Author Topic: My computers are dying!  (Read 1446 times)

GuyPerfect

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My computers are dying!
« on: January 13, 2010, 12:53:43 AM »
I am officially in need of a new computer. I have two, and now they're bordering the "unusable" territory. Electronic gadgets don't usually break down over time since they have no moving parts, but in the computer world, anything is possible!

The main computer was built in 2003 and has only had a few pices added since then. It's got a 1.8GHz Athlon XP in it, and the motherboard is even older than the processor. I've used it for everything since then. It's served me well all these years. But it's old, and things like City of Heroes run better on new, so it'd be better to get something new.

Recently, I noticed I had less available RAM than I thought I had. The computer was also restarting spontaneously for no apparent reason. I removed one of the three RAM sticks in the computer and there was no apparent change, except that it stopped rebooting. A couple months later, it started rebooting itself again, so I pulled another stick out. It is now stuck with 512MB of system memory and two dead slots, and I don't know how long that one's gonna last.

I bought a nice laptop a few years ago, and really lucked out on the deal. I told myself I would require a 64-bit AMD processor, an NVIDIA display adapter, and a $600 price tag. Friends and family thought I was nuts, but then one of them got an e-mail at the non-profit place where she works where, for one weekend only, HP was selling exactlly what I wanted to non-profit organizations. $600 later, I was happy.

It's a Compaq Presario V6000Z, which come to find out is notorious for having its Wi-Fi go bad. This is not a fault of the wireless adapter, however: it's a design flaw in the motherboard itself. Wi-Fi was intermittent up to about a year ago, when it puttered out completely.

Not too long after that, the hard drive on the laptop started to go bad. At the moment, I have 4GB on either end of the allocatable disk space not being used, and Windows is installed on the middle. It's working for now, but for how long, I don't know.

City of Heroes, while working okay on the main box, is now unusable due to either low memory or unpredictable reboots. So I need to use the laptop, which cannot connect to house internet. So I've got it plugged into the main box via Ethernet, and that's been good for a couple months.

I have the laptop's video output hooked up to the sweet monitor, since it has more screen real estate than the laptop's panel and it's much larger for the eyes to behold. I got back from an oil change today and fired up the monitor, to find it lacking in the red department. It works just fine hooked up to the main box, and the laptop's built-in panel shows colors just fine, and the cable is good, but the laptop's VGA output is not sending red anymore for whatever reason.

As I type this, I cannot see any difference between these two images:



Not sure exactly what my options are at this point, as I can either play CoH on the laptop's panel, or in cyanovision. I don't suppose any of you guys out there have money to spare, do ya? (-:

TonyV

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Re: My computers are dying!
« Reply #1 on: January 13, 2010, 06:13:53 PM »
A new motherboard for your main (i.e. not-laptop) machine should be relatively cheap.  What did you have in mind?