The Gaming Den

I have had such incredibly bad luck with monitors lately. I had three monitors fail in a three month span towards the end of last year, and now another one bites the dust. To be fair, they're all old as dirt - but the synchronized failure is starting to piss me off. Can I get a year break inbetween shopping for monitors, please? It's annoying.

sure, if you do not buy all the screens within a year, the likelyhood of them all breaking down within a year from each other is greatly diminished

Stahlseele wrote:sure, if you do not buy all the screens within a year, the likelyhood of them all breaking down within a year from each other is greatly diminished

They're all very old, but they're actually all over the place in terms of age. Though even if they were similar ages, having three junk themselves in the same three months is still pretty impressively bad luck.

True, and i pity you.
I actually do not bother with screens for most of my computers anymore <.<
I have 5 computers and a laptop. And only 2 Screens on my main.
All others i have set up for remote access needing no screens anymore.
I wish the systems would actually boot without a GPU then i could get rid of that as well for more space for other things in the cases. And less energy use and heat production as well. But no, no dice, not with standard end user hardware and windumb as OS i think.

Koumei wrote:So, LibreOffice is obviously fucking shit. What with it just being the next interation of OpenOffice, which can die in a fire. I would like something for creating web pages, and it needs to meet the following criteria:

• WYSIWYG: yes I COULD just do it all in Notepad, if I felt like manually typing all the fucking tags then constantly opening it in FF to make sure I formatted it instead of just seeing the changes as I make them.
• Free: obviously
• Works on Ubuntu. Specifically, one easy process to install it and get it working in Ubuntu, I don't want someone telling me to just install four other dependencies and then custom-build a fucking install file.

"I don't want to install dependencies or compile an installation file"? Are you for real?

Bluegriffon will do the thing. Add GetDeb to your repositories so that it will patch with apt-get and then you can grab the program.

You could get a more recent version directly from its homepage, but it's in a tarball, and... apparently $make install is where you draw the line?

I have had no luck with $make install before, trying to build drivers and shit. It pretty much seems all developers for Linux stuff assume people get it because they want to do everything the hard way, not "because fuck paying for an OS" or "because MS need to revert back to Win7 and then never change again".

They do it that way because they can't depend on any conceits remaining unfucked with in whatever your distro is.

Ubuntu is founded on Debian, one of the three principal linux strains, the chief characteristic of which is strong repository support. That's why you can double-click install a .deb file; it's, like, the whole goddamned point of the entire distro. But if you talk to a Redhat srs-business person, they'll bitch about the weird shit the repo stewards do to jank everybody's programs into the same box, 'cause the five seconds it saves you is an undocumented four-hour problem-shooting session for somebody else. Shit is hard to manage.

Sorry you had to learn a few operating principals to more adequately employ the massively complex human undertaking which was the work of tens of thousands of well-educated people employing their in-demand skills for free. I'm sure the website you build via click-and-drag will be a work of far higher quality~~~

FAKE EDIT: mods plz change thread title to "share annoying computer stuff; receive advice, veiled insults"

So my PC has done this annoying thing three times so far. I'll be chilling out, watching Netflix, playing a game. Suddenly Netflix will stop. All my browsing will stop functioning. Any game I'm currently connected to remains connected, as do chat programs, but new DNS requests (and continual DNS requests from streaming) just don't work anymore.

Typically a flushdns and release/renew fixes it, but today I had to go the extra mile and actually reboot my PC for it to function. I don't know if this is my ISP (doubtful, as other devices on the network continue to function normally), or if I've found a persistent little malware that chooses random periods of time to fuck with me - persistent, because three antivirus programs have yet to locate anything, though I've not yet done a safe mode rootkit scan nor a boot scan. Anyone encountered anything similar?

I have. It's always something different. Always a configuration thing, nobody makes viruses just to fuck with people anymore unless it's ransomware, and trust me that that shit will announce itself.

Are you using automatic assignment or did you specify a DNS server by address? Which provider/modem are you using? Wifi or wire?

Can someone explain to me why Skype is so very very shit lately? It seems like very update is breaking something.

Eikre wrote:I have. It's always something different. Always a configuration thing, nobody makes viruses just to fuck with people anymore unless it's ransomware, and trust me that that shit will announce itself.

Are you using automatic assignment or did you specify a DNS server by address? Which provider/modem are you using? Wifi or wire?

Router: Netgear WNDR3700v4

My ISP is a local one that rents wireless bandwidth from AT&T.

PC is wired, wireless devices were functioning.

I was letting my DNS automatically assign itself, but I switched to Google's public DNS in an attempt to make it stop; the switch didn't make my requests start functioning on the desktop until I rebooted.

Now, my cat5 cable connecting the PC to the router is missing the tab that keeps it in place, and every so often it will wiggle itself free from the vibration of the fans. This wasn't the cause, because the cable is the first thing I always check.

Grek wrote:Can someone explain to me why Skype is so very very shit lately? It seems like very update is breaking something.

It's owned by Microsoft. Breaking their own stuff with updates when it was working fine before has kinda become their modus operandi.

RelentlessImp wrote:

Have you run tracert to figure out where the breakdown happens? I'd like to know what happens when the problem is occurring and you try to open up a new connection to a site using an IP address. Like, going to Google using 216.58.217.142

i put an USB3 Controller Card and a USB3 front panel into the old computer i put Win10 on . . now the ODD won't open anymore . .
I swear that machine is trying to make me throw it away <.<

Nearly a year ago today I made the mistake of buying an ASUS T100HA Transformer from PC World.

The touchscreen touched itself, rendering it practically unusable. The 32gb hard drive was ridiculously small to the point that it needed external help to install the Windows 10 anniversary update.The USB to micro USB power cable broke. The tablet half kept undocking from the keyboard dock at random intervals. The assembly was top-heavy and would fall over if used as a laptop on a train.

Then the thing started misreporting power usage. The power button started to not work reliably. Now I'm pretty confident the power button will never work again. I don't think the chances of PC World accepting that a laptop is meant to last more than eleven months are worth betting on.

Any recommendations for netbook-a-likes given that no one buys netbooks as such these days?

My kids has a Dell Inspiron 3000 series 11'' which does the job. It survives all the crap he does to it, anyway. I'm happy enough that I'd buy another one.
If I was getting one for myself, I'd probably go a mac laptop of some sort. Accepting they're not good value for money, the hardware itself seems decent and I have only had good experiences with apple support. But that requires having money to burn on a light up logo.

Well, here's a fun little tech support conundrum.

Computer won't boot, gives the beep code for faulty RAM. Four sticks, four slots, so you do the usual; dust everything to hell and back and try various combinations of sticks and slots looking for either a faulty stick or faulty slot. Can't find any combination that works, which makes it look like the mobo bit the dust, but just to make sure you decide to take the computer to a friend's house and test the RAM in a spare machine (and test the spare's RAM in your's). Before you can do that but a few days later, you mess around with the machine some more on a whim and it just works - all four sticks, all four slots. Same as it was before you were having any problems at all. Note that the beep code for missing RAM is different than the beep code for faulty ram, so it wasn't merely improperly seated.

What in the sweet fuck was the problem, and what fixed it? For reference, I am the friend with the spare machine and not the befuddled owner, so I can't really go poking around inside it to look for... I don't even know what I'd look for. A capacitor on the fritz? I could see a dying capacitor pulling a Jesus and coming back three days later. Capacitors are assholes like that, and I've started blaming all of my problems on them. Is there a capacitor on the board whose failure would register as an inability to read/write memory? I don't even know.

Might also be a BIOS error.
POST is done by the BIOS to check if the hardware is okay to run or not.
Such things are, sadly, very hard to diagnose even if you are in front of the affected machine.

Parts that fail intermittently are frequently at the mercy of tiny micofractures which can be bridged by the vagaries of thermal expansion or subtle flexing from getting smooshed around. It might start acting up again at some point.

But it's also possible that your friend was simply not 100% rigorous in their elimination testing and ended up trying a combination that they'd previously omitted and either don't realize they had overlooked it before or just don't want to admit it.

Completely unrelated to my previous request (and surprisingly so, apparently her computer's still working fine), what's the best place to shop around for gaming rigs these days if you're more concerned about value than anything else? It's been almost a decade since I bought a prebuilt.

I'm ruling out DIY options right now. The machines I've been working on today have ground my fingers raw and it stings to type this. I'm not letting these devil boxes have any more of my flesh.

Gods fucking be damend -.-
My GPU died.
Had to bodgejob it by cannibalizing the gpu from another computer that does not want to work either . .
Now i have lost 60% of power and can only use 2 of my 3 screens and i had to re-attach a fan to the case using cable binders . . but for now, it . . "works" . .

Aand . . now i got a warning Message from the Mainboard:"Mainboard at -1° Celsius!"

I think after about 3 years the whole thing is just breaking down for some reason <.<

OK, so my new GPU arrived. It is only a normal 1080, no TI, not the 11GB Variant either, but again with an AIO closed loop water cooling Hybrid preinstalled . . And appearantly, one needs to manually tell displays to fucking use display port as the signal source, they do NOT do that automatically for some reason . . .finding THAT out took me several hours and swaps of hardware and displays between 2 systems -.-

My TV/2nd monitor appears to have a severe short, and no longer turns on. My primary monitor is tiny by the standards of people who make vidya games.

Suggestions on what to look for in a shiny new monitor?

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