Recently Borked

I want to start this thread in the hopes that we can keep all of our computer solutions in one place. I realize that not every solution is viable to everyone, but still... Even if its a solution you do not particularly agree is legit, it will allow others to decide if its for them.

Most people have heating issues due to dust and whatnot, well I had a heating issue due to to many cooling fans.. YES, believe it or not, I actually had to many blowing outward from within my cabinet and my power supply was running hot enough that it hurt to touch it. NO not painfully so, but you damn sure knew it was warm.

Well, my solution was relatively simple.. My cabinet had one more fan location, and I have s**t loads of computer cabinets laying around so I took the biggest one I could find and installed it blowing... inward.

Whether this is a viable solution or not for some, it actually relieved the stress on my power supply fan and it now runs cool to the touch.. Go figure. shrugs

If you guys have any computer problems/solutions you have, or have had in the past, post them here for others to survey.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

If you have more fans blowing out than in, you can lower the air
pressure in the case after prolonged usage, and that can raise the
temperature.

I have a computer issue. I leave it on 24/7 and the central air
conditioning at home cant keep up with the heat my box generates. :biggrin:

Wild Card said:
If you have more fans blowing out than in, you can lower the air pressure in the case after prolonged usage, and that can raise the temperature.

I have a computer issue. I leave it on 24/7 and the central air conditioning at home cant keep up with the heat my box generates. :biggrin:

Yeah, I never would have guessed.. I suggest you turn one of yours around too.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Problem: Win XP randomly decides one day to change the default C drive
option to "Search...", so I can no longer actually open the damn thing.
God knows how this happened. And no, it wasn't a virus or spyware - I
checked.

Solution: One hell of a messy hack actually. I opened up the Folder
options and clicked on the file types tab. Then I opened up the options
for "Drive" and added a new option "open" associated with explorer.exe
and made this the default. I can now only open it in a new window, but
at least I can actually get to it.

As I said, God knows how this one happened.

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My site

You probably at one point or another downloaded something which modified your Registry and that fubared it.

Another good one. My laptop doesnt have a battery so I have to
run it from the wall outlet. However, the if you move the cable
even the slightest, the power is lost and the laptop turns off. I
was checking my email while listening to music, and this
happened. Its a frequent occurance so all I did was wiggle the
cable a bit and turn the laptop back on. However, this time,
instead of booting into Windows, I got a message saying my hard drive
had no partition.

Sure enough, I checked it on my desktop and BIOS did recognise the hard
drive, but no file partition was on the drive. In that instant, I
had lost all data on it. Oh well, it wasnt much important, back
ups, mainly, from my desktop.

You probably at one point or another downloaded something which modified your Registry and that fubared it.

Another good one. My laptop doesnt have a battery so I have to
run it from the wall outlet. However, the if you move the cable
even the slightest, the power is lost and the laptop turns off. I
was checking my email while listening to music, and this
happened. Its a frequent occurance so all I did was wiggle the
cable a bit and turn the laptop back on. However, this time,
instead of booting into Windows, I got a message saying my hard drive
had no partition.

Sure enough, I checked it on my desktop and BIOS did recognise the hard
drive, but no file partition was on the drive. In that instant, I
had lost all data on it. Oh well, it wasnt much important, back
ups, mainly, from my desktop.

It is possible to retrieve all the data intact, since it is not the
entire partition that was lost, but just the partition table on the
MBR. I have done it recently for a friend's PC. The only thing is that
you have to NOT use the PC at all till you get it repaired.

Possible Solutions:

1) Get a linux based rescue CD which has
parted on it.
I used the FC3 recovery disk. Use parted to rescue the partitions.

2) Get Partition Magic (costs money). That'll set you up with a pretty
looking GUI on a bootable floppy (cd?) that does the same work.

Well I've since reformated, but I do have partition magic. But
all the options available refer to creating, deleting, or modifying
partitions.

Well I've since reformated, but I do have partition magic. But
all the options available refer to creating, deleting, or modifying
partitions.

I checked an expired trial I have lying around , and the help file says
you need to select the free space you want to search, then go to
Operations > Undelete.

fraggard said:
2) Get Partition Magic (costs money). That'll set you up with a pretty looking GUI on a bootable floppy (cd?) that does the same work.

If interested gimme a yell.. (costs time)

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Dont worry Jon, I'll give you extra diapers if you need them for your troubles.

Frag, we may have different versions of the same program, as mine is DOS boot disk with a DOS-type interface.

I'll tell you something that recently borked.

I had a thread in the General banter with the subject line 'G'. It contained the phrase 'Flash for thought' and had a link.....wtf happened to that thread? I just posted it last night. I even visited it a couple of times...so it really was here! did it get deleted by an admin or something?

Dark Tree said:
I'll tell you something that recently borked.

I had a thread in the General banter with the subject line 'G'. It contained the phrase 'Flash for thought' and had a link.....wtf happened to that thread? I just posted it last night. I even visited it a couple of times...so it really was here! did it get deleted by an admin or something?

At least on two separate occasions I have had threads come up missing.. I am only referring to unexplained missings now.. I am unsure, but I think periodically the host loads a backup copy of snarkpit and I just happen to post moments before such an event.
Since I have no way to confirm this it is entirely supposition on my part.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Recently b0rked? My HDD. I had to use a data recovery tool to get my
stuff back. It seemes that the clusters containing info about the HDD
got somehow messed-up. When booting, BIOS inspects those clusters
and, if it can't read them, it will consider the drive kaputt.
Of course, the data recovery tool would have required me to pay 50 USD in order to run but I managed to
get my hands on of those taboo dingies.Don't you just love the way those
capitalist exploiters like to take advantage of someone's despair to
squeeze some more cash?

Wild Card said:
I have a computer issue. I leave it on 24/7 and the central air conditioning at home cant keep up with the heat my box generates. :biggrin:

Buy new CPU paste, a new CPU coolant block with gold or copper contacts, and thats about it... Thats what I have and my PC is always cool, always working 24/7. I find its best to make a front to back blow of air over the hard drives.

Oh also get a PSU with a massive fan- bigger = cooler and quieter.

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-[Better to be Honest than Kind]-

I gots my cooling all figured out. Its not so much the computer,
but the computer/monitor combination. I have a Thermaltake Silent
Boost heatsink and 5 Vantec Stealth 80mm case fans (3 intake, 2
exhaust) and a Thermaltake Butterfly 480Watt PSU.

If I wasnt putting in all my money in flying, I might invest in water cooling...

I might suggest that it is a bit of a waste to run 600+ wats of equipment 24/ At that rate you use 432 kWh per month which at my electricity rates would amount to $42 per month... $500 a year just to power your system is no joke. You could probably afford to buy a new video card every year if you didn't leave your computer on all the time.

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Some people are like slinkys...

They aren?t really good for anything, but you can't help but laugh when one tumbles down the stairs.

I turn mine off daily, but only to help lower the dust it acquires. I live in a farming community and dust is ever present.

I really dislike having to do so, because I am a believer that turning a machine off and on shortens its life span by putting temperature wear on the components.. I would prefer to leave them on 24/7 to maintain temperature at a constant level.. I dunno about your home, but in the winter its often much colder in my computer room as I do not heat it, or actually I chose not to waste heat in it since its not necessary.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

I hardly see how turning a computer off and on once a day can cause "temperature wear". Its not a sudden temperature change, when a computer is switched off it would cool gradually, and when you turn it on it would heat up gradually. 25 degrees C (about the difference between my CPU temp and room temp right now) over the course of 10 or so minutes wont affect plastic much, if at all, and metal even less. In fact, if your computer is being physically damaged by anything temperature-related, your problems are much more serious than turning it off/on. That actually struck me as strange when I went to america, many of you leave your computers on 24/7. I dont know anyone in Australia who does that without a good reason (ie. servers).

On computer problems... Not too long ago, my alternate hard drive somehow un-formatted itself magically. One day it just didnt show up in explorer. I checked disk management, it said the drive was unpartitioned. I didnt have anything on it anyway, so I formatted/partitioned it, and it works now. Strange tho.

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"If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?"

• My yr11 Economics teacher

Well, just recently (yesterday) my computer stopped booting. So
then I plugged in my hard drive, because one of the cables was loose,
and blammo I fixed it!

Always happens with IDE...

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-[Better to be Honest than Kind]-

my server broke in march, the power supply blew, and i think it blew the rest of the computer, as the mobo broke, the hd's broke and i was getting a BSOD on boot every time. i got a new pc, and my old pc became the server :biggrin: the old 750mhz duron needed an update, its was bit rubbishy :razz: the new wond is an athlon 2000+ :biggrin: i use it for netvis now :biggrin:

anyway, i lost 20gb of patches and stuff, off of a raid array of two 120gb (mirrored) disks, but nvm, its back up now :biggrin:

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I need a new sig

I turn mine off daily, but only to help lower the dust it acquires. I live in a farming community and dust is ever present.
I really dislike having to do so, because I am a believer that turning a machine off and on shortens its life span by putting temperature wear on the components

Erm. It is true that "s**t" is more likley to happen durring a boot or shut down, but tempurature isn't why.

One day my HDD decided to try out Sepuku. It didn't have a knife handy (or a towel for that matter) so it decided to stop spinning.

symptoms (for future reference to a possible solution)

*Hard Drive Not Spinning
*Bios Not Finding HDD at Boot
*Yelling, Screaming, and Killing people feels like the next logical step

There's three possible solutions (at the very least to retrieve your data)

Try First:
Problem: The discs are stuck

Solution: Shake the drive like a British nanny! Don't hit it against anything, but rotate it in your hand twisting back and forth, HARD. It should free up the discs.

Try Second:
(My) Problem: See if other head settings will work (if your drive has the options)
If this is the case, then either the logic board has damage somewhere or became mis-aligned somehow.

Solution: Find an identical HDD (and I do mean IDENTICAL) and swap the logic boards (Requires a torx-8 screw head). Immediately buy a new HDD and either make a image of your current drive (NOT through Nero or something, but Ghost or Drive Image) and pop in the new drive install the image. OR Install whatever OS, slave the old drive and copy the files you want to keep.

If you're lucky it's still within the warranty period and taking the logic board off doesn't void the warranty (since there's no way for them to tell) and you may be able to get a replacement AND keep your data.

Try Last:

The only other option is to have your data professionally retrieved. Or, you could, somehow, get an identical HDD and swap the physical discs (not recommended) I doubt it would work in general though. But if you have a 'clean room' and no way to damage the discs (or heads for that matter) go for it!

There are two other possible problems that can occur.

The disc head's get misaligned somehow and grind into the discs:

You have to toss the HDD. There's no saving it, unless you want to spend thousands of dollars (which may not work).

The discs just funk up. (Common with Fujitsu drives, in fact, those are the only drives where I've seen the discs just stop saving, most other drives have enough replacement cylinders.)
Toss the HDD, again. There's no coming back (unless you have thousands of dollars).

So, hope this helps.

Oh and my drives pins became misaligned somehow. I re-aligned them and it works fine. I still need to replace the HDD though, just not to chance anything else happening.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

With regard to the heat issues: Yes repeatedly turning your computer will cause more wear on the components simply because of differing coefficients of thermal expansion for the materials involved. However, I highly doubt that you will own a computer long enough for these effects to have any significant impact on the lifetime of your system. My guess is that your machine will be hopelessly outdated and collecting dust somewhere on a shelf long before you thermally fatigue any of it's components.

An additional point to consider is that if your computer is left at it's operating temperature for long periods of time, you are more likely to experience random entropy driven corruption of data. I don't know how often this sort of thing happens, but it is theoretically certain that some data is lost to random thermal bit switching. The rate of this process is exponentially dependent on temperature. I suspect that in the future as storage technology moves to using smaller and smaller features, the energy involved in writing a bit will approach the ambient thermal energy (kT), and we will have to start cooling our "hard drives" with ardor equal to that with which we now treat CPUs.

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Some people are like slinkys...

They aren?t really good for anything, but you can't help but laugh when one tumbles down the stairs.

Heres sort of a windows bork - nothing physically broke though, windoze is just lame

Every day when i leave for work, and before bed I put my system in
"standy mode" (winxp) so that I don't have to listen to the fans
blowing, and so I don't waste power needlessly.

One day, not too long ago, When I turn it on, it doesn't want to accept
my password. For whatever reason it just won't logon. I
must have typed the password at least 4 times letter by letter and
nothing. So finally I restarted it, praying to god that windows
hadn't flubbed my password or something, and on restart it works just
fine.... eerie...

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To get something to work, sometimes you just have to beat your head against the wall longer; the skin grows back, but the brick doesn't.

Source hates soup!

An additional point to consider is that if your computer is left at it's operating temperature for long periods of time, you are more likely to experience random entropy driven corruption of data. I don't know how often this sort of thing happens, but it is theoretically certain that some data is lost to random thermal bit switching. The rate of this process is exponentially dependent on temperature. I suspect that in the future as storage technology moves to using smaller and smaller features, the energy involved in writing a bit will approach the ambient thermal energy (kT), and we will have to start cooling our "hard drives" with ardor equal to that with which we now treat CPUs.

Thus, 'HDD formatted capacity' < 'HDD maximum capacity'.

Most common HDD failures are from software initialization and termination if there isn't anything physically wrong with the discs (booting and exiting Windows, for example)

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

i have a case which filters dust but it still accumulates dust inside
the machine. so my solution was to completely ground myself and take a
hoover to my machine...sounds a bit drastic i know but it is a small
hoover like a dirt devil but smaller than that.this cleaned my pc up
and made it look better on the inside.

My fans however i have 5 cooling fans on the case 2 120mm and the rest
80mm im not sure what that is in inches tho. i get a temperature of 35
degrees C on my cpu at most times. I also aquired recently a 650 w
powersupply. Although it was costly this comp wont need updated in the
near future. however my old computer was always breaking down so to
speak. firstly my psu blew as it was over life expectancy, the lens on
my cd drive cracked and couldnt read disks. a blade from a coolant fan
detatched and flew into my motherboard basically destroying the main
board its self.... that lead to this computer

I've taken the vacuum cleaner to my comp a couple of times. It seems to be fine.

Fans coming loose and destroying parts? Thats the stuff of nightmares... :/

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"If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?"

• My yr11 Economics teacher

My friend was trying to play World Of Warcraft, but after an update, it
game him an error saying something about check you AGP apeture size, I
know no one here plays WoW, but the solution was simply just a fresh
install of the new ATI drivers.

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Posting And You

i play wow ....i dont think its that bad tho when you actually get the
size that it is ingame its phenomal...i always sit and wonder how they
did it

My friend was trying to play World Of Warcraft, but after an update, it
game him an error saying something about check you AGP apeture size, I
know no one here plays WoW, but the solution was simply just a fresh
install of the new ATI drivers.

That's probably because the drivers reinitialized the amount of ram the Video card was sharing with system ram (which can easily be altered in BIOS) ... needless to say, there was/is nothing wrong with the drivers.

WoW probably needed more ram that didn't exist between the video card and the aperture size available.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

yea i needed to buy a new 512 mb card for my comp cuz it went so slow when i went into the ork capital city runs perf now

bumps

I noticed a couple questions asked recently, that should have went in here..

That damned 4 month auto-lock.. Sometimes its a pain.. Most times.... Its not.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

TBH I'd just like to see the "Recently" threads sunk once and for all.
If people have nothing to post, then they shouldn't. It seems a lot of
forum content is coming "just for the sake of it".

Having a general banter board full of "Recently.." threads is making it very dull and uninspiring

I tend to disagree but... If they stray off topic, lock'em.

So far, I feel all have a valid point for existing.

Perhaps, you feel disenchanted because my name is the author of most..

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The best things in life, aren't things.

No, i'm just sick of "Recently.." Threads :razz: They're swamping the board, it's becoming tedious to read.

Also I think what could be separate topics or works which deserve their
own thread are getting caught up within these "Recently" threads. I'd
justify keeping alive - Recently Watched, Read and Listened. The rest
seem tenuous at best.

I would make an argument for perhaps having a stickied "Tech Support"
thread (to replace Recently Borked), to database all PC problems
encountered, or hardware recommendations et al.

I did argue for a separate forum at one stage, but with the lack of problems over the past year or so it seems a moot point.

I don't know, Recently Played is good, otherwise we'll get 1 thread per game.

I agree with Gwil entirely, I find the majority of "recently" threads annoying. Its not necessarily the content of the thread that annoys me, but just the whole "recently" thing. The 3 Gwil mentioned and the recently played that Frency mentioned are probably the only particularly well named ones. I'd rather everything else avoided the tired naming convention.

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[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

I'm guilty of starting one or maybe 2 recently threads, but I really
only post in Watched, Played, and Listened. Sometimes read.

The recently threads that "are" the most popular just so happen to be the most on topic ones.. All were/are meant to be so.

The problem I see with them is.. There are to many.. Not to many for me, but to many for those who think there are. and

Those who begin another without searching. We end up with two recently threads with the same title.

If they stayed on topic, I feel we could have an infinite amount of them... Assuming we had an infinite amount of things happening.

I will prolly not create any more but, I will continue to use the ones relevant to what I want to post. IE recently found, recently borked and recently birthdayed...

Recently spooked will prolly fizzle out since its a poll. Polls rarely last more than a few days.

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The best things in life, aren't things.