Recently Hardwared

Here is a PC enthusiasts thread. Feel free to post in this thread any thoughts or user experiences you might have had with existing, or brand new, or upcoming PC peripherals. Could be anything. Monitors, mice, keyboards, graphics/sound cards, USB devices,CPU Coolers, whatever floats your boat.

I peruse tech sites often reading about all the latest gadgets and am always interested in hearing more from people who might actually know more than me about it, or who may even already have an item. So post away your Tech savvy reviews.

.......Or ask questions about items you may want to know more about.

Dunno if this is what your after. I assume you want us to post oddities as well?

Well, this has happened to me on 3 separate occasions, and I have never received a satisfactory answer as to why:

A driver just goes away into the ether. On the first occasion it was a mouse driver. This was way back in either my win3.1 or win95 days. I cannot remember. The second was a sound driver in my winXP days. and the third was a video driver. Recently.
On all three occasions I was using my pc the night before. The next time I boot up the driver is gone. Unfound. Out there.

Has anyone else ever had something similar and do they know why this happens?

---

The best things in life, aren't things.

My keyboard of 7 years finally started acting up on me last week. The whole top row of letters would not produce anything when pressed, and the backspace key would only ever make a backslash when pressed. It was quite aggravating.

So I decided to get a new one. I needed one soon, so I only did a night's worth of shopping online. Since all I have available to me where I live are a Wal-Mart, Office Depot and a Radio Shack. None of which were carrying what I was looking for.

So I ultimately settled with this keyboard. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16823191007

Note: I did NOT pay $74.00 for it on Newegg. I shopped around and got it for $65.00 and free shipping instead

Here is my pic of it as it looks on my desk when I typed this message: It is an otherwise standard keyboard without any bells or whistles(no lights, no prop-up legs in the back no key profiles, bla bla bla...) I think I've grown up from those. I wanted a well built nice solid keyboard, and this thing delivered.

However it does have a few media controls (volume up, down and mute, and sleep mode). And two USB 2.0 ports on either side of it which acts as a hub. It makes it real nice when plugging flash drives and other things up quickly when your case sits on the floor.

It's made of 3mm thick brushed aluminum for a frame, and sits extremely solid on my desk. I've grown used to my low-touch keys on my laptop, so I wanted something similar for my desktop as well. The keys are rather silent, and the thing just generally looks really nice. Everything I've been typing makes me want to type more, because I really like the feel of this thing. Programmers advocated this model, as it feels very solid, and won't move around as you type. Otherwise, it's a standard IBM keyboard, and it looks nice!

-Hows that for a user experience?

---

Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

Orpheus said:
A driver just goes away into the ether. On the first occasion it was a mouse driver. This was way back in either my win3.1 or win95 days. I cannot remember. The second was a sound driver in my winXP days. and the third was a video driver. Recently.
On all three occasions I was using my pc the night before. The next time I boot up the driver is gone. Unfound. Out there.

Has anyone else ever had something similar and do they know why this happens?

To answer your question: yes. Someone has and does.

Moving on. (It has to do with Window's lousy bookkeeping and its constant disk checking that actively corrupts their own file system in the process, the drivers don't actually disappear, the files just get funked up. I'm also pretty sure I've answered this before.)

The hardware I've most recently purchased was a video card:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130568&cm_re=EVGA_GTX_460-_-14-130-568-_-Product

EVGA GeForce GTX460 SC EE 1GB Lifetime Warranty card.

It rocks. Though, I'd probably suggest the GTX560 over it. Overall, it runs everything great. I'm more limited by my old CPU than anything else.

And, I got a new keyboard:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16823126191&cm_re=K200-_-23-126-191-_-Product

The Logitech K200 (and it came with a mouse I don't use)
It's pretty nice ... the keys are thicker than the scissor cut keys I had before ... and it has a dedicated calculator button (what?) I remapped it to music in linux.

And, finally I got ... this fan:

http://enuinc.com/fan-120-ant-blu.html

It's a tricool fan from Antec ... I wanted the non-LED version but it wasn't in stock ... and I really needed the fan. I ended up fixing all my other case fans ALSO, so now I have 5 working case fans (woo hoo WD40) and I have some pretty sweet temps as a result.

That's all for now unless you consider Dungeons and Dragons kits "hardware"

---

Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

It is entirely possible we did discuss this Adam. I cannot really remember but I do know it wasn't recently and before now I was gone for almost 4 years so it was a very long time ago if we did.

I suspected the very thing (well a similar thing) to your answer.

---

The best things in life, aren't things.

Orpheus said:
A driver just goes away into the ether. On the first occasion it was a mouse driver. This was way back in either my win3.1 or win95 days. I cannot remember. The second was a sound driver in my winXP days. and the third was a video driver. Recently.
On all three occasions I was using my pc the night before. The next time I boot up the driver is gone. Unfound. Out there.

Orpheus said:
winXP

Found your problem.

Crollo said:

Orpheus said:
A driver just goes away into the ether. On the first occasion it was a mouse driver. This was way back in either my win3.1 or win95 days. I cannot remember. The second was a sound driver in my winXP days. and the third was a video driver. Recently.
On all three occasions I was using my pc the night before. The next time I boot up the driver is gone. Unfound. Out there.

Orpheus said:
winXP

Found your problem.

Pretty much. I still don't get why people are surprised ... no, shocked, that Windows has fundamental runtime breaking issues.

It's not well written ... don't be surprised if it does absurd things.

---

Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Crollo said:

Orpheus said:
winXP

Found your problem.

You have this uncanny ability to simplify something beyond its ability to remain part of the solution.

and Adam, I am not surprised, I am curious. They are totally unrelated things TBH.

IE, I am surprised we still promote fossil fuel use. I am curious why we don't use alternatives more. Yes, unrelated to this thread but a perfect example of surprise and curious.

---

The best things in life, aren't things.

So, as I mentioned a bit earlier in another post, I recently replaced a few of my peripherals.One of my favorite additions is this:

http://store.razerzone.com/store/razerusa/en_US/pd/productID.211324200

The Razer Black widow mechanical keyboard. It is by far one of the most satisfyingly sturdy keyboards I have ever owned. It requires next to no pressure to actuate a key, as the stroke is recorded about haf way down as it's pressed. It has a nice heavy sturdy feel to it, and the sounds made while typing are reminiscent of those made by old IBM mechanical keyboards of days gone by. I got the pro model for $79.95. There is an elite model which has backlit keys and built in jacks for headphones and a USB port, but that model was $129.99 so I passed on that one. It has 5 programmable macro keys, and all of the functions(volume, play, etc) can be activated simply by holding the [FN] button down.

All in all a very satifting keyboard.

Truth be told I am so hard on keyboards I stopped buying the expensive ones in favor of the 10 dollar versions at dollar general. I have beat the shit out of more than one for getting me killed. Its amazing how little stress those letter keys can handle when your fists connect with them.

---

The best things in life, aren't things.

I have about 20 keyboards @ home. I get them from work, when they get new comps they don't use the KB's that come with them so I take them home. Why..I don't know just can't see them getting pitched.
I've had drivers vanish also, I think some of it as Crono said is windows, also when you install something Windows can screw up another program because of it.
I even had windows bork itself one time for no reason, just deleted half of itself.
That was win3 if I remember.

---

Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

Just don't use check disk. It's awful. (That HDD scan windows forces on you after an improper reboot and every once in awhile is check disc CANCEL IT)

I've had to fix countless computers that had problems due to check disc fucking around. The biggest issues arise on Vista making it so you can't log into the machine ... but the screen never displays. Fixing it involves a lot of registry tweaking. Pain in the ass.

---

Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Its prolly out dated info but FDISK is fairly distructive too.

---

The best things in life, aren't things.

Crono said:
Just don't use check disk. It's awful. (That HDD scan windows forces on you after an improper reboot and every once in awhile is check disc CANCEL IT)

I've had to fix countless computers that had problems due to check disc fucking around. The biggest issues arise on Vista making it so you can't log into the machine ... but the screen never displays. Fixing it involves a lot of registry tweaking. Pain in the ass.

What should we use to repair the file structure then?

Hardware failure would require the failed sectors to be remapped (which should happen automatically to reserve sectors)

file system corruption is not repairable. The problem will always persist and manifest in new and interesting ways.

A viable alternative to figure out which is happening is to use a an NTFS driver on a linux system (NTFS-3G) and use one of their many filesystem checkers. It only analyzes. It will tell you if this is the case. (They also generally have far better S.M.A.R.T. utilities which will give you a pretty good idea of the stat of the hardware)

The majority of time, you have to repair the actions checkdisk takes because it renames things and moves them around ... even if there is no corruption. The majority of time it's ran because it's bundled with various other actions (windows defragmentation) or from a incorrect shutdown.

I just don't see the point of using software that makes more messes then it fixes when the messes it's made to fix aren't usually fixable anyway. (Especially considering you could make a live CD that has all the needed utilities that you boot into when you need to check)

If you need to check system files (different from check disk) you can use microsoft's tool for that ... I forget the name of it, syschk? That'll check against system files integrity.

If the file system is screwed up, though, there's not a lot you can do, regardless of what file system you're using. I just make the argument that their tool isn't worth the hassle.

And if you know how to change the chkdisk flags for when it's ran from an improper shutdown so it actually does JUST check the disk (if that's even possible) ... by all means.

---

Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

I dunno if this is relevant but I lost an entire hard drive once because the checkdisk (or its predecessor program scandisk)caused, or reported a bad sector and caused a cascade effect of sorts. It kept moving stuff to the next sector and then reporting it as bad too. eventually I had so few sectors left the hard drive wouldn't hold the info on the drive and it crashed.

It's never done it again. Dunno why, or why it did it then.

---

The best things in life, aren't things.

Crono said:
A viable alternative to figure out which is happening is to use a an NTFS driver on a linux system (NTFS-3G) and use one of their many filesystem checkers. It only analyzes. It will tell you if this is the case. (They also generally have far better S.M.A.R.T. utilities which will give you a pretty good idea of the stat of the hardware)

Seatools for DOS gets the job done (smart for Maxtor/Seagate Drives and bad sectors for all) - theres also PC doctor, but only for the hard drive test. I constantly use Hirens Boot CD for all my tools. There are a ton of tools on there, it even comes with a live windows XP OS so you can boot and tinker with the files (delete virus files, repair the registry, etc). There are some southbridges that it doesn't work with, but it works 90% of the time.

If you need to check system files (different from check disk) you can use microsoft's tool for that ... I forget the name of it, syschk? That'll check against system files integrity.

"sfc /scannow" is what your referring to methinks

But that only verifies all critical windows files are present and pass a crc checksum (or whatever windows uses).

The majority of time, you have to repair the actions checkdisk takes because it renames things and moves them around ... even if there is no corruption. The majority of time it's ran because it's bundled with various other actions (windows defragmentation) or from a incorrect shutdown.
I just don't see the point of using software that makes more messes then it fixes when the messes it's made to fix aren't usually fixable anyway. (Especially considering you could make a live CD that has all the needed utilities that you boot into when you need to check)

Problem is your average user doesn't know how to run live CDs, let alone know how to type:

mount -t ntfs-3g -o force /dev/sdb1 /media/Drive

into the terminal (Ubuntu style, not your normal linux style, I just use ubuntu because it is the most common distro). Even the automated live CD drive mounter scripts have problems.

I only ask because I've used chkdsk multiple times in my computer repair line of work:
-Computer gives the "blue screen" (not an actual blue screen) of "cant find windows\system32\config\system". Chkdsk finds the registry hive and moves it and fixes the problem. We then move onto cloning the drive (acronis or ghost) to a new one.

-(different case than above) Cloned drive wont boot because the original drive was failing. Ran a full chkdsk. Boom fixes the problem.

-(data recovery), data wont copy (drag and drop) nor will it be recovered by commercial software. Run chkdsk on drive (over-night), come back can drag-and-drop data off drive OR commercial data recovery software gets to the data (multiple separate occasions).

Chkdsk does a lot of low level sector manipulation for sure, thats why if you stop it before it finishes its going to cause problems. Any non-readonly repair tool is going to do that.

I guess the debate is whether chkdsk should have come or not with windows. I'm glad it did, but its meant to be used as a tool, not a cure-all like the way it runs.

Orph- That drive was failing already. And windows was detecting that, it was attempting to fix the problem automatically with a chkdsk scan. It wasn't necessarily chkdsks fault that it killed your drive. Failing drives are fickle, and a heavy operations such as chkdsk pushes it over the edge. Sounds like im proving my own point with circular reasoning, kinda, but even if you ran another "magical" ("magical" because I don't know of any that really exist that repair ntfs file systems) tool that fixes poor sector problems it would have damaged the drive just as much as chkdsk did.

too-long-didn't-read: chkdsk should be used as a tool by someone who knows what they're doing, in its current state its relied on my M$ and users as a cure-all, when it shouldn't.