The Gaming Den

Stahlseele wrote:Depends.
What kind of System do you have to feed into the new screen?

One I update "as needed." The video card has HDMI out (2, if I remember correctly), as well as whatever caveman technology my current monitor uses. It should be 2-3 years old, but was pretty decent at the time.

I showed up to work this morning, and my computer monitor gave me the excellent news "no boot device found." The 3 options I was given (in addition to turn it off and back on again, which did nothing) were: try again, spend at least 30 minutes diagnosing everything, and boot options.

Boot options looked fine at first glance, but that's first thing in the morning, before coffee, on the first day after Daylight Savings time. It also showed a hard drive, which made me think "I don't know, how about you try to boot off the hard drive which you say exists?".

Diagnostics were fine, then I went back to bios setup. As an aside, I'm technical enough to know you need at least one boot device. Today I learned that puts me one step ahead of whatever dipshit designed the Bios. Somehow one of the updates had set boot options to "let Windows choose", then unchecked that option, leaving zero options for booting the computer, which the Bios was apparently happy with. Happy in that it allowed the change, and also that it didn't give any sort of warning or error message relating to "you have chosen to have fewer than one boot device, if you have problems booting, you might want to look into that."

*nods* sounds about right . .
Also, alla yall remember my fucked up "HTPC"?
It suddenly worked fine. For a week.
And now i am back to square one as it randomly powers up and shuts down as soon as it gets power -.-

Have windows 10, and every so often for reasons I'm not sure about, it'll decided to change from English Australia keyboard to English US keyboard. I think there's a shortcut I'm unaware of that I keep entering while writing things, not sure how to turn it off.

Thaluikhain wrote:Have windows 10, and every so often for reasons I'm not sure about, it'll decided to change from English Australia keyboard to English US keyboard. I think there's a shortcut I'm unaware of that I keep entering while writing things, not sure how to turn it off.

Probably command + space. Go to Region & Language and remove US English from the list.

so appearantly:
a.) just because it is an ATX-Standard PSU, does not mean it is standardized in length.
b.) i have now a new SFX-L PSU in the wonky HTPC . . let us see how this works.
c.) a problem i did not forsee . . a silent PC which is by now entirely passive cooled . . is kinda sorta hard to tell wether or not it is running still <.<

And . . now the problem has changed from the computer randomly starting and shutting down to . . the computer just randomly shutting down . .
I think i will salvage what is worth it and take a steel tipped boot to the rest of it <.<

My video card refuses to work on my laptop. I was thinking "fine, computers are modular and I'll swap out the part". Well, did you know that there's a shortage of video cards because of bitcoin assholes? (Don't ask me to explain, it doesn't make sense to me in the least.)

Anyway, if anyone knows where I could get a hold of a geforce gt 650m laptop video card (or something of equal/greater power that's compatible with an inspiron 17r SE 7720), mind pointing me in the right direction?

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:Well, did you know that there's a shortage of video cards because of bitcoin assholes? (Don't ask me to explain, it doesn't make sense to me in the least.)

The TL;DR is that CPUs are very good at doing lots of operations in serial because they're designed for things like scheduling, handling user input, and similar that can't be easily parallelized*, while GPUs are very good at doing lots of operations in parallel because drawing graphics on a screen is easily parallelizable: each frame you get can be broken up into sections that can be rendered independently, and it's easy to scale the size and complexity of those sections based on the resources available.

So basically, any problem that can be trivially broken down into parts that can be solved separately benefits from being run on a bunch of GPUs instead of a bunch of CPUs--and if you can split a problem into N parts to run on N GPUs, you can obviously throw 2*N, 3*N, 4*N... GPUs at the problem to solve them that much faster.

Since the math behind cryptocurrency basically boils down to "Try a bazillion different independent operations until you hit a certain goal," mining bitcoin is a trivially parallelizable problem, hence throwing more GPUs at the problem, hence everyone buying as many GPUs as they can for monster bitcoin mining rigs, hence the shortage.

* Techniques like pipelining, branch prediction, and similar let you get a lot of the benefits of parallelism without needing to parallelize the code, but that's beyond the scope of this explanation.

Also, those laptop graphics card modules are notoriously hard to come by.
THAT has nothing to do with mining. They are almost completely useless for mining actually.

Changing out laptop parts isn't super common, so they're probably pretty tough to find (supply/demand). I don't even know what you would do to change out something other than the battery or harddrive. Good luck to you.

Well that is lame. I was hoping to avoid getting a new computer but that might be what I have to do.

Depends. Hit up the maker of that model, they might have an upgrade program.
HP, at least in the alien ware line i think, has such a program.
Specifically for GPUs.
But yeah, you already have a rarity of a laptop with a replaceable GPU.
Usually, those are soldered onto the motherboard along with the CPU.
Nowadays, even RAM is sadly often not replaceable anymore.

§$%&!!!!
2 new steam inventory items
50% off on Frostpunk Price for Owners of Banished
66% off on Banished Price for Owners of Frostpunk
and i own both of these already <.<

I always keep getting these discount things for stuff i already own damn it!

Stahlseele wrote:§$%&!!!!
2 new steam inventory items
50% off on Frostpunk Price for Owners of Banished
66% off on Banished Price for Owners of Frostpunk
and i own both of these already <.<

I always keep getting these discount things for stuff i already own damn it!

I think you can usually send the discounts to someone else. Maybe that's what they're hoping for?

So my computer has decided to intermittently not notice my SSD (boot drive) when it boots up. It happened a while back, and I've spent about 15 minutes just now unplugging and replugging everything while blowing out the insides. Still no luck.

Looks like the boot options only list one drive right now (the old harddrive I mostly use as storage).

Iduno wrote:So my computer has decided to intermittently not notice my SSD (boot drive) when it boots up. It happened a while back, and I've spent about 15 minutes just now unplugging and replugging everything while blowing out the insides. Still no luck.

Looks like the boot options only list one drive right now (the old harddrive I mostly use as storage).

This exact same thing happened to me a month ago or so.

I was able to boot to my Disk Drive and access my SSD, so I knew the drive and connections worked. Finally, just changing around options, I put it on the automatic Boot Manager, and when I did that it allowed me to boot to my SSD, so maybe that will work?

It is not listed in Windows, either. I'll try for another round of turning it off and back on again to see if that does anything.

Unplug both power and data from the HDD.
Unplug both power and data from the SSD.
Plug the HDD power and data into the SSD.
Start up the computer and see what happens.
If it detects the SSD and boots, power down.
Connect the HDD to the ex SSD power and data.
Power up and see if both drives are detected.
If SSD is not detected after the initial cable swap, try and aquire a SATA to USBx Converter/external drive enclosure.
Put SSD into that and connect to other device to check if it is detected properly.

Yeah, 'disk not in disk manager' is generally either a bad disk or a bad connection. Obvious suggestion - make sure everything you can't bear to lose is backed up to another disk. Might be worth changing the motherboard socket you're plugging the disk into, as well.

G'luck!

I have it "fixed." I unplugged everything again, and plugged in everything except the HDD. I'll probably get around to plugging that back in next time I need something from storage.

And yes, I used different plug-ins from before, because who knows what change will make computers work.

Are there differently coloured SATA ports on the board?
Did you go from one colour to the other?
Because different colour usually means different storage controller used.
So it might be that.
Which is why i had written about plugging the obviously still working hdd cables into the ssd to see what happens.

i am starting to hate computers.
first, the boot drive OS SSD in my server just died . .
had to cannibalize another system to get that back up and running again.

And then, yesterday, the PSU in my gaming rig actually went BANG inside
the case . . bright flash and escaping smoke included, tripped the breaker
for the room as well and the over surge protector in the breaker box is
now blinking rather angryly . . and because of how fucking stupid these
things are actually being constructed, i had to take the whole fucking thing
apart to actually get the exploded PSU and the cables that belong to it out
of the case . . because no, you can not simply keep using the same cables
for the new PSU you have to put into the system . . no . . the PLUGS may be
standardized in shape and form and everything else physical . . BUT NOT THE
ACTUAL PIN USAGE OF THOSE CONNECTORS AND CABLES! Those can vary a
truly astonishing degree between manufacturers for no fucking discernable,
to me at least, reason!

And there is now something clattering around in the broken PSU so something
went REALLY wrong in there . . as indicated by the very bright flash and the
very loud BANG it said goodbye with . .

So i had to completely rebuild that 6 year old system again basically from
scratch because fuck my life i have nothing else and i am too poor to simply
buy a new one because life just gets more and more expensive and of course
wages are not nearly keeping up . .
And after rebuilding i had to play the shell game with 3 different SSDs because
neither me nor the BIOS (yes, BIOS not UEFI) did remember where wich of them
went and on what disk was what OS and what boot loader so even if everything
else was working just fine it simply would not boot into windows anymore . .

And of course . . for no reason what so ever, because i did nothing on the cooling
side of things, both AIOs are still attached exactly the same as they were before
to both CPU and GPU . . they are both now overheating like nobodys business -.-

I am sick and tired of this shit happening for no fucking reason aside from the
Universe going:"Bored now . . fuck you in particular lol!"

and it is my job as well . .
major outage. nothing works.

Does that mean you work harder trying to fix things, or do nothing and wait for it to come back online?