Should this be stickied? This should be stickied.

I don't have a cd in, and if it's doing heavy work.. would it be making this noise every day?

_________________
Tuor: Stuff is our resident, hot mess, alcoholic.
Senel: Stuff is the patron saint of getting shitfaced. You replaced your organs with an engine that runs solely on alcohol.
RIP Lucky. I love you so much.

Unfortunately we tried that before and while it was amazingly popular after about a month people didn't check it and new threads would crop up with computer problems that were similar to the ones in the sticky thread. If there were more people with computer problems that might work itself out because of constant activity, but while this is informative ultimately as a sticky thread it would be counter productive.


Depends on how much stress you put your system under. Run a defrag on your computer and if the fan is loud while it is doing a degrag then the fan is being loud because of a high processor workload, if it is just getting loud at random there could be many reasons why it is being loud. As for costs the fan itself is cheap having someone open up your laptop and install it is not. I've had to open up a laptop before and switch out a fan and it takes a while.

Is your laptop under warranty? Did you purchase it with a credit card? Some credit cards double the manufacturers warranty.

_________________
Zeph do you ever tire of being perfect? ~Dave
Zeph is still awesome though. ~Rival
I love you so much right now Zeph. ~Yoshi
I love you Zeph. You and your simple yet humorous topic-breakers. ~Coos
Zeph has left me inspired. ~Mathias
Zeph is so awesome even soulless bits of binary worship him. ~Wizard
Curse YOU ZEPH! CURSE YOU! ~JesusChrist
WE ARE SORRY THAT WE ARE NOT AS PERFECT AS YOU, ZEPH! ~Stufflikehearts
Zepherin for forum queen and writer of the best seller "how to screw your brethen up for dummies". ~ The Mirak

I don't really do anything besides watching movies, internet, and WoW. How much stress does that put on a computer? And yes, it's under warranty. I may go get it checked out whenever this snow storm here dies away.

_________________
Tuor: Stuff is our resident, hot mess, alcoholic.
Senel: Stuff is the patron saint of getting shitfaced. You replaced your organs with an engine that runs solely on alcohol.
RIP Lucky. I love you so much.

Most of the time not really, although if you got spyware and adware it can be a sizeable amount, but I assume you probably run adaware or malwarebytes or some such to keep it relatively clean.

WoW might be, but if you've been playing it all along and this issue is new then I doubt it is the cause. If it's under warranty then check for malware and if not take it back have the assclowns do warranty work on it and make sure you backup your data before hand because sometimes they just send you a new laptop.

Snow, you must be in the east coast area. I've been stuck in Denver for the past 4 days because Dulles Airport has been shut down do to snow. I'm supposed to fly out to DC on Friday. Although since I'm on vacation I'm not too sad.

_________________
Zeph do you ever tire of being perfect? ~Dave
Zeph is still awesome though. ~Rival
I love you so much right now Zeph. ~Yoshi
I love you Zeph. You and your simple yet humorous topic-breakers. ~Coos
Zeph has left me inspired. ~Mathias
Zeph is so awesome even soulless bits of binary worship him. ~Wizard
Curse YOU ZEPH! CURSE YOU! ~JesusChrist
WE ARE SORRY THAT WE ARE NOT AS PERFECT AS YOU, ZEPH! ~Stufflikehearts
Zepherin for forum queen and writer of the best seller "how to screw your brethen up for dummies". ~ The Mirak

The fan could be dirty to I had one of my case fans get clogged recently and it started making a ton of noise

Here's the problem:
1. Converting all the files to MP3 or other "neutral" format via a converter is not designed to be easy as M4P has DRM and whatnot that MP3 and WMP in general doesn't usually have to deal with.
2. Codecs won't work purely because Apple has locked .aac and .m4p files so only iTunes and the like can play them.

Basically, you're out of luck unless you can find a decent converter. Try here but don't hold your breath.


A vague question, but a valid one nonetheless.

Every time we get a laptop in at my work (And we get lots) that has this problem it is usually:
1. Fan either dying or dusty.
2. HDD dying or just being noisy.
3. Optical drive (CD/DVD) dying or being noisy.

It is 99.99999% of the time one of these three, purely for the reason that these are the only moving parts in the computer. You've said you have no CD in/drive ejected and it does the same, so it isn't 3.

Now, listen to it closely. If it's making a whirry "whoosh" noise then it's probably the fan. If it's making a "vrrrrr" noise then hard drive. If you've got the know-how you can always take the hard drive out and test it then. Laptops are fairly straight forward (Usually) for replacing HDD/ODD and cleaning fans.

You said it's under warranty, so when you call them do mention everything you've tested and the surrounding symptoms. If you think it's the fan, tell them and describe why. It will save them, and you, time for repair.

Good luck.

_________________
"Worst case scenario I'll get arrested for public nudity.
Best case scenerio I'll get arrested for public nudity with a boner. It's win win." ~ Dave
"Also Yoshi is the most important person in all of Australia." ~ Zepherin

Thanks!

Thanks, guys.

_________________
Tuor: Stuff is our resident, hot mess, alcoholic.
Senel: Stuff is the patron saint of getting shitfaced. You replaced your organs with an engine that runs solely on alcohol.
RIP Lucky. I love you so much.

I just found this one http://download.cnet.com/Free-Mp3-Wma-Converter/3000-2140_4-10442362.html it's super quick and does good quality

Worked like a charm, thanks!

Just be ware it doesn't handle large amounts of files well. Then again maybe I shouldn't have dumped 500 files in at once.

One at a time for me.

I need some speakers. I would like to connect my PC to it and my TV to it. I would like to keep costs below 150 and if I can go under 100 that would be even better. I think I may go with
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/speak ... 4&cl=us,en

and then use AV splitters so I can connect audio from the TV and audio from my sound card, but if you guys have any better suggestions that would be desirable.

_________________
Zeph do you ever tire of being perfect? ~Dave
Zeph is still awesome though. ~Rival
I love you so much right now Zeph. ~Yoshi
I love you Zeph. You and your simple yet humorous topic-breakers. ~Coos
Zeph has left me inspired. ~Mathias
Zeph is so awesome even soulless bits of binary worship him. ~Wizard
Curse YOU ZEPH! CURSE YOU! ~JesusChrist
WE ARE SORRY THAT WE ARE NOT AS PERFECT AS YOU, ZEPH! ~Stufflikehearts
Zepherin for forum queen and writer of the best seller "how to screw your brethen up for dummies". ~ The Mirak

Those speakers are brilliant and probably the best you can get for the money. I use an AV splitter setup for DVD/Foxtel/Wii/PS2 and it works great.

I actually have the X-530 speakers. They are identical hardware wise, with a slight difference visually. Cost me $50 less then the X-540 set. So, if you can find an X-530 get it, otherwise those will do great.

Just a note, though. There is no remote on anything with the speakers so changing speaker volume (Outside of TV/PC volume control) and sub volume will require manual change. I just sat them in the middle and called it done, personally.


PS: Annoyed that there are no Wireless-N + Gigabit Ethernet modems around. Routers, sure, no modems. What if I only want to deal with one thing, huh? Fuckers.

_________________
"Worst case scenario I'll get arrested for public nudity.
Best case scenerio I'll get arrested for public nudity with a boner. It's win win." ~ Dave
"Also Yoshi is the most important person in all of Australia." ~ Zepherin

Thanks Yoshi. This is the 5th time you've given me a hand.

_________________
Zeph do you ever tire of being perfect? ~Dave
Zeph is still awesome though. ~Rival
I love you so much right now Zeph. ~Yoshi
I love you Zeph. You and your simple yet humorous topic-breakers. ~Coos
Zeph has left me inspired. ~Mathias
Zeph is so awesome even soulless bits of binary worship him. ~Wizard
Curse YOU ZEPH! CURSE YOU! ~JesusChrist
WE ARE SORRY THAT WE ARE NOT AS PERFECT AS YOU, ZEPH! ~Stufflikehearts
Zepherin for forum queen and writer of the best seller "how to screw your brethen up for dummies". ~ The Mirak

No problems, it's what I do

Seriously though, I've been working with computers professionally for nigh on three years now, and I still enjoy helping people and solving problems where I can. I still enjoy fiddling with new hardware and software and I still like to branch out and investigate and learn in my own time. This is the complete opposite of what every single person told me would happen. At this point I am supposed to get sick of computers and technology and hate dealing with people and their problems but I just don't.

I still do little jigs when I learn something handy. For instance, we supply maintain and do administrative duties with servers for some clients. We also do some mail hosting (Kinda) for them.

So what happens is the domain mail sends it to their Exchange Server which doshes it out. All was set up and righteous (Except some Outlook fuckup that was only a coincidence) and the client mentioned that a lady (Let's call her lady@ and him client@) should have been set up to receive a copy of all mail sent to him but he still wants to receive it.

I have not had much experience with servers so I spoke to a colleague who did and he was talking about setting up a POP3 account in lady@'s Outlook to grab a copy from his mailbox off the server. 'Kay. Sat down, went to remote in and do so when I stopped and thought to myself, "Surely there's a better way? Surely Microsoft have accounted for such a mundane problem and can be handled entirely server-side wise?"

So I spent twenty minutes Googling this shit and sure enough, they did, in a fairly logical way if you knew of it. So I spent five minutes setting it up, did some tests, all sweet. Now, setting up a POP3 would've been quicker slightly, but the point is that it was nice to think about it for a second and then find and learn a better way.

So yeah, I still like computers and helping people

_________________
"Worst case scenario I'll get arrested for public nudity.
Best case scenerio I'll get arrested for public nudity with a boner. It's win win." ~ Dave
"Also Yoshi is the most important person in all of Australia." ~ Zepherin

Ah, that explains it. I was wondering why you'd make a thread a thread like this when it's also your job.

I've been trying hard to come up with a question, but the only thing I can come up with is if you have any particular tricks to increasing the longetivity of a particular windows install before formatting. Defragment and search for virus regularly? Oh, and if you could teach me ActionScript 3.0 that'd be nice too

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Haha, the last time I used Actionscript was with Flash MX 2004. So I haven't used it for yeeears now.

Some Windows long-life tricks? Lemme see.
- Stop fucking with the registry with cleaners and whatnot unless told explicitly by people who know what they're doing.
- Try to keep the superfluous software count down. A lot of issues I've found is some obscure software is writing over/fucking with some file used by other things.
- Don't get viruses?
- Defrag is good (Though I am terrible and never get around to it).
- FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, INSTALL THE WINDOWS UPDATES. The worst thing I've heard was some guy saying how he turns off Windows Update on all machines he touches because "it just adds more bullshit". Don't be that guy.

It's pretty straight forward. Don't install dodgy looking stuff, avoid anything an airhead would use (MSN Plus, I'm looking at you) and try not to fuck with things to attempt to improve stuff that isn't broke.

Common sense plays a large role in longevity of installs (Though obviously sometimes shit happens). Unlike those reformatting every six months/year I usually install once per PC until the new version of Windows comes around, or I'm doing major upgrades/revisions. Education on what breaks things (Spyware and the like) solves many more things than any registry hack.

_________________
"Worst case scenario I'll get arrested for public nudity.
Best case scenerio I'll get arrested for public nudity with a boner. It's win win." ~ Dave
"Also Yoshi is the most important person in all of Australia." ~ Zepherin

Yeah, personally, I have more tough with hardware than I do with software.

But maybe I'm just the type that runs my computers into the ground.

Anyways, as for a question, is there any sort of way for me to rather quickly reload drivers into a new Windows install?

I've been using W7RC for the last half year, but I didn't have the foresight to install it as Professional, so now that I have my free upgrade copy thanks to my Comp Sci department, I'm sort of stuck since (or so far as I've gathered) you can only upgrade from RC into the Ultimate version if you didn't tweak at install (not that you're supposed to be able to upgrade from RC, but the fix around that was almost so simple I was kinda surprised).

So yeah, I think I'm going to do the better thing and just go for the custom install option, so doing a completely fresh install and letting it just dump my entire C drive into a folder to sort out personal stuff.

The part I'm concerned about is reinstalling drivers. It's not that I can't do it, but I'd rather be able to point at my current drivers folder and just tell the computer to "go".

Is there any sort of way to do this efficiently? Or will I just have to shoot through a bunch of driver set ups again?

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Twitter | Transistor Glamor | Tumblr | MAL

1. Grab DriverMax: http://www.innovative-sol.com/drivermax/
2. Export to somewhere.
3. Burn to disc.
4. Install Windows 7.
5. Unknown/uninstalled devices, update, point to disc.
6. Profit!

I've gone ahead and installed/tested it already, so it should be sweet to go.

_________________
"Worst case scenario I'll get arrested for public nudity.
Best case scenerio I'll get arrested for public nudity with a boner. It's win win." ~ Dave
"Also Yoshi is the most important person in all of Australia." ~ Zepherin

But what about porn D:

Thanks for the tips, . I think my main problem is copious amount of software, that slowly accumulates, but I've gotten better at uninstalling stuff again.

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Lol, I find hentai is the easiest type of pornography to access with zero risk of viruses or spyware/adware, given that you use the appropriate sites. xD

_________________
Twitter | Transistor Glamor | Tumblr | MAL

Uh I've sorta forgotten about it, but what Acer program stuff could I safely remove (if all of it?) since it came with the computer?

Pretty much all of them. If you think you may need it (For instance, fingerprint stuff for laptops) then leave it, otherwise uninstall it. Drivers are the important thing.

_________________
"Worst case scenario I'll get arrested for public nudity.
Best case scenerio I'll get arrested for public nudity with a boner. It's win win." ~ Dave
"Also Yoshi is the most important person in all of Australia." ~ Zepherin