If you have a single (or some more) question regarding any of the tech topics of this board and feel that it wouldn't justify creating an own thread just for that, feel free to post it in here.
If you know the answer to any of the questions in this thread, please help us out here! I am sure it's going to be appreciated.
I am creating this thread since there's ben popping up too many threads lately with single questions asking for help that aren't really set out to create too much interest.
Are both your clock and monitor plugged into the same power strip?
Your computer is haunted. Have a priest come and consecrate it.
Seriously, it's odd, but >>101 might be on to something. Can you move your computer to another room, or at least another outlet, and see if the weirdness continues?
If your other electronics are affected it might have something to do with the power coming out of your outlets. Surges or unstable voltage can cause buzzing in audio equipment and flickers in monitors. I don't know how it would make a computer run slower without it being forced to shut down or fry a part, however.
As a wild guess it might be the CPU overheating by having had the heatsink separated during the move and slowing itself down to reduce heat buildup. Some G4 Powerbooks did have a thermal diode with dynamic frequency scaling but I'm not certain if G4s had this feature in the desktop models.
Another more improbable guess might be a problem with the computer's power supply being damaged and feeding an incorrect signal somewhere to the system clock or CPU. Or your BIOS somehow set to use the wrong multiplier for CPU speed.
>Or your BIOS somehow set to use the wrong multiplier for CPU speed.
Macs don't have BIOS/CMOS.
But you might be on to something with regards to a fan becoming loose or faulty. Be sure to give that a look too, >>98.
>>105
Then what on earth do you call the OpenBoot ROMs? Certainly it's not the BIOS on a PC system, but I'd say you're going a little far with that assertion there, kid.
On the topic of going a little too far, that parting remark is of dubious character.
You mean Open Firmware? Sure, Macs have firmware. But it's not called "BIOS" and it's not used the same way as BIOS/CMOS. Nor is it something that any more than a miniscule fraction of Mac users would ever have a use for. I know I've never used it…
Can we get back to the problem at hand? Where did Mr. 98 go?
I'm here, gonna switch outlets tonight and see what happens to the memory situation. (And I'll check out the fan too.)
I recently had a problem with my PC, in that it wouldn't boot at all - there was some HD activity for a few seconds, and all the fans and CD drives started up, but nothing on the monitor.
Now, where it was situated wasn't the most convenient place to dismantle it and try to figure out what's causing the problem, so I took it elsewhere and connected a spare keyboard, mouse and monitor, at which point it booted up just fine. So I took it back to where it was, plugged everything back in and once again it didn't work.
Then I tried disconnecting things one at a time, at which point I discovered the whole thing was down to the mouse. I mean, what the fuck, the <i>mouse</i>. So why the hell was it doing that?
> <i>mouse</i>
dammit, i could have sworn I enabled HTML.
Well, technically anything could be to blame... a PS/2 or USB mouse who's +5v and Ground pins are shorted (due to a dodgy plug or cable), will naturally cause the crobar circuit in the PSU to kick in, shutting off power to the whole system.
Out of cheese error.
>>113
ah, but it didn't shut off power to the whole system. the fans and disk drives, at least, still had power. but seemingly the graphics card didn't.
Maybe some corruption in the mouse driver that crashes the system as it's loaded?
I'd suspect a shorted +5V and ground, too. Fans and drive motors running on +12V might still get power. It's hard to tell exactly what would happen.
age
you have a rodent problem
Is it possible to combine split RAR files without decompressing and recompressing them?
上げる
i just reinstalled XP on a system that had the same installed on it previously. main difference being i reformatted the HD i was installing it on in NTFS rather than FAT32. it installed and ran fine, but i now get this error on boot:
*** IDE DRIVES INSTALLATION ERROR ***
For best reliability & performance, please change the stand alone slave drive to master. System Halt...the boot drive is the master on that cable, second HD is the slave. the bios initially autodetects both drives, but when it's actually displaying the names/models of the drives the master doesn't appear.
i haven't opened the case since reinstalling, so there's no possibility of me having physically changed any jumpers or unplugged anything. so what's going on there?
further to that last post, this is what appears at boot before the error:
Auto-Detecting Pri Master - IDE Hard Disk
Auto-Detecting Pri Slave - IDE Hard Disk
Auto-Detecting Secondary Master - ATAPI CDROM
Auto-Detecting Secondary Slave - ATAPI CDROMPri Slave [name/model of second HD]
Sec Master [name/model of first CDROM]
Sec Slave [name/model of second CDROM]just tried disconnecting the slave, i get a "Pri Master HDD error" instead. i can continue from this point and boot from a floppy or CD, but still. is my HD fucked? and if so, what fucked it?
>>125
It might be done for. Try to boot into a live CD system and check the drives SMART status, and/or download some drive checking tools from your hardware manufacturer and check with those. If they say your drive is broken, get a replacement (Your drive might still be under warranty so it might not even cost you that much). If they say everything is ok, try completeley deleting everything on the hard drive and reinstall after that.
Also, drives just break sometimes, especially if they're older, usually when turning on. The reformatting work might just have been what was needed to kill you drive, and when you rebooted after the install, it broke.
it seems like it's a firmware issue (maxtor drive being misidentified by its factory ID, Ares in this case). there's software available to fix it, but it costs $400, which is about ten times as much as the drive is worth. might as well get a replacement, then.
age
by the way, this thread is why kareha needs stickies.
>>129
no. there is a notice board at the top of the page.
do the intel macs really run any windows program, or do they need to have windowz xp installed to do that?
>>131
no. there are some windows programs that windows xp won't run.
I bought a SATA hard drive and external USB enclosure recently, but it doesn't seem to power up at all. I assume the enclosure isn't working properly (it looks and feels like a cheap piece of crap) but I thought I'd just check here to see if there's any common issue that causes this to happen. Any jumpers I need to set, specifically? I've been out of the hardware loop for a while, all the HD's I've installed in the past were IDE, so I'm not overly familiar with SATA jumpers.
>> no. there are some windows programs that windows xp won't run.
do you mean that the intel macs will only run programs that run under windows xp, or that i do not need to have windows xp installed to run those programs?
>>134
no, i don't mean either of those things.
>>131
Compiled against a different OS. Unless you have some sort of multi-platform binary. Like a Java or .NET app.
>>132
Not a relevant answer, but true. 95/98 Compatability helps, but some things really assume a very different environment than the average XP machine provides. Usually games or VERY OLD apps.
When i'm installing a game, my cd rom keeps disapearing on me. I have to restart the computer and the cd rom comes back. but when i try installing again, the cd rom dissapears randomly, sometimes on the first disk, sometimes on the 3rd or whenever.
Does anyone know what's wrong?
133 here, tried the drive in a different enclosure and it worked fine. I suppose the moral of the story there is if it looks like crap, and it feels like crap, and it was priced like crap, it probably is crap.
Vista has a feature that allows you to control the volume of different applications separately - is there any freeware equivalent to this for XP? I'm not really in a position to install Vista at the moment.
age
How come I can only use proxies on port 80?
I'm having problems visiting 2channel. I cannot view anything past the front page of any board. I am located in Australia and using Firefox 2 under winxp.
i'm a noob
i want subtitles. i have a .ass and a .avi or mkv. what the fuck do i do?
>>144
This is what I did watching Elfen Lied. Might not help at all. But whatever.
I used Winamp, with some pack of extensions called Community Codec Pack or something like that. The media was on .mkv files. Opened these with winamp. A couple of icons appeared in the right bit of the taskbar. One of these had a subtitle sub-menu item, right click to see what's there.
>>144
You can use mplayer ( http://www.mplayerhq.hu/ ), and call it via the command line like this (If you don't know how to use the windows command line, have a look here: http://www.sophos.com/support/knowledgebase/article/13195.html ):
mplayer -sub your_sub_file.ass -sid 1 -ass your_avi_file.aviYou have to be in the directory the avi and ass are in (Or give full paths to those), and you might have to give the full path to the directory your mplayer executable is in.
Also, random guess: Death Note 36.
Why do most of the Wall Mount Brackets for HDTVs all look the same? They all look like all HDTVs have the same mounting "holes".
Does that mean I can use whatever Wall Mount Bracket for whatever HDTV, as long as the Wall Mount can support it
>>147
standardization. not just for nuts and bolts.
Uh.
Whoops, the second link is meant to be the Samsung PS42Q96HD. Curry's website doesn't allow copypasta links.
External hard drives. I want to buy one to store my media (video, CD images, eBooks)
Question: what should I worry about or look out for?
>>151
The reality that they fail after a while.
>>152
Well, damn. I ordered one, and it's coming tomorrow. I wanted it to last a lifetime :'(
They last quite a while though. I've got one that's been with me for 1 year now.
>>155
I got a maxtor 120 GB going for 5 years. With only 5 bad sectors. It's giving signals about it's imminent death though.
Hey. I bought a HDMI to DVI-D cable.
If my computer has a DVI slot like so:
http://www.blogeek.ch/images/test/XPS2010/19.jpg
Then can I use a HDTV (that has HDMI obviously) to use as a monitor?
DVI is for visual data. If I plug in speakers in the computer and turn off sound on the HDTV, would the sound go through the speakers?
You can use the HDTV as a monitor. You would need to get speakers.
159GET in ancient thread.
160GET!
I need a good, free video converter. I want to convert WMV to AVI.
If possible, WMV to MP3.
>>161 Errm... you do know that MP3 is not a video format?
I do know that! I want to just rip the music from the music video, you see?
>>162
what goes between MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 then?
>>164
MPEG-3 is the designation for a group of audio and video coding standards agreed upon by MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group). MPEG-3 was designed to handle HDTV signals in the range of 20 to 40 Mbit/s.
It was soon discovered that similar results could be obtained through slight modifications to the MPEG-2 standard. Shortly thereafter, work on MPEG-3 was discontinued.
MPEG-3 should not be confused with MPEG-1 Part 3 Layer 3 (or MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3), commonly referred to as MP3.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-3
You could just record the audio as it plays from your speakers using Audiacity, just set it to "stereo mix" (or something similiar) and record.
WMV being a proprietary format, will be merry hell to try and disassemble. The ASX stream format is patented, thus most free/opensource programs won't touch it.
mencoder, which comes with mplayer (as suggested by >>166), can convert these files though... although there's a significant learning curve, and results can vary quite a bit due to the guesswork needed to parse the container format and decode the streams.
just me, or are all external HD enclosures shit? i've gone through three so far (all SATA -> USB):
I'm thinking of buying this sound system:
But, what I want to know is, whether I can plug my computer in via VI-HDMI cable and then plug the sound system to TV by HDMI-HDMI.
I have a hard drive that contains certain personal data of customers (previously belonged to a small business with which I was involved) - at this point I'm quite low on money so I'm planning to sell it as part of an unwanted PC. But I obviously don't want any unscrupulous types to recover such data from the drive, so I need to use some kind of software to erase and rewrite it, preferably only the unused space (it's got a fresh install of XP on it, just so I can sell to people who don't know shit about computers, and at this point i can't be arsed reinstalling it). Would cipher /w do the job, or do I need something else?
>>173
there's a reason why businesses sell/give away their computers without a hard drive. if you're really concerned about personal data, i would recommend that you either buy an empty drive or sell the computer sans hard drive.
If I use a cable that plugs into the [Audio Out (like where you plug in your headphones) of a computer] and goes to a 5.1 sound system via [Composite AV Audio], would I still get a 5.1 signal?
>>175
no. you'd still get two channels (assuming two channel audio output from the computer). you would need some sort of converter that changes the two channel signal into a 5.1 channel signal.
>>176 And where would this "converter" pull the other 3 channels from?
I'm not so sure that they're so trivial to derive from a stereo source -- I suspect you need to have a 5.1 channel signal to begin with before you will get a true 5.1 channel effect.
>>177
Actually, the upscaling converter does derive the 5.1 channels from the 2 channel signal. Obviously for best results, the audio signal should be already designed to playback at 5.1 channels. There are algorithms that seem to work well that can be used to make the upscaled 2.0 -> 5.1 sound a bit better than just duplicating the audio streams. These algorithms would fall into the field of psychoacoustics fyi.
Whenever I download any torrents, my computer will randomly reboot. When it does so, Windows XP will complain about some corruption on the file system. This happens regardless of the BT client I use, and the file that is corrupted is always either the file(s) the client uses for resuming downloads, or rarely a cache file of Mozilla's.
Any idea why this happens?
I assume you checked for viruses first? Random reboots + XP = does not compute. XP is very stable in my experience. It has to be some hardware problem, like some defective card/bad memory/overheating cpu/bad PSU/etc. If it happens during a download I would investigate the network card first.
>>180 I had the random reboots like you describe... the culprit turned out to be "Windows Update".
>>179
Is that after it's on for a while?
Perhaps check the BIOS configuration and make sure it's heat threshold for auto-shutdown isn't too low.
Do any of you know what program is used in this video?
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=8IWiJsCPtTc
Is it compatible with Vista and/or XP?
Okay, so I downloaded the trial. How come it only rotates WHAT I'VE DRAWN, instead of THE ENTIRE CANVAS like in the video?
>>187 Press E, move the Wacom pen around to rotate the whole canvas.
Do external video cards exist? E.G it plugs in a VGA/DVI slot, and it has 2 or more VGA and/or DVI slots
If they do, what do you recommend?
>>189
I think what you want is a "VGA splitter."
On a Mac, < 3 shows up as a bar instead of a heart symbol. I get something that looks like |. Why? I want a heart to show up...
For some reason, in some programs, / shows up as a yen sign. I toggled something in the regional settings to japanese, is that related?
189 here, I googled VGA splitter and all I got were things that could mirror the image from the source onto other screens. I wanted something that lets me use 1 DVI/VGA slot for a multiple monitor display (each monitor being an extension of the desktop).
Also, is there something that I can put inbetween my computer's DVI slot and HDTV's HDMI slot and be able to use the HDTV as a separate monitor with a 1080i/p signal?
I am trying to enter traditional chinese using windows vista. in xp I was able to use pinyin with the taiwan chinese input. but the taiwan chinese no longer seems to have the option of entering via pinyin. The only use of the pinyin input method was under PRC chinese and unfortunately PRC is all simplified.
>>194
In that case, what you want is a graphics card with multiple outputs. Connecting one to the back of another card would just be silly, which is why the thing you asked about originally does not exist.
(But it would still be possible, in theory. I remember seeing some sort of external graphics card for the Amigas, a long time ago. This sort-of made sense since you didn't have any slots to put a "normal" graphics card into, on the most common models. For the technically inclined: basically you'd trade resolution or frame rate for more colors, IIRC)
Just buy a new card.
But I am trying to use it with a laptop.
