PC Tech Talk

[StarsMine]

i thought that was supposed to fix red-rings o' death

well thats because the oven trick does the same thing to both, reseats the soder, thats what causes the RROD and some burnt out GPUs.

[acolyte_to_jippity]

hmmm, instead of the oven trick though (could warp your case if done wrong) i'd just do the towel one. wrap your 360 in heavy towels, turn on for an hour, turn off, let cool, try now.

[yours' truely]

OK, here's my bag of tricks.

I know a bit about computers, enough to build and maintain my own rig. Other than that I do get a bit clueless with the software aspect, but I do know that google is a great help. Also, I read a lot about pc's.

MaximumPC This is where I learned the basics. Just got a subscriptions and read every article through out the year. Now I just periodically check the site for any interesting news.

NeoWin.Net Wonderful site. It's a tech site that features a pretty specific news feed and the forums are very active and full of people with lots of knowledge. Also, with the active community, if you post a question, you will get a constructive response very quickly. In addition, the forums are also super detailed with specific channels, and the search engine is great to use b/c if you have a problem then most likely it's been addressed before and there's already an extensive thread or two on it already.

TomsHardwareSimilar to neowin with it's purpose, but tomsharware is much more indepth and actually does really informative articles, walkthroughs and reviews. Hard to navigate, imo, but if you get time, just get lost on it and you will learn something new.

NewEgg Net based Electronic store. You can buy anything with computer related and even get OEM products. Normally it will have some kind of steller deal once in a while but the biggest thing I use it for is the reviews of the products. When I go to look for a new purchase, I first find the items I may be interested in and then read the customer Negative customer reviews just to see what may not be mentioned anywhere else.

I skimmed the previous posts and saw that a lot of people seem to prefer laptops. I'd recommend that anyone that wants to do some gaming, media editing or just hack a gibson or two, please get a home desktop. They're cheaper and normally out performs laptops. Of course, if you don't have the money to change or you think you need your laptop for school, I would suggets a netbook.

I also saw a small mention for free anti-virus/spyware. I recommend Windows Defender. In all the most recent reviews I've read, it's been rated the best of the free anti-virus' around in terms of protection and low resource usage. You can get it from the windows website, download center.

I've fallen a bit with keeping up with the gpu's, but I've been reading several articles and reviews that say that NVidia's been pretty shady with it's recent cards, so definately do your research on their products before commiting your money to a card. I do want to mention AMD's ATI cards. From what I've read they are really making huge improvements in their product that is on par with NVidia in many aspects. They are also often cheaper than NVidia.

Finally, I have to recommend, whenever you buy any computer product, either parts or a set, always register it with the company. I've had several parts replaced or upgraded by the manufacturer when their product has failed even 4 years after purchase.

[mag36]

OK, here's my bag of tricks.

Couldn't Agree more with everything you said. I read all those sites as well. One other thing i like about newegg is they will typically honor the manufacture warranty and you don't have to deal with alot of bullshit. Only one site I didnt know about was NeoWin.Net, Ill have to check them out sometime.

[mag36]

I bought this cooler (priced 61.99)back when i built my pc back in 3/24/09
Vigor Monsoon III LT

One of the fans began to fail little over month ago. It had a one year warranty, So I called up the manufacture. All i kept on getting was a voice recording saying they would call me back. well after 2 or 3 weeks of calling and never hearing from them. I went to Newegg and see they would RMA it. And they did!

Now they sent this one as a replacement. (69.99)
Nexus VCT-9000 120mm


They didn't ask me or anything and Im Not sure if i like it though. I cant find any good reviews on it yet.

[ZERO]

I have been subscribed to Maximum PC for 10 years.

[yours' truely]

I have been subscribed to Maximum PC for 10 years.

been waiting to get money set aside for that too. I'm trying to collect any old pc parts and pc mags so I can play with them.

[StarsMine]

Nividia released there quad sli drivers for the 4XX series of cards.
and look what happened http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=316295, new world record.
1500 watt of shit I need more money for my electricity bill.

[ZERO]

For the price of that entire card I can make a nice HTPC.

[anex]

I need your help guys.

I bought another sound system and I want to connect it to my computer.

1x 5.1 Optical slot
1x 5.1 Green sound slot

I want to play sound simultaneously though them. But realtek only lets me establish one "default device." Is there anyway to set it up so I can have two default devices?

EDIT: I got it working in some sort of gay way after downloading audio repeaters and other programs. All I had to do was tell REALTEK HD that I plugged in the same input twice.