PC Tech Thread

Tried a different cable?

What resolution and refresh rate are you using?

Multiple cables, laptops and monitors.

1920x1080. 60Hz. Same settings are fine when using a HDMI-DVI cable.

have you tried setting the monitor overscan ? You can normally do this (I have to do it on my TV all the time). In my case I did it on the PC using the nvidia software.

I think what's happening is the VGA is not carrying the right resolution info via EDID.

Hmm, overscan does ring a bell from a long saga of trying to get a linux box to play nicely with my tv. Annoyingly there doesn't seem to be an option for it on the onboard Intel Graphics .

Would appreciate some advice.

I have circa 23 GB of email data that has been archived from our exchange database and we want to retain the archived data. It is former employees' email accounts, each one has been archived into a PST file by the people who do our server admin.

Whats the best medium to cold store that data offline and have a change of accessing it in three or four years? Cheap is definitely preferable

DVDs?

sd card? usb drive? dvds?

Facebook seem to like Blu-Ray

Cheers - for some reason I completely blanked blu ray as a data medium

Anyone interested in a free core2duo processor/mb/ram before I recycle them? System stopped working and I don't know why but suspect the powersupply, so this may or may not all work (I have no way to test).

Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3GHz Socket 775 4MB Cache 1333MHz FSB
ASUS P5K AiLifestyle Series iP35 Socket 775 eSATA 8channel Audio ATX Motherboard
4x 1GB DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400

What's hot in monitors these days? VB's old Samsnug is flickering like a bastard so can't be too long for this world. Best bang for buck? Rarely game, don't care about colour matching or any designer shit. Options?

I'd get a USB drive too, just for ease of access. Good to have multiple back-ups anyway

@hippy I have a Dell UltraSharp U2515H, they are really nice, matte screen, QHD resolution, basically invisible bezel, and a really really nice stand

@hippy +1 for the Dell. I have a u2713 and u2715 (I.e. The 2013 and 2015 versions of the 27inch monitor). Good build quality and very good picture. 1440p. The 25 inch is same resolution

Speaking of monitors, I have a weird and annoying problem.

2 monitors attached to my laptop via DVI and VGA. The VGA monitor flickers/jitters. After a lot of testing stuff I worked out that it only happens when the laptop is plugged into the power, fine when it is on battery.

Swapping power supply made no difference, neither did swapping laptop or monitor.

I assume you can get some kind of filtered power supply or something to fix this? A quick google only threw up hugely expensive audiophile versions. Any suggestions?

For games - a 120hz screen.
For designing - IPS screen.
For everyone else with a decent GPU - a 5k screen.

Looks good. £250 ish, doesn't seem too crazy either.

5k?

Oh yeah, 4k can still have visible pixels, 5k doesn't. But you need to have a GPU with 2 DisplayPort 1.2 outputs. The GTX 960 is minimum for that at the moment.

Any suggestions for a Windows program to test pc speed that doesn't need administrator to install. Preferably something that doesn't need installation.

Trying to test if the laptop runs at the same speed on battery as mains but struggling to find something that'll work.

No need to measure, just get access to the information. Something like CPU-Z should tell you.

I can't see anything on there showing whether there is power-saving (although it doesn't seem to run properly, possibly due to lack of administrator rights, there is an error when it starts up).

Clock speed is what you want to be looking at, the bottom left corner...

I may buy a Laptop that comes without an OS.

Is this insane?

If not what should I buy/install?

Depends.

If the laptop has a DVD drive, it's very easy to install an OS and you can get a cheap Win7 and upgrade to 10 for free.

If you want to install off a usb key, it gets potentially very irritating with Win7 (might have to bake your usb chipset drivers into the .iso) but I don't know if going straight for 10 improves things...

What do you use it for?