A thread for boring computer questions.

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Can someone help me troubleshoot a display/possibly videocard related problem? I have a Dell XPS M1530 laptop. Sorry for length of description but I want to provide absolutely everything I know.

- About 6 months ago, my computer started to act up at a frequency that it never had. I ran into the blue screen of death a few times, I had to do hard resets several times, etc.
- About 3 months ago, after another blue screen of death/hard reset, I noticed performance problems in Photoshop that weren't there previously - hard to explain, but it just seemed like I had downgraded to a 2005 videocard or something.
- I went to nvidia's website and updated the driver for the videocard, which didn't seem to make much difference.
- I dealt with it, like the dog with sunglasses.
- Starting two weeks ago, I ran into issues where the whole screen would just freeze, out of nowhere. The mouse pointer wouldn't move. I'd let it sit for an hour, come back, nothing. Each time I had to do a hard reset, and then things would be fine again for a while.
- I traveled home, taking my laptop with me. The Display wouldn't work during the entire trip. I'd turn the computer on, the disc would spin up, but the screen was black. Again, I'd let it sit for hours, come back, but no dice. This happened several times, until I just gave up trying.
- When I got home, I tried again. Mysteriously, everything was fine. The display came back up, I could use it.
- Then the other day, when I turned my computer on, it had a solid dark gray screen instead of a black screen with text. I stared at it in wonder as it gradually faded into the image below like a polaroid picture:

http://a8.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/302480_10150329811980959_638030958_8133527_725471091_n.jpg

- It took about 2 minutes for it gradually fade into the white screen with a solid black vertical bar.
- I turned off the computer and sacrificed an orphan
- When I turned it back on, the display looked just like the image above, without any gradual fading. It just instantly looked like that.
- I turned it off and got really pissed off.
- This morning, I turn the computer on, and it's ok again. I'm using it right now. Everything looks fine.

Based off of all this, is it a...

1) loose display cable? (I thought this might be the case, but in browsing a few tech forums people seemed to suggest that if it faded to the image above, rather than instantly appearing like that, it could be a problem with screen itself?
2) shitty videocard?
3) messed up screen?

or of course,

4) the mysterious "other"

If you've open and closed the lid between turning it off and turning it back on again, a loose display cable seems probable. Do you have a spare monitor that you can plug into it?
Another cause might be overheating, due to a cooling fan wearing out. Check if there's airflow going into/coming out of the vents, particularly on the underside.

man, it might be BOTH of those things...it's true that one thing that seemed to help was closing the lid and then opening it back up again. I suppose I should open it up and check all the display cable connections.

Overheating has been a problem since I got the computer. It always feels warm on the bottom, and sometimes it gets downright HOT. I

a Microsoft Outlook question!

on my works laptop i have to archive my emails every now and again.

Yesterday i decided to create a load of folders in my normal in box, to tidy things up, and moved loads of emails to these folders. Now the archive thing doesn't work! I tried putting everything back to how it was, and deleting those folders but it still won't archive anymore.

help!

ah

is it because its looking at the date i moved them to the folders, rather than the received date?

Just use the web app if you can - wash your hands of the office client

this might stupid but is there anyway to improve video streaming on a mac? except your broadband connection and i guess ram, what else affects this?

What browser?

chrome. but if other browsers would be better i'm willing to try that

Oh, I don't know then, soz

video streaming tends to take up a lot of processing power (to decompress the video stream), so if any other programs are running which are taking up some of that processing, then you might want to shut them down.

Do we have a web design/html/css/web coding/etc help thread? Or can anyone suggest some good, friendly, helpful forums to ask such questions? I could do with some help on a few subtle specific coding difficulties...

so after my spilling coffee on my mac and it not working for the past few weeks, i finally figured out how to remove the battery and then all of a sudden it worked except the T keys u, j, m, p and none of the numbers. so i have to cut and aste those letters or any numbers, also the enter key doES NOT WORK, NOW THE CApS IS STuCK, ANY IDEAS, SERIOuSLY THE CAS IS NOW STuCK

Get a cheap external keyboard?

I spilled some beer on my laptop a couple of months ago and bunch of keys stopped working. I ended up having to replace the keyboard. It was pretty easy to do though.

What kind of external hard drive do you guys recommend for a Macbook Pro? I'll mainly be using it to hold my music collection to run it through iTunes, as well as for some backup. Here's the story, I've been using a couple Western Digital drives for backup of photos and personal documents, but neither really have the kind of expansion space for my growing music collection. Anyway, my wife bought me a 3TB Seagate GoFlex drive which is supposedly totally Mac compatible. I hooked it up and had no problem consolidating my 450+ GB collection to it, but it is constantly freezing my Finder and/or iTunes even when in use. It appears to be still spinning, but just locking things up and forcing me to do a hard reset. Anyway, much research leads me to see that this is a really, really common problem with these new USB 3.0 drives since Mac doesn't support 3.0 - something about them just not working well together. I also saw that you can buy an adapter base with Firewire 800 that might (key word there) alleviate this issue and give me more stable connection. Problem is, I've called about 7 stores and no one has these and they are even on backorder direct from Seagate. I don't really want to wait to see if this MIGHT fix my problem and miss out on my return window for the drive.

I think I've answered my own question here, but am I better off just returning this and starting over?

What kind of drive would you recommend for my use/setup? I appreciate you smart peoples' advice.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003HIXOOQ/ref=oh_o02_s00_i00_details
what I got

Thats a little more than I hoped to spend, but not significantly so. Especially with all those positive reviews.

some wifi routers let you attach hard drives to them to make net drives, which should be good enough for streaming music, occasional backup -- i dunno if the usb3.0 issue would affect it as much?

halp.

mac laptop. no sound from speakers. can hear sound & adjust volume while headphones are plugged in, but internal speakers not working. sound preferences not displaying internal speakers, only 'digital out.' haaalp.

mac hides some audio prefs in the audio MIDI Setup

Check the audio-out minijack. Can you see a red light shining inside? There's a little switch in there that controls optical audio out, and it sometimes gets stuck in the on position. While it's active, your internal speakers get cut off. Carefully plugging-in and unplugging your headphones will usually get the switch unstuck, but sometimes you'll have to poke it with a toothpick.

i will check that out & will report back, thx!

the red light is on inside the port, but plugging / unplugging headphones hasn't worked. i'm poked in there with a toothpick, paperclip but I can't seem to catch whatever switch is on in there. dangit.

On mine, the switch is rectangular and near the top opening of the jack. If fiddling with it doesn't work, I hope Apple will fix it for you. Seems like a common enough problem.

so i bought a cheapo $10 replacement charger for my laptop. it overheats (which isn't a huge problem but it gets hotter than my last charger, which is an accomplishment) and whenever the computer's charging the cursor starts to lag like crazy. sometimes it's completely unusable. am i just gonna have to deal with it? i'm assuming i just have to deal with it.

throw your laptop away

not what i was expecting but ok

just spitballing here tbh

i tried setting the computer on fire now i'm on fire

friend of mine bought a cheapo charger which got really hot but seemed to do the job, then after about six months it went out in style, catching fire and blowing the fuse. good 2 c that u've accelerated the process.

Cheapo chargers can be seriously bad news. If it's making your computer fritz it will be putting out noisy power. Eye-opening: http://www.arcfn.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-apple-is.html?m=1

well balls. i guess i'll just go back to my broken charger for now.

OK, this one is pretty boring:
What are good numbers for print resolution for a photo printer? What about scanning resolution?

I'm looking at one that says

Print resolution: Black (best quality): Up to 600 dpi; Color (best quality): Up to 4800 x 1200 optimized dpi from 1200 dpi input data (when printing from a computer on photo paper)

Scan resolution: Hardware: Up to 1200 x 2400 dpi; Optical: Up to 1200 dpi

Is this any good?

Last time I shopped for a printer was 2001, so I no longer know what I'm looking for. Thanks.

That's fine, I'm pretty sure.

Though I should add my usual disclaimer that I add when I give advice about printers, which is that printers are terrible and impossible and my relationship with them is, at best, a truce.

I think most of the talk of resolution is irrelevant when it's the actual quality of the machine. Like If I was looking at two machines and one had some crazy optimized dpi listed but the other didn't, but the other was more expensive, I'd go with the other.

And personally I'm not a big fan of "all-in-ones" thought I know they can be decent. My girlfriend uses an HP I got for free when I bought my Mac Pro in 2008 and with the right paper, inkjet photo prints are surprisingly passable and the scanner is fine for documents or whatever, but she'll still use her old HP b/w laser printer for all text stuff.

My only advice for inkjet printers is that Epson generally reigns supreme. Same with scanners. And I was given advice from somebody who once worked at HP that their laser printers are not what they used to be. I bought a cheap-o Brother laser printer that I was happy with though it seems to print little dots on the side now.

Thanks. Food for thought.

Though I should add my usual disclaimer that I add when I give advice about printers, which is that printers are terrible and impossible and my relationship with them is, at best, a truce.

Ditto. Why must it be so?

they have gears, is probably the reason

Let's invent a printer w/ no moving parts. I just did my part, now you do yours and we'll make lots of money.

Printing is always a pain. This is what I use:

http://vandercookpress.info/images/219OS.jpg

Trying to install Office 2007 (what we're supposed to use at work - lol out-of-date) while still keeping Excel 2003 (my preference* - lol prehistoric) installed, going mad in the process. Found some instructions online which said "on the 2007 installer option screen tick 'keep previous versions installed', but they won't necessarily play nice", except my 2007 installer doesn't even show me an option screen.

* I need to write Excel macros for my job and do not trust Excel 2007 not to shit up my ability to do that - mostly just my Luddite inability to learn how to work the ribbon, but I have had some genuine other issues w/macros in 2007 too

I don't know if I'm asking for advice or just venting. Mainly venting.

This'd be one where I would say "where are your IT department and why arent they doing this?"

It is basically impossible right now for our IT dept to do anything even slightly complicated. They have some good staff - also some not good staff - but not enough of them, so everyone is frantically overworked, takes weeks to reply to tickets and won't read any instructions more than a line long before doing anything.

So they can install 2007 (in fact they will say "we put a script so you can install 2007 for yourself on the shared drive, you should just have run that already and not bothered us, ticket closed") but the chances of getting a working copy of Excel 2003 on at the same time without weeks of back-and-forth are about 0, I reckon. Especially since ideally I'd like Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 and that appears to be non-trivial. And since I still have admin rights...

Also I'm doing this on my home laptop right now, but yes, it's a test run to let me do work stuff and if I find a way I'll do it at work too.

Now that I no longer work for a company where file server backups are the IT department's problem and not mine, I need to find a reliable way to backup my laptop should it decide to shit the bed.

I guess I need some of external device (any recommendations?) and am also wondering if I can do some kind of automated cloud-based backup sort of thingie. Any recommendations for something like that?

So, basically, my boring computer question is how does a non-techie best shot backups. Cheap and easy is U&K.

mac or pc?

pc

1. get a mac
2. Time Machine