This weekend my 12 year old brother came over to stay. We had a good time. We played on the laptops and shared some movies and overall it was really good. I got to introduce him to the classic comedy series “Bottom” that he seems to really enjoy. I sadly couldn’t take him to our sisters as it was raining and he had this really thin wind jacket that would of just got him soaked, so i am sorry to Suzanne for not bringing him over. Whilst he was here I cooked him some nice food including a lovely home made pizza and although he didn’t eat all of it, i certainly ate all mine. Overall it was a quiet but good weekend. 
Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category
A Nice weekend with my brother
16
Aug
The Graphics Card Saga
02
Aug
Well i thought i would write about my graphics card saga on my computer. On Saturday i went to move the mouse on my PC to wake it up to check my messages and nothing came up on screen. I thought the PC had simply crashed. So i rebooted the PC and nothing came up on screen. This was a little worrying. I went through the usual diagnostics of removing all onboard cards and stuff and narrowed the problem down to my PCI-E graphics card. This card was fairly new and i bought it on eBay over a year ago. I managed to plug the LCD screen to the onboard graphics card and i was surprised to see that was also damaged. The screen was jumping all over the place and their were tons of lines all over the place. I knew this wasn’t at all good. I looked closely at the motherboard to find there was 1 tiny 6.3v 1000Uf capacitor that had blown. Basically the top of the capacitor was rounded and should be nice and flat. This wasn’t the most ideal of things to find on a computer. I took the motherboard out of the chassis and placed it down. I fetched my soldering equipment and looked through my stock of spare capacitors and found i had an exact match which was great. I set about removing the old capacitor and replacing it with the new one. After about 5 minutes repairing it i hooked it back up and powered it back on and success it was working. I also tried the PCI-E card but alas this wasn’t working still which is pretty annoying. After further inspection i believe the graphics card was made of sub-standard quality as the solder points were oxidised and had turned slight green. This is sure sign of shoddy workmanship when it comes to soldering. There could be many reasons for it from acid from fingers touching the soldering points before they were soldered to substandard working practices.
After checking all the BIOS and making sure things were still working normally, i put the motherboard back into the chassis and powered it all up and success the onboard graphics were once again working – but sadly only to a point. Once windows booted up it decided it wanted to repeatedly reboot itself – i eventually narrows that down to the drivers that were installed. I removed the drivers for the ATI card and also the onboard card because for some reason it doesn’t like its own drivers. The system is now thankfully fully working again but with the windows inbuilt graphics driver – which is not too bad – it still runs at 32bit at 1024×768 without any problems.
The idea of just repairing the motherboard instead of throwing it out and getting a new one is the fact i have no money to do that and i have to basically use what i can to fix problems at this current time. If it does go again though i will have to save about £100 for a new computer as i still need one even though I use my laptop daily.
Well that is my little Graphics card saga
Intel Throttling Feature is a PAIN
24
May
One of the most annoying things about dual and quad core computers is the inbuilt throttling. The throttle feature is designed to keep the core cool when it is being overworked – however this feature can be rather annoying as it can kick in during the most inopportune times causing the application you are using to run very very slow. On my laptop the throttling feature kicks in all the time and i am constantly turning the thing off which is just annoying. I have tried to disabling the throttling feature and even resorted to locking certain registry keys to try to stop it from kicking in and no matter what i try it seems to just spring back to life. Now the feature is there for a specific reason and as i said its to help cool the core down, but on my laptop it actually does the opposite and causes it to warm up more because it is actually trying to throttle as well as carry out the commands from the applications i am using – its a truly no win situation. Now i do know that after doing some research my laptop is a little unique when it comes to throttling problems and it is known that the problem causes an annoyance for many users. I have tried applying the latest bios updates in order to combat the problem without any luck. I have tried a few alternative programs to Rightmark CPU clock utility such as throttlestop which is designed to keep it cooler but then i run into unforeseen problems such as crashing. My core in general runs between 38’c to 66’c on average and turning off the throttle part actually does cool it down. I also under volt my laptop to encourage rapid cooling as well. I guess until a newer bios update can be sent out to either disable or cause the throttling to kick in at much higher temperatures then i guess i will have to live with it.
Office 2010 Beta – Good? You’d think so wouldn’t you.
12
May
Well I’ve quickly tried out Microsoft Office 2010 beta and i found it a massive improvement over previous versions but as with all Microsoft programs there were pro’s and con’s. I really liked how the office programs was installed via the net and only really installed the components that you needed at the time – once installed it was on the system and ready to use. I really like the new interface, its really easy to use and fully functional. They are still using the ribbon style layout like Office 2003 i believe but its been set up a lot better and there are more options for customisation.
The cons though i think are hardly any support for there own mail system within outlook – i use Windows Live Hotmail and you still have to install the Outlook Hotmail connector to use hotmail within outlook and this i feel is a silly mistake. There is actually better connectivity between Windows Live Mail over that of Outlook and its support for Security Certificates for hotmail is literally non-existent whereas WLM does have that support. I like the calendar layout and in the past have only ever really been interested in there outlook program. I was interested in buying this new version if it lived up to expectation but alas i have found it pretty disappointing. The interface although very nice is very slow. I found that synchronising mail with hotmail was very slow and on most occasions never actually picked up any mail and yet mail was in the folders. I would think that there would be better support for offline folders for and storage within the outlook PST file but that also seems to be lacking within this version. I think they went in the right direction with there home user software of Windows Live Mail that does pretty much everything i need and would expect of a mail program, but that also has its drawbacks such as lack for PST support. I think if Outlook was designed with better connectivity to the major mail providers such as there own hotmail, the system would be virtually perfect in design. But it does need to overcome some of the speed flaws and connectivity problems first.
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