Random Technology Questions

[Crokey]

My PC has been making a really grating high-pitched noise, first for only a minute or so while it's booting but now it's not really going away unless I move my case a bit. I took of the side panel and the sound seems to be coming straight from the PSU.

Should I replace it ASAP and stay the hell away from my computer in the meantime, or is this not really much of a problem aside from being annoying as hell? I fear it's on its last legs (the unit is really old, high-quality but old) and I don't want to risk it taking out any hardware if this is a sign of it dying.

This choice would be entirely yours if you are comfortable about doing it. But first off, when was the last time you cleaned it out as PSU's can get get extremely dusty on the inside? Get yourself a compressed air duster and poke the nozzle into the holes etc and give it good blow out (if you've not used one before, don't turn it upside down when using it)

 

Now this is when the choice if yours, if that doesn't do it, then open the thing up and give it even more thorough blow out, and even use a brush to get the more caked on dust loosened up (you'd be surprised how much a PSU fan can compact dust). I would recommend using small make-up brushes as they are softer and won't cause abrasions.

 

As the noise tends to stop after short while, it sounds like dust and debris has settled once your machine has turned off and then when you start it up the fans are scraping on this until it's been pushed aside a little bit, which is when the noise stops. Plus the benefit of this is that it keeps everything clean and makes things work more efficiently.

[Reformed Squid]

Thanks for the advice, I've cleaned my computer out with compressed air before but not the power supply. Though this sounds more like coil whine more than anything and the sound has been lasting longer, I'll try spraying it out. From the small holes in the power supply I can tell it's very dusty.

Edited December 2, 2015 by Cloudee

[Sombra]

Also if you open the PSU don't touch any sh*t inside there. Infact google how to drain the PSU before you open it since it's better to be safe than sorry

[GTA3Rockstar]

Is there anyway to create a folder after highlighting items, right click and Move To: New Folder ? There is only a Compressed Folder option and can't find anyway to do it.

 

Instead of right click, New Folder, name it and then drag everything into it.

[Sombra]

Is there anyway to exclude a program from Winkey+D? I like to be able to skip to desktop real quick but then that obviously minimizes IRC/Foobar/Etc on my second screen.

[Crokey]

Is there anyway to exclude a program from Winkey+D? I like to be able to skip to desktop real quick but then that obviously minimizes IRC/Foobar/Etc on my second screen.

Nope, the only other thing you could do it is to setup your Alt+TAB to quickly change between one window and the other, as in have it next in line...

 

PS It's probably best to have your other window bigger than your porn window

[Sombra]

No it's not porn I would just CTRL+W that, just when you've been on the PC a few hours in Photoshop/Vegas, opening project files and so forth it takes forever to get back to the desktop

[friendly luggage]

How can I replace paint with paint.net when I use edit? Nothing found so far in Windows or default apps. On my old install of Windows it just worked.

[Sombra]

http://www.tekrevue.com/tip/windows-right-click-edit-photoshop-instead-of-ms-paint/

 

follow that but point registry to paint.net

[Flachbau]

I tried to install Windows 8 on this extra drive I had. It had Ubuntu on it previously, so I'm not sure if it screwed everything up. Basically, Windows tells me that it can't be installed on this drive. Never had this problem before. It's a Toshiba MK3265GSX ATA drive.. Apparently it's "online", but I can't initialize it so that I could convert it to MBR format, which is what a lot of sites are suggesting.

 

 

Is the damn thing dead or nah? Or is it just a very simple problem with an easy fix? I can't tell either way.

[Sombra]

right click it and format it/make it active then try

 

if its unallocated thats prolly why windows wont let you install

[Flachbau]

I tried that, here's what happens:

 

When I right click the far left portion, I get these options

 

 

When I right click the right portion:

 

 

Here's what pops up when I first open Disk Management:

 

 

and when I click okay, after about 10-15 seconds:

 

[Crokey]

Usually CRC error is a physical error on a drive, however, I have known a loose connection or it not being set up right in the BIOS to create a false report.

 

Try swapping to a different SATA port and going into your BIOS to check if it's picked it up right and then try it again in Disk Management.

[Sombra]

ye CRC usually means it's f*cked, I found that out when I was 14 and thought trying to connect a drives molex power while the system was running was a good idea.

 

As Crokey said I'd probably reseat the sata data/power cable, try another port or since you have Ubuntu knowledge make a live USB stick of Ubuntu and try and format the drive from in there.

[Flachbau]

I tried it in every SATA port I have, it never worked. Doesn't matter now, I'm installing Windows on another drive I had laying around. Thanks for your help though, lads.

 

So I can safely assume the drive is f*cked, right?

[Sombra]

Pretty much, SATA is generally just plug and play (atleast in my experience) but SATA drives are piss cheap these days or even better if you have an old Sky box, Personal Video Recorder or something along those lines they usually use SATA drives; tonight I grabbed a 160GB WD Green out of an old Freeview box I haven't used in years and I'm pretty sure the old Sky HD box sitting downstairs has a 500GB Seagate Pipeline in it, so I'm going to pop that open in the morning and see if it is.

[gajrajgchouhan]

Why my 32 GB pen drive only has 29 GB space ?

[Miro]

Is it possible to attach a separate Keyboard and Monitor to a Laptop? So as to work with another keyboard and to see on a different Monitor but using the engine of the Laptop.

Also, are there any kind of Monitors that protect your eyes more than others? And how can I figure out how protective my current Laptop screen is towards my eyes?

[Flachbau]

It should be possible. Depends on the connections your laptop offers.

[Sombra]

Why my 32 GB pen drive only has 29 GB space ?

 

theres a difference between the way sizes are advertised on memory drives and the way the PC reads them. pc reads them in binary so 1 bit is only 0.125 bytes hence the seemingly missing space. thats a bad explaination so either google bit/byte difference or sivis or someone can explain them.

 

 

Is it possible to attach a separate Keyboard and Monitor to a Laptop? So as to work with another keyboard and to see on a different Monitor but using the engine of the Laptop.

Also, are there any kind of Monitors that protect your eyes more than others? And how can I figure out how protective my current Laptop screen is towards my eyes?

 

 

aslong as the laptop has a vgi/hdmi/some display port and available usb ports then yeah. just plug the monitor in and go to display settings and set it as primary output. my dell laptop screen died years back so i plugged in an old monitor and used fn+f5 to put display to monitor. keyboard/mouse should just be plug and play.

Edited December 13, 2015 by Blaze

[Igor Bogdanoff]

Why my 32 GB pen drive only has 29 GB space ?

IIRC it's because of way counting kilo, mega etc. Normaly kilo is 1000 mega is 1 000 000 etc. But in IT technologies it's kilo is 1024, mega is 1 048 576 etc. There was attempt to change it but it quiet failed. Ofc companies use the other way than they should in saying much can your drive hold datas.

Edited December 13, 2015 by Tomasak

[Sombra]

ye companies use metric computers use binary hence why a 200gb hard drive will only show 186gb

 

f*ckin gg companies

[DEALUX]

Why am I getting poor performance in Firefox on a 4 core CPU when I have multiple tabs open (especially containing sites like gta.wikia.com which are full of ads)? It seems that CPU usage doesn't go above 25% for Firefox which would indicate that really only one core is used but I have no idea whether that is the case. I also know that Chrome has separate processes for each tab which would indicate that it does use multiple cores\threads. The only problem is that I don't like the oversimplified interface of Chrome and there's a bunch of features that Firefox has that I don't want to give up by switching to Chrome.

 

Does Firefox just suck as a browser due to limited or no support for multithreading\multiple cores or am I the only one complaining here?

[Sombra]

Install Adblock? Or in Task Manager go to Processes, right click Firefox, choose Set Affinity and if all four aren't selected then pick those. That being said I only got a dual core/4gb RAM and it's currently roughly at around 50 CPU usage and 667000 memory and it's fine for me.

 

I'm pretty sure Firefox Nightly has support for multi processes too so maybe try that.

Edited December 13, 2015 by Blaze

[DEALUX]

The Affinity setting is fine. I basically opened a bunch of links\pages from this page: http://gta.wikia.com/wiki/100%25_Completion_in_GTA_V

 

Firefox has a tendency to freeze when I open a page on gta.wikia.com while the content is loading. I don't know why. f*ck. I just opened a bunch of tabs with content from gta.wikia and no freezing occurs. Chrome is blazing fast.

[Sombra]

I'm gonna guess it's from GTAWiki having those must watch videos on every page so every time you open a new page Firefox has to load 5 flash videos which once you start opening 10/15/20 mission pages etc it quickly starts eating up memory plus Flash/Firefox arent the best combo.

 

Opened 20 of them in the background myself and it lagged a little while typing this If you don't watch those you could try blocking Flash on GTAWiki.

Edited December 13, 2015 by Blaze

[DEALUX]

Yeah. I've always suspected Flash as one of the causes of Firefox crashes and it seemed to be the cause on several occasions. I kinda wish websites stopped using it altogether.

[gajrajgchouhan]

 

Why my 32 GB pen drive only has 29 GB space ?

IIRC it's because of way counting kilo, mega etc. Normaly kilo is 1000 mega is 1 000 000 etc. But in IT technologies it's kilo is 1024, mega is 1 048 576 etc. There was attempt to change it but it quiet failed. Ofc companies use the other way than they should in saying much can your drive hold datas.So which method does the companies use ? "Kilo is 1000" method or "Kilo is 1024" method ?

[GTA3Rockstar]

Since Firefox 43 came out, my Oldbar addon has been wacky.

If I type something into the URL bar, this line appears:

 

When before, it would look like this:

 

 

 

Basically, it seems to show the script instead of the old version.

 

Anyone know how to change it? I like the old style better than the new, so Oldbar is a must.

[Sombra]

Idk sh*t about oldbar but there's a Firefox addon called Classic Theme Restorer that lets you do alot of customizing/change UI elements back to older ones so maybe that's something you could try