Archive for November 2009

Pc is back!

24/11/2009 PC No comments

Finnaly. I can stop using my crappy laptop to surf the net at home. Said laptop belive it or not is coming up to five years old. So it has served me well although I feel the mulitple fresh instals of xp plus a brand new hard disk may have something too do with this!

Anyway after many conversations with ebuyer I have finnaly got them to replace the bricked motherboard. Tonight I am going to reinstall windows 7 on the 1terabyte disk I purchased shortly before bricking the motherboard! So fingers crossed the new updated version of the old board that served me so well will be just as good!

Ebay woes update

23/11/2009 eBay No comments

Well I got a refund from the eBay seller who claimed the keyboard had been dispatched. Needless to say it never turned up!

However they (as expected with eBay) where not the only ones selling that part. So I found a uk based seller bought from them and it turned up over the weekend. Am fitting it tonight providing liz is home with it.

Do Not Enter

23/11/2009 Funny No comments

Tossers Only

Tossers Only

LOL

Random pc issue

21/11/2009 PC, Tech Stuff No comments

Had a problem that’s been bugging me for a fortnight or so. Basically when you right click on the desktop, a folder or anywhere that’s part of the explorer shell you get an explorer.exe has encountered a problem. At first I thought it was a memory problem, so I ran memtest for 48hours this didn’t give me any joy as there was no errors. I then reinstalled xp sp3 with yet again still no joy. The actual error code was as helpful as microsoft tend to get, so I ran a full av scan, malware scan and a spyware scan all of which come up clear…Needless to say none of this suprised me since it was a fresh install of windows xp pro.

Eventually after hours of googling I stumbled across a blog post that referanced a tool which showed you all the menu hooks. The post recomended switching every non microsoft menu hook off and on again until you find the one thats causing the problem. Eventually I found it…… It was an Intel fault, once I found that I then found an Intel registry fix to download which removed the problem permanently.

Finnaly the problem was fixed and I could migrate docs and settings across!

I will link to all the blogs and fixes once I’m on a pc and not blogging from my iPod touch.

Jenson Button Joining Mclaren

18/11/2009 Sport No comments

So JB is joining Lewis at Vodafone McLaren Mercedes. Is it going to be a good thing?

Im not sure if this is a good thing or not. Obviously I want the brits to do well in all sports, but putting the current and previous world champions in identical cars, which up unitl now would have had Lewis as the focus of all the research, development and testing.

Jenson has a complelty different style of driving to Lewis, will he get the same engineer time and research in setting up the car for his driving style? I cant see JB wanting to take a back seat to Lewis in any way, shape or form and I dont think he would have joined VMM if that was the case. So I’m going to assume both drivers are going to be treated equally and then hope and prey for an exciting formula one season!

Asus Bios Update

02/11/2009 PC, Rants No comments

Installed windows 7 on friday, everything was fine…….for half an hour when i got my first bluescreen. I restarted and then tried to carry on running windows updates.

It tried to restart during these updates, but it just hung, the monitor went into standbye and the pc looked like it was going to switch off but it didnt. I did some digging over the weekend and tried a few things this evening leaving the feared bios update until last. Unfortunetly none of the other windows hacks/power settings/bios settings made any difference.

So i took a deep breath and decided to do a bios update, unfortunetly i hadnt read all the warnings about doing the update from within windows – which i have done many times before without any problemsm, except this time!

The software cleared the old bios, however wouldnt give it the new bios. This wouldnt have been to much of a problem as im sure i could have fixed it, had windows not decided to BSOD yet again. Only this time at a more costly time. The pc shut down, and restarted as you would expect, only this time the montior stayed in standby and the Hddr activity light stayed on.

I dug out my laptop and did some more reading, people where suggesting all sorts – Removing all but one chip of memory, Reseating cpu, removing all pci cards, clearing cmos.

All of which i tried, so im now stuck with a rather large paper weight that if i put on my desk would probably cause the desk to colapse!

I’m left with a number of options, I can get a new eprom chip and solder it on (which wont be happening) or i can try an get a replacment from asus (there website tells you to contact the reseller) so i logged a call with ebuyer about it. Am hoping and preying they are going to be nice, and offer to replace the motherboard. Im hoping it will be replaced as its less then 3 years old and all asus motherboards are meant to have a 3 year warranty.

Fingers Crossed!