or is this just confirmation that it is on the way out?

Any time HDDs start doing anything other than 100% working, it's time to get a new one. They are cheap compared to the time you'll lose fucking about restoring backups if they go pop.

Good idea.

What I'll do is:

Disconnect drive C: and throw it away

Buy a copy of windows 7 for £40

Install windows 7 on to one of the newer HDDs

Party time

This is probably the best idea, no?

I don't know how practical it is to install windows on an existing partition. Just buy an SSD and install it on there

If there's any sensitive information on there (bank/online shopping details/work/ email details/nude pictures of Zardoz...) I'd destroy any hard drives before disposal.

Good point! Computer equipment is often turned into fncy dress costumes here, so yes, that might cover it.

You could install Windows 7 onto your existing hardware and it'll run fine (Windows 7 is surprisingly tame in terms of its hardware requirements), but you'd arguably be better served by buying a new unit from Ebuyer, probably a bit higher-end than you one you linked to above, but not much.

How is your current PC in terms of noise levels, or is it already pretty quiet?

One of the things that's really changed of late is how damn quiet modern PCs are, if you're used to having one whirring away in the room it's a real change to have a practically silent one sat there.

Cheers, but £40 instead of £210 looks better to me, right now. The computer is only used for work so anything that'll run Office 2010 is fine. The idea of an SSD and silence is nice, but not £100+ nice. Thanks again.

I have acquired a quadro fx 4600 that was gathering dust at work and as a result, my pc can do games again. Just about.

Weirdly, it's been so long since I last used a PC for any game other than minecraft that I no longer need to invert the year is. Odd

Invert the year is to jump!

Typing on your phone in the kebab shop in not accurate shocker.

I meant the y-axis

By all accounts that's an 8800 class GPU so really cracking on a bit now, but would probably make a decent enough job of running most PC games at modest resolutions with sensible graphics options.

Source based games (Half Life 2, Portal 1/2, Left 4 Dead 1/2 etc) it'd make mincemeat of.

In fact, looking into this a bit more, I'd say it's basically an underclocked GeForce 8800GT, which even in its day was a mid-range sort of card.

Like I say, should perform reasonably in most games, as long as you don't go nuts on the graphics options page, 720p would be a good match for it resolution wise, 1080p perhaps in older stuff.

That's my experience so far. Never been one for AA and all that gubbins and modern games are out of my league due to the rest of the pc anyway.

As long as I can *finally* play through portal2, I'm happy

I built a pretty bad-ass PC a couple of months ago. Gaming exclusively on it now. I've got a PS4 on pre-order, but I haven't touched my consoles in months!

The details, for those who care:

i5 3570K 3.40GHz @ 4.60GHz
ATI Radeon HD 7970
16GB of RAM
A Samsung SSD (256GB)
Corsair Obsidian 650D case (the loveliest case ever - excellent cable management features!!)
Oh, and a top of the line Corsair 850W PSU to power it all.

It's mega quick. Runs everything I've tried on it on max settings at 1080p silky smooth.

That's a bitching system, lob BF3 at it completely ULTRA-ed out on a 32 or 64 player map, it's quite one of the prettiest things you'll have ever seen a computer do.

I have and do regularly!

1TB SSDs now down to around £500, and a high quality latest-gen Samsung drive at that. Reviewed very well in Custom PC this month, and they're building increasingly clever technology into them now. (This drive has a triple-core CPU in it running at 400MHz, how mental is that?)

With the new caching technology activated, the review measured read speeds of 900MB/s, which is fucking insane.

http://www.ebuyer.com/539547-samsung-1t ... z-7te1t0bw

I'm holding off for now though, gonna wait and see how the next-gen consoles translate to what's best for a gaming PC, current thinking is that many lower-power cores may be preferable to fewer more powerful cores.

Or in other words, match the PC's specs to the console specs, so go for an octo-core AMD CPU as opposed to a quad-core Intel CPU. The AMD cores get far less work done per clock cycle than the Intel cores, but both next-gen consoles have what are effectively low-power AMD octo-core CPUs in them.

Point being, I'll hold onto my current PC until the picture is clearer, and then buy a whole new system, rather than upgrade what I have. My current case is about seven years old!

It's no secret that I love me some PCs and I think that Windows 7 is the best operating system ever, but sometimes even this holy matrimony can upset me.

Mrs AE's TFT broke yesterday (she has a laptop but she likes an external screen for the bigger display and 1080p workspace), it's not too bad in that it wasn't a mega-expensive one and it's on pretty much all day every day, and has been for several years - so it was gonna go pop sooner or later.

Bought a new screen from Currys today (Currys/PC World is quite an exciting development by IOM terms, they've only been here a year or so), £130 for a 24 inch Acer, 1080p, all the inputs covered, not exactly high end but a perfectly serviceable screen - main thing was I wanted HDMI which you don't get on the really budget screens, 'cause Mrs AE's laptop is on a HDMI-out and we already have the cable for that.

Got it all set up when I got home no problem, display looks sweet, job done. But soon after she told me that she had no sound. This seemed odd because I'd just plugged a different monitor into the HDMI output on the laptop, Windows had auto-detected it and lobbed the drivers on, defaulted to the correct resolution, usual scenario.

So obviously I started off checking all the cabling, wondering if I'd dislodged something in the changeover (she's only got a 2:1 speaker system, but you know how the wires can add up on these things), everything looked fine, subwoofer still had power, could see the volume bar in the Windows mixer bouncing up and down whilst playing music. Rather odd.

But I then noticed that the audio device in the mixer had changed, a quick jaunt into the control panel and sound properties revealed that the monitor had decided to nominate itself as the default audio out device (it's got a shitty set of speakers built into it so can carry sound over HDMI).

From there it was easy enough to disable the monitor completely as a sound device, and audio was immediately restored through the speakers, but it did make me realise how people who don't kind of 'do' computers on a daily basis, really can find them perplexingly awful.

I understand that the monitor probably thought it was being 'helpful' by activating its audio and that the laptop thought 'Ahhhh yes you've plugged a monitor in with audio capability, I'll turn that on for you', but even so, a bit rubbish. (I can only assume the monitor's audio was set to zero by default, because there was no sound coming out of it whatsoever, and all the controls on it are those new 'invisible' ones so it's not even like there's an obvious volume control, and either way it'd turned the fucking speakers off!)

So do mechanical hard drives.

That's not 'the monitor', AE, that's Windows. You added a new audio out, why wouldn't you want to use it? Should it have ignored the new display functionality too?

If you plug a mouse or keyboard in, should it ignore them until you actively choose them?or maybe more pertinently - headphones?

It's replacing the default audio out without a prompt that got on my goat a bit.

It didn't cause me any real problems, probably two or three minutes to sort out (including checking the cabling), but it just stood out as the sort of thing that drives non-computery people nuts.

How about a dialogue box that says 'I want to change your speaker settings from x to y', something like that? I don't think most people will associate a replacement monitor with a change in speakers, and it's not like a new screen where you need it to be 'activated' to work.

I'm trying to think of it from the perspective of say, my in-laws, who would ring me up to say something like 'We plugged a new screen in and the speakers have stopped working'.

It's all bonkers though innit, triple-core CPUs in a 'basic' storage device, that probably harness more processing power than entire PCs did ten years ago.

It's like 512GB USB flash drives, I realise they exist and that, but part of me just thinks, 'No way, you can't get so many transistors working so fast in such a tiny thing.'

They wouldn't though, they get you to sort it, or take it to The Tech Guys, or buy a new computer.

Its a totally different mindset.

Oh yeah make no mistake, I am the technical support on-call guy for my entire family.

Whenever my brother calls for example, I know it's going to turn into 'my computer is doing this......' within about three minutes at the most.