The Computer Thread

Those cooling pads work by giving space for air to circulate, I guess?

They also have their own fans, so they orient themselves to somewhat "expose" the laptop's bottom more, as well as provide more intake for the fan inside the cooling pad.

Targus and Belkin made laptop cooling pads. The best ones angle the lappy so that hte keyboard is in a more natural position and have fans blowing air at the laptop.

Targus fans are a little weaker than Belkin's, but modern laptops don't run as hot as older ones. Belkin fans can pick up dust due to their fans being tornados (seriously, you can feel the breeze even with my laptop sitting on mine). Take apart the laptop and blow out the dust with canned air, you may have to do the same with a Belkin cooler pad as well.

Fans get dust, it's a fact of life.

The cooling pad I have access to doesn't have a fan but I'll take your advice and use that.

Okay, so I've been playing through the Dungeon Siege 1 expansion (finished the original a few months ago), only when I started it up today (after restarting my PC this morning), I'm getting horrible black flickering all over. It's worst in the menu, but even after I load my game there are still occasional black flickers once every few seconds. This was not happening before, it was working fine as recently as yesterday. I didn't change any settings.

I have a feeling I may have had a similar problem when I first tried playing the game, fixed it by putting some settings the right way, and then forgot all about it. In any case, I've just gone through and tried pretty much everything (setting bltonly=true, restarting my GPU driver, running in compatibility mode, running with explorer.exe turned off) and it hasn't worked. Any ideas?

EDIT: Playing in windowed mode stopped the flickering on the main menu, but then when I try to load my save, the entire game just crashes.

EDIT 2: Never mind, fixed it. I happened to notice that SpeedFan (which I'd turned on earlier to check my CPU temperature) was running in the taskbar, remembered that having it on had caused Total Annihilation to go flickery in the past, so I turned it off. After that, Dungeon Siege worked fine again. It seems that whatever graphical quirk Total Annihilation has that makes it flicker when SpeedFan is running, Dungeon Siege has the same thing or something similar.

I'll leave all the above text up, in case people googling the same problem in the future find this post.

edited 15th Feb '16 8:35:35 PM by Meklar

Okay, I gots UT2004 working with an ugly workaround, but it loads. Thank you Krieger22 for the Winamp link...I'd send you a cupcake but the baked goods over IP protocol is still in alpha...

Howevar:

Youtube crashes in Firefox for some reason. Pisses me off because youtube has teh hot videos I likes to watch.

Trying a workaround on Palemoon, I just need a youtube downloader (yes I download youtube vids, no I don't upload).

Anyone got a Windows 10 Youtube fix for Firefox?

Trying Quake 3 Arena. Are there Windows 10 workarounds I should know about?

Anyone?

edited 15th Feb '16 11:40:14 PM by TairaMai

Get Windows 7....huehuehue

Most articles I've read say that Quake 3 Arena should run just fine on Windows 10.

As to YouTube downloaders, I use VLC. It automatically uses the highest quality and saves to MP4 format automatically. The former may or may not be a good thing.

Youtube in Firefox has given me no issues, and I upgraded to 10 at launch. Might it be an issue with your addons/plugins/other browser settings?

Thanks Imma tryin' it later.

-_-

Entropy, I have a new laptop so I can't get Windows 7.

~* invokes the espers and spirits of the internet *~

MAY YOUR NEXT SERVING OF BALUT...NOT GO WELL WITH YOUR FAVORITE BEER!

edited 16th Feb '16 11:52:51 AM by TairaMai

Eh, by this point Firefox is a shadow of its former self, anyway. I've moved on to Palemoon (technically a Firefox fork), which adopted Goanna just recently making it snappier than Firefox has any right to be.

I don't actually eat balut. It's not like EVERYONE here eats it.

Ok I do not know if anyone else has this problem, but Chrome seems to really not like tropes on this site with massive amounts of text during the editing process. More specifically, if right click a misspelled word during editing to fix the spelling error, the page crashes. Luckily I can refresh the page and it retains my changes, but it seems to been happening to me for a while.

It's already been reported in Bugs.

So I got my Killer 1202 wireless network card installed. It does work as advertised, but the drivers seem to be actively fucking up Windows 10 functionality like the taskbar and shutting down.

And of course I'm short on time for troubleshooting due to the morons I'm not even sure why I bother keeping company with. At least their support replies fast.

Actually, taskbar issues are a universal Winx problem.

I feel like I have betrayed the free software movement....but I broke down and bought Cyberlink Power DVD...

...wait! Put down the plasma baton Stormtrooper!

I tired and tried to find an opensource Blu-Ray player...but nothing worked.

SO.... I gots Power DVD for...way too much...

But it works.

Now should I install my 10 year old copy for Wordperfect (because it prints USPS barcodes) or is there an open source program/add-on that prints Postal Barcodes?

I have a problem. My monitor suddenly got a blue tint. Apparently this means I need a new graphics card. Which I can't afford.

How do I fix this in the meantime?

EDIT: Nvm, turns out a cable was just loose. Whoops.

edited 20th Feb '16 5:04:17 AM by PhysicalStamina

To be fair, there are no legal opensource or freeware Blu Ray players.

Decided to dive into the world of mechanical keyboards, but since I couldn't exactly blow $120 or so on a super-fancy one, I decided to chance it and bought a Redragon USAS. So far, it's been surprisingly nice for something that came in at under $50 ($49, to be precise); it's really solid-feeling since it's made out of aluminum, the keys feel much better than my old Microsoft Comfort Curve 3000, and while they're not real Cherry switches, the Outemu blues in here are nice and tactile (and very clicky, moreso than the Cherry MX Blues). Seriously, how is something that's under $50 better-built than most of Razer's stuff (and Razer's Blackwidow TE costs almost twice as much!)?

Because Razers are overpriced.

Anyone know why a computer would be losing disk space without me downloading anything? I noticed that I lost a good 6GB last week despite permanently deleting every episode of anime I'd downloaded after I finished watching it. 1.5GB was lost to make a system restore point but even then that's still 4.5GB unaccounted for.

edited 20th Feb '16 10:33:07 PM by Chariot

Windows 10 is using your computer as a download point if you have it. Another issue is system restore (like you said), cache from your browsers, downloaded program files, updates of your programs, icons and thumbnails and windows updates regardless of the version you have.

Anyone have a way to print US postal service barcodes in Libre Office or Open Office?

Use Zint and import the image into your document file.

Will do! Thanks! Corel and MS Office are crazy $$$$....