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kloa posted:If I have a mobo with Intel vPro, can I update the BIOS without a CPU present? No
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Feb 13, 2018 18:16
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DizzyBum posted:Yeah, I don't think the panel is dead either. All the diagnostics are coming back normal from this thing. Literally everything is acting normal except for the fact that the panel is a black screen. Even the backlight still works. Try a new cable before anything else. It does sound like the capacitors could be going, though, especially with the progressive decline of the panel.
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Feb 13, 2018 18:37
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Naan Bread posted:I'm shipping my gaming PC from home that has been sat in a garage for over two years. What are some things I should be wary of before powering it on for the first time? After shipping it's good to re-seat everything (honestly it would be best to ship the graphics card disconnected, but I'm guessing it's too late for that). The bumps and vibrations while shipping can loosen cables and connectors. I doubt you'll have to do anything special besides that. If it boots up with the incorrect time or fails to keep the time you could replace the CMOS battery, but I'd wait to replace it until you know it's bad (they're usually a CR2032 button battery but check the battery type in it before purchasing anything). I boot up old PCs fairly regularly and usually they don't need much. Any dust inside will likely be from when it was last running and not new.
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Feb 13, 2018 18:43
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Rexxed posted:Try a new cable before anything else. It does sound like the capacitors could be going, though, especially with the progressive decline of the panel. That was one of the first things I tried. Actually, all the cables I used *seem* to be working fine (again, diagnostics looking good no matter what I try). I will likely try to open it up later to see what might be happening.
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Feb 13, 2018 19:24
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Yeah bad caps is a good bet. There are very few few ways that electronics can gradually fail and that's surely the most common one.
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Feb 13, 2018 23:24
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I opened up the monitor last night and tried to get a good look at some of the caps, but I didn't see anything that stood out to me. Nothing bulging or looking weird. And as far as I could see, all of the connectors looked good and snug. If I wanted to look at everything, I would have had to take a lot of extra time to disassemble it, so I gave up after a certain point. I'll go back to my 1920x1080 dual-monitor setup for now, and when I've got some more free time, I'll really open it up and look at all the boards. I don't know how test the components, though. Guess it's time to learn! I just wish I could find someone else that's had the exact same problem and wrote about it. The only thing I've been able to find has been Dell's general advice - "If you turn on the monitor and you don't see the self-test, the monitor is faulty. But we don't fix/repair our own monitors, we just replace them while they're still in warranty.  "
DizzyBum fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Feb 14, 2018 |
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Feb 14, 2018 16:38
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Recently built a PC for somebody (i5-8400, Macho Rev. B, and Asrock Z370M Pro4). It's the perfect combination of performance and quiet efficiency as far as I'm concerned but mostly due to the mainboard's "silent" profile for the fan. If I need to I can create my own custom profile too. I haven't seen any other modern mainboard's options, so my question is: Is this exclusively for the overclockable boards or do even the cheaper boards provide these options nowadays? I plan to buy another board when the cheaper coffe lake boards are out, but if this is exclusive to the 3xx boards I'll stick with them. Thanks.
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Feb 16, 2018 21:27
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lllllllllllllllllll posted:Recently built a PC for somebody (i5-8400, Macho Rev. B, and Asrock Z370M Pro4). It's the perfect combination of performance and quiet efficiency as far as I'm concerned but mostly due to the mainboard's "silent" profile for the fan. If I need to I can create my own custom profile too. I haven't seen any other modern mainboard's options, so my question is: Is this exclusively for the overclockable boards or do even the cheaper boards provide these options nowadays? I plan to buy another board when the cheaper coffe lake boards are out, but if this is exclusive to the 3xx boards I'll stick with them. Thanks.
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Feb 16, 2018 21:50
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Alereon posted:Pretty much any motherboard can tell the CPU fan to adjust its speed based on temperature. Where they differ is in whether additional fan headers are controllable, and if they can actually control the amount of power supplied for fans that don't support their own speed control. Good fan speed control is considered a premium feature. My Sandy Bridge board only has this simple option to set fan speed I think. If fan profiles nowadays are unique to z-boards I'll stick to those, even though I don't overclock. Thanks. 
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Feb 17, 2018 10:59
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What's the deal with old servers posted on ebay for what seems like extremely cheap? I am looking at Poweredge servers with dual Xeons and 64 GB of memory for $200 and I'm wondering what the catch is? I have to share a small workstation farm with several other people in my research group to run simulation software (it's all distributed and remote) and while this is on the low-end of our workstation specs, a few of these would significantly offset the computational load for me if there isn't anything weird going on and and I can just plug it in and install an OS. Power consumption isn't an issue because this won't be in my home.
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Feb 21, 2018 06:17
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IratelyBlank posted:What's the deal with old servers posted on ebay for what seems like extremely cheap? I am looking at Poweredge servers with dual Xeons and 64 GB of memory for $200 and I'm wondering what the catch is? I have to share a small workstation farm with several other people in my research group to run simulation software (it's all distributed and remote) and while this is on the low-end of our workstation specs, a few of these would significantly offset the computational load for me if there isn't anything weird going on and and I can just plug it in and install an OS. Power consumption isn't an issue because this won't be in my home. Usually they're just loud rackmount servers with first or second gen i7-equivalent xeons. There's a lot of good deals to be had there if you just want a lot of cores and ram and don't care about noise. There are some even older ones with core2quad equivalent xeons that aren't such a good deal because they use DDR2 and are a bit long in the tooth. The main things to check hardware wise is to look up the Xeon on wikipedia and compare it to others in its generation and check if you're getting enough RAM for dual or triple channel (whichever is available). Also check if the board can boot off SATA disks or if you need SAS drives. The other main things to check are that the seller has good feedback and that shipping costs won't kill the deal. You can also check natex.us for old servers. They remount old server boards in Phanteks full tower cases (great cases for $100) and sell them preconfigured, but they're a bit more expensive that way. They also have a lot of other server hardware. You can boot pretty much any of those servers and install windows or linux on them. Most are old enough that Windows 8 or 10 will have all of the drivers.
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Feb 21, 2018 06:27
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Say you aren't gonna game or even watch HD stuff or whatever and don't care about noise. Would one of those with a nice ssd provide a shockingly lighting fast desktop experience?
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Feb 21, 2018 11:02
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Hipster_Doofus posted:Say you aren't gonna game or even watch HD stuff or whatever and don't care about noise. Would one of those with a nice ssd provide a shockingly lighting fast desktop experience? No, they're not especially fast. They're basically the same speed as the equivalent i5 or i7 of their generation, but often they're lower clock speed although they can have more cores and more on die cache. They're fine for desktop use, but the fastest CPUs are the newest ones that have high clock speeds and the newest architecture. Xeon chips basically vary from desktop chips of the same generation in that most don't have integrated GPUs (but server boards have some on board graphics usually baked in), they support ECC Registered RAM, they have more cache, and they can come with more cores and lower speeds (more cores means more heat so you have to run slower). I think in the first gen stuff which fits LGA1366 sockets (as well as some higher pin coun sockets) the max is 6 cores, but 8+ cores showed up with second gen architectures in LGA2011. For a fast desktop experience on a budget I think any Dell i5 with 8gb of RAM would be a good deal. I picked up a scratch and dent optiplex 990 from the dell outlet a couple of years back with an i5-2500 for about $150. With 8gb of RAM and an SSD it feels snappy for just about everything short of gaming and it's been good for some gaming when I put a video card in it for a while as a secondary machine (I had to swap the power supply for GPU power cables). Since it's a couple of years later I'd imagine you could get a 3rd or 4th gen i5 for similar prices now if you look for their frequent sales. The main reason these older servers are a good deal is if you need a lot of CPU cores and/or RAM. If you run a lot of virtual machines or run other tasks that benefit from being paralleled or multi-threaded it's often a huge bargain to get a machine with a lot of cores and ram for a budget price. They're always on ebay because datacenters upgrade large amounts of them at once and the old units go to resellers/recyclers in bulk.
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Feb 21, 2018 12:34
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We buy them for work, they're perfect for our voicemail and gateway servers that are going to sit in a customers closet. For home use, think more of file servers or something like Plex, that again you can stick in a back room and run reliably for years
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Feb 21, 2018 14:55
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IratelyBlank posted:What's the deal with old servers posted on ebay for what seems like extremely cheap? I am looking at Poweredge servers with dual Xeons and 64 GB of memory for $200 and I'm wondering what the catch is? I have to share a small workstation farm with several other people in my research group to run simulation software (it's all distributed and remote) and while this is on the low-end of our workstation specs, a few of these would significantly offset the computational load for me if there isn't anything weird going on and and I can just plug it in and install an OS. Power consumption isn't an issue because this won't be in my home. There's no catch, they're just loud and use a decent amount of power, but that's to be expected. Since that's of no concern to you, buy away.
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Feb 21, 2018 15:09
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HalloKitty posted:There's no catch, they're just loud and use a decent amount of power, but that's to be expected. Since that's of no concern to you, buy away. I had one of the PowerEdge Xeons in my basement for a while as a personal server, and it did work great. However, you really can't overestimate the amount of noise and power draw. It always sounded like a jet engine starting up, and it drew around 400-500W (all the fans and 15K spinning rust.) It wasn't worth it to me to pay $20/month or so to keep it powered.
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Feb 21, 2018 20:13
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Is there a utility I can use to figure out how much power my PC is actually drawing?
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Feb 21, 2018 22:51
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There are meter sockets like https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00009MDBU/ that you can use to see how much you're drawing from the wall. Reading from the wall will give you the most accurate result; your PSU isn't 100% efficient and the efficiency will vary depending on the system load, so a software tool will probably not be able to account for that.
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Feb 21, 2018 23:29
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How can I tell exactly how many external displays (and at what resolution) a laptop will support when researching which one to buy? It's really frustrating this info isn't on the spec sheets I am finding and I suspect it's not as easy at just counting all the ports.
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Feb 22, 2018 09:55
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Chuu posted:How can I tell exactly how many external displays (and at what resolution) a laptop will support when researching which one to buy? It's really frustrating this info isn't on the spec sheets I am finding and I suspect it's not as easy at just counting all the ports. i have a brand new intel and a brand new nvidia card and i think the highest resolutions i can push are basically two 4k monitors worth, though I can divide that up probably about as many ways as I want I suspect most laptops you buy these days will be able to push 2x 4k monitors- i would google the specific laptops youre looking at with that question, or ask that specific question for specific laptop models in the laptop thread and somebody will definitely help you out there https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3552651 Worf fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Feb 22, 2018 |
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Feb 22, 2018 18:16
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Chuu posted:How can I tell exactly how many external displays (and at what resolution) a laptop will support when researching which one to buy? It's really frustrating this info isn't on the spec sheets I am finding and I suspect it's not as easy at just counting all the ports. Anything that has DisplayPort 1.2 or above should support multiple displays via either daisy-chaining (display has to be compatible) or a DP hub, allowing up to 3 devices on a single port.
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Feb 22, 2018 21:36
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Geoj posted:Anything that has DisplayPort 1.2 or above should support multiple displays via either daisy-chaining (display has to be compatible) or a DP hub, allowing up to 3 devices on a single port. My Lenovo Thinkcentre M900 Tiny at work freezes at the BIOS if I daisy-chain DP monitors.  Windows works fine (after some finagling) if I hot-plug them, but then next boot it's hosed. Not like I wanted more than 2 monitors anyway...
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Feb 22, 2018 22:42
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I always forget how to read Crystal Disk Info. Is there a good reference for that? IIRC the current/worst numbers are meaningless and you want to see all zeros (on some stuff) in the raw values? Or is that backwards? I don’t use it often enough to remember.
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Feb 25, 2018 21:39
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It conveniently and unmissably flags any values that are of concern.
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Feb 26, 2018 03:26
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DizzyBum posted:Cross-posting from the Monitor Megathread: Quoting myself from last week because I fixed the problem!  Someone on reddit suggested replacing the T-con board. I ordered a replacement off eBay and swapped out the board this morning, and it's working perfectly! No more black screen!
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Feb 27, 2018 18:02
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This is a weird one. I've got a device that writes data to an SD card, and has no networking or other remote access capability. I want to capture the device's output somewhere that I can access remotely. I have in my head something like an SD card-shaped plug on a cable that I can hook up to a computer or something, and capture the writes that would've been made to the SD card. Is this a thing that exists?
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Feb 27, 2018 23:12
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fatman1683 posted:This is a weird one. I've got a device that writes data to an SD card, and has no networking or other remote access capability. I want to capture the device's output somewhere that I can access remotely. I have in my head something like an SD card-shaped plug on a cable that I can hook up to a computer or something, and capture the writes that would've been made to the SD card. There are wifi enabled SD cards. The idea is that you would stick it in the camera and when you got within range of your home network, it would suck the pics off of it. No idea if they are still an active development or how they truly work, but that would prob be your best avenue if SD is your only connectivity
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Feb 27, 2018 23:20
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Fart.Bleed.Repeat. posted:There are wifi enabled SD cards. The idea is that you would stick it in the camera and when you got within range of your home network, it would suck the pics off of it. No idea if they are still an active development or how they truly work, but that would prob be your best avenue if SD is your only connectivity Thanks, this might be an option. Looks like there's a lot of variety in implementation so I'll have to do some digging. edit: Ok these are pretty lovely. Seems like the only one still actively manufactured is the Toshiba one, which creates its own (extremely short-range) wireless network and only runs for a few minutes at a time. There was a competitor called EyeFi, that could connect to any wireless network and even automatically upload to their cloud storage service, but apparently Toshiba 'licensed the technology', i.e. bought them out at some point. So that one was a non-starter. Any other suggestions? fatman1683 fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Feb 27, 2018 |
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Feb 27, 2018 23:40
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fatman1683 posted:This is a weird one. I've got a device that writes data to an SD card, and has no networking or other remote access capability. I want to capture the device's output somewhere that I can access remotely. I have in my head something like an SD card-shaped plug on a cable that I can hook up to a computer or something, and capture the writes that would've been made to the SD card. This short PDF describes the construction of one, it relies on having a microcontroller system that presents a FAT16 file system to the device the SD edge is plugged into to capture the information written to it: http://www.thinkmind.org/download.php?articleid=icds_2011_4_30_10048 This PDF of a powerpoint presentation describes a student's project to display near-real time images on a device with no network access but with an SD card reader, by using a microcontroller and connection to a computer to generate images and place them on a virtual file system for the devices to use (eg with digital picture frames, old cellphones, etc) https://webpages.uncc.edu/~jmconrad/ECGR6185-2008-01/notes/SD_CARD_DISPLAY_MICROCONTROLLER.pdf You will of course need a board like this to work from, since they properly run lines to an SD card-shaped connector with the proper pinout to interface with real devices: https://hackaday.io/project/6946-sd-card-emulator-lattice-xp
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Feb 28, 2018 02:48
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fishmech posted:This short PDF describes the construction of one, it relies on having a microcontroller system that presents a FAT16 file system to the device the SD edge is plugged into to capture the information written to it: Thanks! This is pretty awesome. I'm not sure I have the board-level chops to build this, but it's definitely interesting.
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Feb 28, 2018 03:19
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its pretty dry these days and im carrying a static charge more often than not. Every time I shock my metal case or metal keyboard I hear the device being plugged/unplugged sound. Everything is staying connected. Am I causing damage to my system? I assume everything is shielded or grounded.
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Feb 28, 2018 23:38
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I'm not sure if this is better suited towards the printer thread or here, but I have a Brother MFC-7860DW that I need to scan some documents. I remember that I was previously able to duplex scan from the feeder tray, but now it seems like that option is gone. I'm pretty lost, because its like 20 pages front and back that need to get scanned, and the options in the Brother utility just arent there.
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Mar 1, 2018 15:09
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KKKLIP ART posted:I'm not sure if this is better suited towards the printer thread or here, but I have a Brother MFC-7860DW that I need to scan some documents. I remember that I was previously able to duplex scan from the feeder tray, but now it seems like that option is gone. I'm pretty lost, because its like 20 pages front and back that need to get scanned, and the options in the Brother utility just arent there. If you can't get the printer itself to duplex feed, you can scan one side with the feeder, then plop them back in the feeder facing the other way and scan the other side. That will be in reverse order but software like NAPS2 can stitch it back together.
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Mar 1, 2018 17:07
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Is there a "software short questions that dont deserve their own thread" anywhere? I have a dumb excel question but I'm not seeing where to ask.
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Mar 2, 2018 01:53
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WHY BONER NOW posted:Is there a "software short questions that dont deserve their own thread" anywhere? I have a dumb excel question but I'm not seeing where to ask. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2779598
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Mar 2, 2018 03:39
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Perfect, thanks.
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Mar 2, 2018 08:15
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I'm going to be shopping for a used laptop soon. Does anyone besides Dell do the "genuine" bullshit with batteries and power supplies?
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Mar 3, 2018 01:38
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Hipster_Doofus posted:I'm going to be shopping for a used laptop soon. Does anyone besides Dell do the "genuine" bullshit with batteries and power supplies? What do you mean exactly? Also, you might want to ask in the Laptop Megathread
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Mar 3, 2018 01:55
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Hipster_Doofus posted:I'm going to be shopping for a used laptop soon. Does anyone besides Dell do the "genuine" bullshit with batteries and power supplies? hp definitely does but most of that stuff can be turned off by uninstalling the bloatware which you should be removing anyways
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Mar 3, 2018 06:37
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Hipster_Doofus posted:I'm going to be shopping for a used laptop soon. Does anyone besides Dell do the "genuine" bullshit with batteries and power supplies? There's usually a good reason not to use ebay special batteries and chargers anyway HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 16:09 on Mar 4, 2018 |
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Mar 3, 2018 08:12
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