Skip to content
- Explained to David a friend what he would need to implement long range WiFi from his shop to his house. I also picked up an all in one touch screen Acer. BTW, do not buy all in ones. They are too prone to problems and when the main board goes then you loose it all. Also, there’s no need for touch. I don’t think anyone even considers it as a day to day thing. Maybe once in a while. Besides, Microsoft isn’t any good at touch. They just shoehorn the shit in. I tested the Acer’s power adapter first. That worked. It measures the proper voltage output. The plug looked like it might fit my Samsung 27″ display that I picked up yesterday from the goodwill. Nope. I set up David’s Acer after that and turned it on. It lit up immediately. I watched the boot process and it indicates that it is Windows 8 and that it is attempting automatic repair. This typically means that the HDD has issues. David called just after that asking about an Ethernet cable. I explained that just about any Ethernet cable of the right length would work, though he might have to clip the end piece off to get it through the wall. And then he’d have to put the end piece back on once that was through. Finally I got into the bios on the acer and indicated to turn safe boot off (that’s Microsoft’s attempt to keep other oses off computers, which we believe is an attempt to lock out other operating systems. Once that happened I tried to boot with a Linux cd. Nope. I forgot something. I had to turn CSM on. Always remember, turn CSM on and secure boot off in order to boot from an alternative OS. The only reason we can is because the Linux community screamed bloody murder about the lock out by Microsoft.
- Windows Vista is still supported yet Microsoft seems to be leaving it as the red haired step child. A laptop that has Vista on it was brought in because it would not update to the service packs. Vista has SP1 and SP2. If he tried to update to SP1 then it would churn for a short while and claim the update was successful. Subsequent reboots resulted in prompts to update. This is an old issue. I have known about it for a long time. The update on Microsoft’s update server is old and doesn’t work. You have to manually download the update. Get that? You can’t use the update that Microsoft provides as part of the update process. You have to download a replacement update file and execute it locally. The other problem was that the machine had a partition issue that was quickly resolved and he has too little RAM. He needs 3gb of RAM for Vista to run happily yet he only has 1gb. Due to it being a laptop some of that RAM was set aside for video memory, leaving him with even less. Just a terrible design by Toshiba. No wonder they are going under.
- A young kid came in with his mom lugging an old desktop. I said I would check it out for him to see if it was beyond repair. I plugged in a power supply and ensured there was a video card and ram. He had 4 sticks. He claimed they were ddr4 ram. Rather they were DDR 400, which is actually PC3200 which is actually standard DDR ram. The 400 part indicates the speed of the RAM. Powering it on resulted in one long beep and 2 short beeps. Looking that up for that board it indicates that there’s a memory issue. I swapped the video card and pulled all RAM but one. I plugged it into a different slot. Same issue. After looking up the motherboard model it the specs indicate it was an old socket 939 motherboard. It had 8 SATA ports which would have been nice to use for something if the machine wasn’t suitable for modern gaming however the RAM issue turns out to be a defect in the motherboard probably some failed component due to the age of the unit. We talked about him getting a custom rig built. He stated his budget and then proceeded to state the features he wanted. The i7 was the deal breaker. For his budget that i7 was not going to be manageable. He showed me the machines that he had been looking at on amazon and I sort of broke that down for him. I’m not sure he knows what he wants now. Later I was looking at laptop that I’m preparing for someone and found the video to be extra slow so I decided to look for a driver from the manufacturer. Turns out that even after a successful update to the drive the system Windows 8.1 still is using the Microsoft basic video driver. Not good.