General Computer Thread

[Gingerbread Demon]

I've been saving up to get one, and yeah, I've been on pins and needles with fingers crossed the whole while. Anyhoo, my video card is a Zotac Nvidia GT 740 with 1 GB of onboard memory. I realize 1 GB is rather small, but it was an absolutely fantastic deal when I bought it. I ended up buying it for less than half of what they sold for elsewhere, and all because the box had been opened.

That card is fine if you are not doing AAA games like Andromeda. I used to have a GTX 550 ti. that only had 2gig but oddly it coped well with games like GTA V and such. In hindsight I don't know why I tossed it for the R9 380 sometimes. It seemed to handle a lot of stuff.

 

[Random_Spock]

Speakers buzzing sometimes is EM being picked up by the sound card or such. Maybe something as simple as a loose connection somewhere near the audio jack or on the board picking up noise.

Maybe. I checked and it seems as if nothing is loose there. But now... Windows 10 is acting up O_O.

My Start menu is screwing up. I was listening to some music via Itunes and went and checked my Start menu to save something in Wordpad and this showed up after I was able to open it. I'm running sfc /scannow to make sure there's nothing corrupt on it and I'm going to be shutting down Explorer and rebooting it to see if it helps any.

I HATE Windows 10 with a passion right now. I'm not able to reinstall it from scratch myself. So if it gets to that point, I'm screwed.

 

[Amaris]

That card is fine if you are not doing AAA games like Andromeda. I used to have a GTX 550 ti. that only had 2gig but oddly it coped well with games like GTA V and such. In hindsight I don't know why I tossed it for the R9 380 sometimes. It seemed to handle a lot of stuff.

Oh, don't underestimate her. I play GTA V on high settings just fine, along with Elite: Dangerous, which even demands a Quad-Core processor, but I have an i3. The card's a lot more powerful than she lets on.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Maybe. I checked and it seems as if nothing is loose there. But now... Windows 10 is acting up O_O.

My Start menu is screwing up. I was listening to some music via Itunes and went and checked my Start menu to save something in Wordpad and this showed up after I was able to open it. I'm running sfc /scannow to make sure there's nothing corrupt on it and I'm going to be shutting down Explorer and rebooting it to see if it helps any.

I HATE Windows 10 with a passion right now. I'm not able to reinstall it from scratch myself. So if it gets to that point, I'm screwed.

Those blank white boxes, it almost looks like you could have some kind of video issue as well. Did you do the usual stuff of checking for the latest drivers and such? That doesn't look right at all.

 

[Santaman]

After that much troubles I would put Windows 10 out of its misery and install either 7 or 8.1.. the latter you can configure with classic shell to look like Win7, XP or even Win2K.

I found an internal 56K modem, installed it in the ancient Athlon and I even found the drivers for it..

 

[Amaris]

After that much troubles I would put Windows 10 out of its misery and install either 7 or 8.1.. the latter you can configure with classic shell to look like Win7, XP or even Win2K.

I found an internal 56K modem, installed it in the ancient Athlon and I even found the drivers for it..

The computer I run Linux Mint 18 on is an Athlon system. Works smooth, and sprightly, it does.

 

[Bagofmostlywatr]

That's not bad going. How much memory is in it? I found my i3 desktop could be slow on Mint 18 with 2gb, but that might have just been Chrome's fault.

 

[Amaris]

That's not bad going. How much memory is in it? I found my i3 desktop could be slow on Mint 18 with 2gb, but that might have just been Chrome's fault.

The Athlon system? 3 GB.

 

[Santaman]

Depends on what generation of Athlon you're talking about, the oldest I use are socket 939 DDR1 machines with 1-2 gb, one is in storage the 2 Gb one runs Linux Mint 18.x its a single core Athlon 64 3500+ and runs at 2.2Ghz, this is not a fast machine but it can do the whole simple browsing and text editing stuff and the like.
I should maybe install Win2K on it which is my favorite M$ OS..
Then there are two Athlon 64x2 machines dual cores, 2.3 and 2.5Ghz, also on Mint 18, these are faster and run far smoother, also they've got 4gb RAM which helps a lot and the final Athlon is a AM1 Athlon 5350 which is a modern quad core with 8Gb DDR3 running 2.05Ghz

I've got one older AMD machine, a socket A 32 bit Thoroughbred Sempron 2600+ which runs win2K that chips is kinda the same as later era Athlons I always confuse the two since I've got an Athlon 2600+ chip in storage with a late era Asus Socket A board..
I don't use 32 bit machines anymore except for nostalgic purposes..

 

[Random_Spock]

Those blank white boxes, it almost looks like you could have some kind of video issue as well. Did you do the usual stuff of checking for the latest drivers and such? That doesn't look right at all.

Yea everything is up to date. Once I restarted Windows Explorer it fixed that issue.

And now I looked into the error console. Not too thrilled with what I came across.

And screw this...

svchost (2768) Unistore: A request to read from the file "C:\Users\Owner\AppData\Local\Comms\UnistoreDB\store.vol" at offset 7761920 (0x0000000000767000) for 4096 (0x00001000) bytes succeeded, but took an abnormally long time (16 seconds) to be serviced by the OS. This problem is likely due to faulty hardware. Please contact your hardware vendor for further assistance diagnosing the problem.

ESENT 507


Really Microsoft? I'm not made of money. I did change the amount of bytes before... from 4096 due to an issue, so I'm wondering if that's a part of it. But damn, I'm tired of this.

 

[Santaman]

M$ just dished out another patch so maybe that will help..

 

[Marc]

M$ just dished out another patch so maybe that will help..

or there could be a hardware error as the log message notes.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

If it's anything like game developers when you get a patch they fix one issue but break other stuff.

 

[Santaman]

Eh.. you do realise that usually it takes M$ one year at least to fix an OS enough that it can be called usable?

 

[Amaris]

Got my new 600 watt power supply, installed it, everything's running smooth as silk. System seems a little sprightlier, too. Probably because everything is getting enough power.

 

[Random_Spock]

or there could be a hardware error as the log message notes.

Yea I checked up on it and it seems as if it might be related to the drive. The error. Meaning it's running out of room. I'm around 190 gb or so on my end, on a 466 gb drive (500 gb). Ugh. What I give to have a larger drive. Well guess it's better than something more serious. Stilll keeping an eye on it though.

 

[Amaris]

Yea I checked up on it and it seems as if it might be related to the drive. The error. Meaning it's running out of room. I'm around 190 gb or so on my end, on a 466 gb drive (500 gb). Ugh. What I give to have a larger drive. Well guess it's better than something more serious. Stilll keeping an eye on it though.

I wish I would have known about that a few weeks ago. I bought a 2 TB drive, and gave away the 1 TB SATA drive it replaced. I would have gladly given it to you.
Speaking of upgrades, in addition to the power supply, I can now upgrade my video card. I just ordered a ZoTAC Nvidia GTX 1050. I'm a huge fan of ZoTAC, and found a massive deal I couldn't pass up.

 

[Random_Spock]

I wish I would have known about that a few weeks ago. I bought a 2 TB drive, and gave away the 1 TB SATA drive it replaced. I would have gladly given it to you.
Speaking of upgrades, in addition to the power supply, I can now upgrade my video card. I just ordered a ZoTAC Nvidia GTX 1050. I'm a huge fan of ZoTAC, and found a massive deal I couldn't pass up.

Thanks. I wish I knew about it earlier too. I noticed that it's been low for a bit and have been deleting what I can, but the errors were really something to see. Looks like it can't handle Mail right now (not that it is important, since I check that kind of thing online).

It's mainly those dang Windows updates that eat up the space a lot of times. Last one was around 10 gb or so. I'm working deleting one game I got done with, but it's not really a big one. And I'm not deleting any videos, a lot of those are stuff that I'm not able to find again.

And I think I know what gave me another issue. I changed the size of the cache awhile back to around 7000 mbs, not knowing at the time that it's connected to the virtual ram and not the HDD. I only have 4 gb of that.

taskhostw (3640) WebCacheLocal: The shadow header page of file C:\Users\Owner\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WebCache\V01.chk was damaged. The primary header page (4096 bytes) was used instead.

ESENT 472

Pretty sure that might have been what caused the issue there. Changed it from that size down to around 2000 mbs. Hopefully that helps.

And I think this might be related:

svchost (800) A significant portion of the database buffer cache has been written out to the system paging file. This may result in severe performance degradation.
See help link for complete details of possible causes.
Previous cache residency state: 100% (3915 out of 3915 buffers) (2656 seconds ago)
Current cache residency state: 13% (890 out of 6577 buffers)
Current cache size vs. target: 100% (25.934 / 25.887 MBs)
Physical Memory / RAM size: 3562.898 MBs

 

[Marc]

It's mainly those dang Windows updates that eat up the space a lot of times. Last one was around 10 gb or so. I'm working deleting one game I got done with, but it's not really a big one. And I'm not deleting any videos, a lot of those are stuff that I'm not able to find again.

I very much doubt there would be 10GB windows update given that complete installer for the OS is not even that big (the iso image for the build 1703 Creators Update was 3.5GB).

Secondly disk cleanup is your friend. Make sure you click the option to clean up system files. It will go through an remove old windows installs, the old installers, unneeded update files, clean out temporary files etc etc.

 

[Random_Spock]

I very much doubt there would be 10GB windows update given that complete installer for the OS is not even that big (the iso image for the build 1703 Creators Update was 3.5GB).

Secondly disk cleanup is your friend. Make sure you click the option to clean up system files. It will go through an remove old windows installs, the old installers, unneeded update files, clean out temporary files etc etc.

Ah. Haven't done that in a bit, since I don't want it to remove stuff that I don't want it to. Is there anyway to do so that won't affect files that you don't want removed?