The Computer Thread

Depends on what's wrong and how good your service center is.

If you take it to a major retailer with a service center, then you can expect a couple of weeks turnaround as they may have to send it off to a centralized repair facility.

If you can find a local mom-and-pop shop (they're rapidly dying but you might get lucky), you will probably get both faster and cheaper service, although they may not be able to repair all models.

In both cases it depends on what the problem actually is. If it's just dust, they should be able to clean it and have it back to you fairly quickly. If you have a hard drive failure imminent, then it'll be a bit more intensive.

edited 3rd Apr '15 6:57:40 AM by Fighteer

It's probably best to mention that it doesn't click constantly. It's more of a once-in-a-while thing.

So Stylish allows you to put placeholder values in your userstyles to implement style options managed through the add-on's menu. I'm gonna have to experiment with this~

Edit: Oh wait, that's just for installing via Userstyles.org, it doesn't allow you to change them in the add-on itself. Dammit.

edited 3rd Apr '15 11:19:44 AM by Sixthhokage1

Well something just happened.

I leave my computer for about 5 minutes and I come back to find my screen is this shade of green. Tried resetting it and turning the monitor on and off again but nothing changed.

How fucked am I?

Check the cables and everything. Other than that I have a vague memory of an old monitor doing the same thing and never working again, but it was years ago so that might not me accurate.

I've been having issues with my wireless recently. My Motorola Surfboard Cable Router has been acting up. Occasionally it will reset the connection completely. Typically, these happen sometime around midnight, so I'm not sure whether to blame old age (I've had the thing for a few years) or if it is actually my ISP (Earthlink) and issues with them.

Is there anyway to test whether it's my router or my ISP?

Do you have a separate cable modem and router or is it an all-in-one box? If you have separate devices, the simplest way is to take the router out of the loop and connect your PC directly to the modem with an Ethernet cable. If the problems persist, then it's either the modem or the ISP. If the problems go away, it's the router.

If you have an all-in-one deal, then that won't help. There are a few diagnostic steps that might still work, though. One is to conduct traceroutes during periods of high latency or signal loss. ^note Open a command prompt (Windows-R, "cmd"), then type "tracert microsoft.com". Wait for it to complete. The first hop will either be your router or your cable modem, depending on your setup. It'll be in the 192.168.x.x range. If it's showing unavailable, then you've got a local problem.

The second hop will be your ISP's local network hub. If the signal is stopping there, then either the modem isn't getting a good signal or the ISP's local lines are messed up. If you're getting good latency to the local hub, but high latency or no connection past that point, then it's a problem somewhere in the ISP or its upstream provider.

I've had recurring issues with my connection and it's seemingly a case of saturated upstream on the ISP's end. They don't have enough capacity to asymmetrically serve the content being sent to them, as opposed to coming from them, and the result is that everything bogs down.

edited 7th Apr '15 7:54:28 AM by Fighteer

This is very satisfying to me:

The first commit of Git, stored in Git.

It's been self-hosting since almost the start. Helps that it started with a solid data structure design before the programming was considered.

Solved it, just had to give the computer a nice kick.

Good ol Percussive Maintenance

just finished setting up a few new monitors◊; now to order a mount so I can fit them all on the desk in landscape and upgrade my computer so I can run them at full capacity.

Side note 4K is awesome.

What in the world would you use all that real-estate for? And goddamn do I sometimes regret having a family and thus not enough disposable income to do something similar.

edited 7th Apr '15 5:47:38 PM by Fighteer

Absolutely no clue at the moment. I'm sure I'll find something. My old set up was 3x 1920*1080 so I'll probably just end up using them the same way just at higher resolution and larger sizes.

The main uses I could think of for that much screen space are digital art/image editing and video production.

I don't know: the problem with fusing three screens together is the giant black bars running through the image.

This is true. I guess it's good for uber-multitasking.

HP Envy, Windows 8: My Caps Lock LED alternates between flashing about once every second and not lighting up at all. In both cases, there's a brief flash on the button whenever I press the key, but it doesn't stick. Unfortunately, 9/10 of the other people who have this issue have a different problem entirely (they're unable to boot their computer up at all). Mine still works perfectly, it's just the light is messed up.

If it means anything, I just had my keyboard replaced about a week ago.

edited 8th Apr '15 8:05:32 AM by Midna

"If it means anything"... I'm tempted to chuckle here. That is the obvious causative event; it's probably wired wrong, or the key or LED is faulty.

Does your caps lock work properly despite the status of the indicator LED, or do you have to deal with your computer trying to make you TyPE wORDs lIkE THiS unintentionally?

edited 8th Apr '15 8:38:11 AM by Fighteer

It works perfectly other than the LED.

Oops accidentally trimmed this thread from the watch list. Good thing you reminded me to double check my manual. Slight but important difference in CPU model. There are two more I could get above that one that would work with it and they have very minor differences in performance for only a small cost variation. The graphics card is good but the power supply I was looking to get sold out and resupply is long in coming so now I am hunting for one that doesn't break the bank.

Well never mind found a solution on the lennovo forum. Some guy found one off the list that works with it. Got the last one in stock. The power supplies are far more scarce for this box then anything else. Many of the manual listed parts for power supplies above 300 can't be found anymore for some reason.

The CPU is next. I have to decide if I want to save money or bite the bullet and keep the box alive longer with a better CPU that is on the list.

The graphics card is a gimme.

edited 9th Apr '15 1:41:15 AM by TuefelHundenIV

I'm having a probelm I'm having trouble solving. I'm infrequently getting random audio ads playing on my computer, and not from any open program. It's happened with nothing running and even when I've gotten task manager open in time, there's no "apps"(windows 8) running. How can I track down the background process causing this?

Bad news: it may be spyware/adware running deep background. Or it's a browser hijacker that's gone awry.

Good News: run a good anti-malware program. That should clean it out.

I had a similar problem: a browser hijacker inserting random links into webpages. I though it was the pages at first until I tried to access DFAS (the miltary pay system) and found random links in that.

Joesolo, did you download any "freeware" or browser ad-ons?

Nothing new. I re-installed Overwolf recently, but nothing besides that.

run a malware remover and if possibly, find some anti-rootkit proggies....