February 2007
You are currently browsing the articles from PC Tips World written in the month of February 2007.
Last week my friends called me. He asked me to check his computer. “It doesn’t boot even”, - he said. Well, thanks god he lives in near house and I went. Took some beer and knock in door. He welcomed me and invited inside. His computer is rather old - Athlon XP 2000+ and GeForce 5200. Others components are rather newer. The PC was already screwed up, so I just looked inside. I must stop here and tell you what is main in troubleshooting:
- Ask what has happened with subject.
- Try to boot PC and check the symptoms of the victim (PC certainly).
- Repeat second procedure several times and check whether it repeats.
- Check contacts on motherboard, hard disk, CD-ROM.
- Detect defect, which causes problems. Remember - there can be several defects. Defect is detected? Goto 8.
- If you can’t detect defect unplug everything, which won’t influence on PC boot: sound cards, hard disks, CD-ROMs. Leave only one RAM installed.
- If PC still doesn’t boot you have problem with main component of the PC (I will write about this in future).
- Remove the defect.
- Enjoy.
These rules are basic. Try to match them and I bet you will find at least defect. Advice - if you can, try to substitute broken component for some time. You can be wrong. In private case you can vary, but in general follow rules.
I have done almost similar these rules in my case. I tried to power on PC, but nothing happened. System didn’t start up, even coolers didn’t work. I thought it was motherboard or PSU. If the motherboard was broken it would at least powered on and coolers work. This didn’t happen. My thoughts was - PSU definitely. So I told my thoughts to my friend. Of course he was upset, but what we could do? He gave me money and I bought new PSU.
Imagine our surprise when we, after PSU was installed, powered on system. Guess what happened? Nothing! Similar symptoms. But this time cooler on PSU turned a little. So it had started and then stopped. At this moment I have realized my mistake. Electric defence on PSU didn’t let desktop working. Using my knowledge and sixth point I found out that it was hard disk. It was rather old as all system. Western Digital with 20 GB capacity (sorry, I don’t remember exact model). I apologized my friend and that time he gave me money for hard disk. Hard disk was bought and now my friend is happy with newly installed hard disk (Western Digital 80BB, not too far from old one).
Conclusions? I made several mistakes. I didn’t check my thoughts. I could change PSU and try one more time. But I was hurry and bought new component. The main conclusion, which I understood from this case - never speed! You never know what is real problem.
Written by mente on February 26th, 2007 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Desktops and Troubleshooting.
Several weeks ago I had a choice to change my own desktop to same-cost laptop. I have made my choice and I want to share gathered information with you. This is some sort of review. Several paragraphs were written on my PPC, when I was underground going home, so mistakes can be found. I hope this article will help your choice, like it helped me.
I must warn you - I have made some limits. Desktop’s or laptop’s price mustn’t be over $1000. Also I don’t consider Apple products such as Mac book, PowerBooks, etc. Desktop has installed Microsoft Windows. So laptop has. Nothing extra ordinal in configurations.
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Other Websites: Best Laptops Compare Laptops & price in Australia
Written by mente on February 19th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Laptops and Technologies and Desktops and Reviews.
On Sunday in San Francisco Intel has shown experimental processor, which ha
s 80 cores. Cores are common, the main plot is many cores. At the beginning Intel has shown processor working at 0.95 volts. Frequency was 3.16 Ghz and power consumption approximately 62 watts. The performance was amazing - 1.01 TFlops for one processor! Increasing the voltage processor frequency has been increased to 5.1 Ghz. Power consumption also has increased to 175 watt. Increased to 5.7 Ghz processor has shown a record of 1.8 TFlops for single processor. Power consumption was at the level of 275 watts. For example the highest performance computer has 65536 processors and can provide performance approximately 370 TFlops. So just two hundred Intel’s processor can beat the mightiest computer on the planet Earth.
Intel won’t make 80-cored processor public ever. It’s a prototype for future models. Serial model will have maximum of 16 cores, but even with them it is highly performed processor. Maybe Intel will even use technologies tested on this processor to make processor with integrated graphics. One or several cores will help to make it.
Written by mente on February 12th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Announcements and Technologies and Conferences and Desktops.
Do you remember XG-Station? Asus will have to share its profits with others. XG-Station still isn’t launched (in Q2 2007), but other companies decided to unify external video card. They’ll do it with the help of PCI-Express bus. They have just approved PCI-E 2.0 specifications and soon PCI-E will become external technology. PCI SIG has specifications, but don’t want to share with anyone. This standard will be popular between graphics companies, such as ATI or Nvidia. External technology will be used to create a cable connecting computer with some device. Imagine external graphics card. No limits for developers. Size, thermal care, power source don’t matter. Now you have one box and soon there will be 2: computer and graphics card 
. Thanks to Molex and the Inquirer we have some pics of cables. I share one with you.
Cables are shown from PCIe x1 (left) to PCIe x16 (right). Interesting that specifications still not available, but we have already working cables. And when external graphics cards will be released? Nobody knows. Don’t think that external PCI-E will be used just for graphics cards. Also it has a potential to be used in bridge between media devices and computers. HDDs, DVDs (HD-DVDs and Blu-rays in future) and I even don’t consider server segment, where is huge number of RAID massives.
Written by mente on February 9th, 2007 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Laptops and Desktops.
I like slashdot.org. Awesome portal. Tonns of information, many visitors, discussions. Browsing hardware.slashdot.org today I’ve found that Nvidia ignores users’ asks for working drivers for Windows Vista. Nvidia says their hardware don’t work on Vista. And I recommended Michael Hainsworth. After reading a post on inquirer I’ve apologized. I hope Nvidia will apologize for their customers too. Or they can lose big number of them in next years, when users upgrade to Vista (but I don’t think so)
Written by mente on February 6th, 2007 with no comments.
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Do you remember Ruby’s comparison? Well, according to this post AMD has working model of “new” Ruby. But it’s not the main spot. AMD has working R600 video cards. It’s just working prototypes for manufacturers. If manufacturers are happy, customers will be happy too (I hope). AMD still needs time to make sellable video card. Also card is needed to be reduced in size. But I hope they’ll do it quick enough.
Thinking about R600? You must start saving money, if you want to be in the first flight. Because it launches at the beginning of March
Written by mente on February 3rd, 2007 with 2 comments.
Read more articles on Releases and Announcements and Conferences and Desktops.