Tech @4-ch

I won a case on eBay where a seller never shipped an item to me the way described, in the time they said they would.

A few minutes ago, I got the package in the mail-AFTER I received a full refund and spent it.

I honestly wasn't ever notified that the package was at the post-office, since it was shipped a different way than I paid for....

Should I keep the item? I already bought a replacement, haha.

You already have one so you obviously don't need it. The people who sold it to you might need the money they get from selling it, so send it back. I'm sure they'll be happy to have it found and be able to sell it again. They might need that money. But, even if they don't, it's a dick move to keep it.

It really doesn't matter.

You could get away with keeping the money, but would you be morally ok with that? If so keep it.

I'm pretty sure this doesn't matter anymore. This was three months ago.

Or is it just that Seagate drives die?

and when I say "die" I mean "die within the time it takes to finish torrenting something to it."

yes.

Western Digital drives of that size, and the 2tb models, kind of kick ass.

Hi. I've been thinking about picking up one of the AMD-based ones and building it up as a portable mini gaming system.

However, I see a potential problem here. The teeny tiny case has a teeny tiny 300W power supply. Yes, the motherboard has a PCIe 16x slot.

However, there's only room in the case for half-height, so called "low profile ready" video cards to fit that slot. That's not impossible to overcome. But the 300W power supply doesn't put out enough juice to run a video card that will be better than integrated video. Apparently at least a 480W PSU is needed that can support a video card drawing 200+ watts/26 amps or more. You're not going to get, say, a GeForce 9600GT/512MB card to run on that, and it may even fry the motherboard if you try.

Has anyone built up one of these and been able to put a decent PSU and video card in it?

Thanks.

I've heard of 5.25" power supplies that are made specifically to power pcie devices - if you do a quick google search you may be able to find what I'm talking about. Another option is to hook up a power supply externally to it, though it might take some work to make it look professional. Think of it like a Gateway Profile 4 / 5's power supply. The thing is like a brick. Anyway, that's what I'd recommend.

Alright, so I've been trying to install Fedora 11 on a brand new VD Caviar Green 500GB drive I got yesterday from Best Buy. I tried to do it from the LiveCD and it kept failing to write to the HD. "Bad media" something. I thought my HD might be eff'd. I was kinda pissed.

So I tried the full DVD install, and it goes normal, media check passed, and it goes about the normal installation until it gets to the actual instal. You know, with the progress bar and all. At which point it says:

---

python: rpmte.c:704: prmteColorDS: Assertion 'ix < Count' failed.
install exited abnormally [1/1]
disabling swap... ((etc etc))
...

sending kill signals...done

>>1 here.

When I boot to a live CD, copying the CD to the HDD fails less than halfway through. "This may be due to bad media. Please verify your installation media." I've tried a DVD and 2 different live CDs. I'm pretty sure it's not them.

The last couple of tries, though, it doesn't say anything at all, the installer just freezes or the screen goes black (and says "no signal" before turning off, almost like the card was deactivated or something, but the lights stay on)

I even tried to switch over to TTY2 and typed /usr/bin/liveinst. The graphical installer appeared over a black screen and froze about a third of the way through.

D:

I want to mod my pc so that my fans can be turned on and off with switches on the outside of my case (maybe in the expansion bay). Now the idea I had in mind was to cut either the positive or negative wire from the fans molex connections, and solder a green LED and switch to it (I'll worry about encasement later). The problem is that I don't know if the LED will hinder the fan's performance or if it wont would I need a resistor to keep the LED from burning out, and if the resistor would limit the fans functionality, I'd like to have the green LEDs to show which fans are turned on. Can I make this happen or is this just a pipe dream?

Hey guys I need help cleaning out files of this laptop I just got. It has a 150GB hdd but 120GB are being used... I can find some files but theres around 100GB that are being used.

I would normally just install a fresh windows but the problem with this laptop is that it overheats if the processors aren't in power save mode (Shuts off in 20 or so minutes if its not in powersaving) any suggestions?

So... You want to search for which files to delete?
"WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool."
http://windirstat.info/

Can you connect the hard drive to some other computer? You can do all your work from there.

>>1
You've got problems with cooling. Why not clearing the FAN?

>>4
To this I would add cleaning the heatsinks, but don't remove them unless you have thermal paste.

If it is a laptop, you might want to send it to a local shop. Because laptop components are more fragile and smaller compared to desktop, so you have to be extra careful when you take things apart. Oh, it usually more expensive too so be sure you have a steady hand and know what you are doing before unscrewing anything.

Odd situation. Sometimes when I install Xp on a machine, after most of the setup there's a screen called "Who will use this computer?" where I have to type in names. Since the machines are mine I just want my default Administrator account (regardless of security issues and whatnot), but the setup "forces" me to type in a name for another admin account which I cannot remove later on. Other times, however, the setup skips this screen altogether "allowing" me to keep only one admin account.

Any idea why this happens and is there a way to make it do the latter?

A guess:

#1. Running setup after wiping the entire partition.

#2. Running setup using the Repair Windows option with previous user directori(es) intact.

That's the weird thing; I did two installs side by side on identical machines, both formating the disk with NTFS, yet I got the screen in one. Weird.

Thanks for your input though.

I erroneously said partition, but it is also possible that it (the disk) contain another Windows partition with XP user directories in it.

It happened to me every time I install new a Linux kernel and forgot to update GRUB to point to the correct partition. I have two Windows system, and at one time it strangely slow to start and did not retain any of my customizations because XP (apparently) read to the wrong partition just because I haven't set the active partition right. The one I put my user directories is hidden, while the XP kernel blindly loading any active partition, which is the wrong partition.

Because I don't know how you format the disk, I assume you might overlooked the possibility that you are formatting a partition, not an entire disk. The setup might detect the one(s) that you didn't touch (a false positive) setting it as active partition, and --even though you didn't use the "Repair Windows" option-- the setup did the right thing to create new directory with number appended to it (eg. it detected "Administrator" so it create "Administrator.001") to avoid the deleting the old account(s), copy some files, and boot.

Maybe this is why it didn't ask for new account. Just a wild guess though.