Tech help?
Aug. 21st, 2009 10:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livMy laptop (three years old, running WinXP) is kinda dying. It has two big problems, both intermittent.
The first problem came up earlier in the year: the machine just spontaneously switches off. There will be days when it happens all the time, so I can't really even get through the startup process. Then there will be periods of several weeks when it seems to work perfectly fine, and there are some days when it's good for a few hours and then dies. It doesn't seem to be correlated with anything much; it's not a power issue as I keep the computer plugged in nearly all the time. And I don't think it's an overheating / length of use issue as it's as likely to happen when I first switch the computer on in the morning as when I've been using it for many hours. It seems a bit more frequent when I'm running hungry programs (Windows Media Player and various non-ancient games seem to be a particular culprit), but it does die quite often when I haven't even started any programs, or am just running a browser with a single window open.
This problem started when I was playing the PopCap game Bookworm Adventures, and seemed to be equally bad in the browser version or the downloaded version. So obviously I stopped playing that game, but then the spontaneous shutting down started happening anyway. I am not sure if this is just a coincidence of timing, or if the game actually damaged something.
The second problem only started since I brought the computer back to England (so maybe I damaged something in transit?) What happens is that on most occasions when I start the computer, the screen displays all weird. There's a smattering of red pixels all over the place, and all the graphics have little shadows, and some weird pink and cyan patterns appear in places like window title bars and the welcome screen. The way to fix it seems to be to change some setting (eg change the display properties, install updates which don't have anything evident to do with the display) and then restart. Simply restarting doesn't help, but changing unconnected things often does. Or it may just be coincidence, again, it may be that it starts up ok one time in three and is nothing to do with whether I change settings or not. It doesn't seem to be a physical problem with the screen as these odd effects are always part of the software-generated display, not just arbitrary pixels, and they change when the screen display changes.
On top of that, the computer has become grindingly slow. So I probably need to replace it, though I'm reluctant because really, I expect to get more than 3 years out of a computer! Anyone have any good recommendations for a new computer? I don't want the latest cutting edge thing, but at the same time I don't really want to buy second hand because that wouldn't be enough better than what I already have. (Reconditioned / ex-display / as-new would work too.) So probably new but low to middle range is what I'm looking for.
I may go for a desktop because I already have my Eee for portability, though these days the price differential between laptops and desktops isn't nearly as great as it used to be. Also I don't have a monitor, so that would swallow most of the saving. I am not sure about OS; I would definitely rather have Windows XP than Vista, but might be willing to consider a Linux based system. The problem is that it's hard to buy a computer that doesn't have Vista preinstalled. I don't know, my experiences with the Eee have led me to think that modern Linux is definitely competitive with Windows in terms of being user friendly, and I am not doing at all badly for software. The downside is that I would quite like to play some recent games, not necessarily the latest but say from the last five years. But that's not a high priority.
The first problem came up earlier in the year: the machine just spontaneously switches off. There will be days when it happens all the time, so I can't really even get through the startup process. Then there will be periods of several weeks when it seems to work perfectly fine, and there are some days when it's good for a few hours and then dies. It doesn't seem to be correlated with anything much; it's not a power issue as I keep the computer plugged in nearly all the time. And I don't think it's an overheating / length of use issue as it's as likely to happen when I first switch the computer on in the morning as when I've been using it for many hours. It seems a bit more frequent when I'm running hungry programs (Windows Media Player and various non-ancient games seem to be a particular culprit), but it does die quite often when I haven't even started any programs, or am just running a browser with a single window open.
This problem started when I was playing the PopCap game Bookworm Adventures, and seemed to be equally bad in the browser version or the downloaded version. So obviously I stopped playing that game, but then the spontaneous shutting down started happening anyway. I am not sure if this is just a coincidence of timing, or if the game actually damaged something.
The second problem only started since I brought the computer back to England (so maybe I damaged something in transit?) What happens is that on most occasions when I start the computer, the screen displays all weird. There's a smattering of red pixels all over the place, and all the graphics have little shadows, and some weird pink and cyan patterns appear in places like window title bars and the welcome screen. The way to fix it seems to be to change some setting (eg change the display properties, install updates which don't have anything evident to do with the display) and then restart. Simply restarting doesn't help, but changing unconnected things often does. Or it may just be coincidence, again, it may be that it starts up ok one time in three and is nothing to do with whether I change settings or not. It doesn't seem to be a physical problem with the screen as these odd effects are always part of the software-generated display, not just arbitrary pixels, and they change when the screen display changes.
On top of that, the computer has become grindingly slow. So I probably need to replace it, though I'm reluctant because really, I expect to get more than 3 years out of a computer! Anyone have any good recommendations for a new computer? I don't want the latest cutting edge thing, but at the same time I don't really want to buy second hand because that wouldn't be enough better than what I already have. (Reconditioned / ex-display / as-new would work too.) So probably new but low to middle range is what I'm looking for.
I may go for a desktop because I already have my Eee for portability, though these days the price differential between laptops and desktops isn't nearly as great as it used to be. Also I don't have a monitor, so that would swallow most of the saving. I am not sure about OS; I would definitely rather have Windows XP than Vista, but might be willing to consider a Linux based system. The problem is that it's hard to buy a computer that doesn't have Vista preinstalled. I don't know, my experiences with the Eee have led me to think that modern Linux is definitely competitive with Windows in terms of being user friendly, and I am not doing at all badly for software. The downside is that I would quite like to play some recent games, not necessarily the latest but say from the last five years. But that's not a high priority.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-21 12:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-21 03:20 pm (UTC)The general slowdown might be caused by the sort of cruft that Windows XP (and other OS's) tend to gather over time. Re-installing XP might help, if this is an option for you. You can also test whether Ubuntu or another Linux distribution (a lot of people really like Mint Linux for laptops) will work for you by booting from the Live CD before installing it.
If you decide to got with a desktop, I would recommend a basic system with as much processor+ram memory as you can afford. Since it is so hard to get systems with Linux installed I would wait until Windows 7 becomes available since it is getting rave reviews. (And I say this as a long-time Linux user.) On this side of the Atlantic, LCD monitors have become quite affordable.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-21 06:01 pm (UTC)I wouldn't necessarily rule out overheating with those symptoms: my personal experience of overheating computers has been primarily that once the cooling system has failed, they crash pretty quickly.
It's possible to do a bit better than speculation though! Most computers now have temperature sensors built in and although I don't know if XP includes anything to report the system temperature, you can certainly get software that does. In the last case of overheating I had there was a very clear spike in the graph just before everything went splat, so I could tell I a problem with cooling without even having to know what the system's temperature limits were.</p