PC Tech Thread

Back for more advice. Mini moocher would like a set of speakers to go with their mini pc. Budget is £30.

I see plenty on Amazon. Any suggestions?

I don't own them, but this is probably the cheapest from a decent brand at £40.
https://www.kbaudio.co.uk/products/edifier-r19bt-2-0-pc-speakers-with-bluetooth

I don't have any but Creative Pebbles are supposed to be decent

@moocher I've got some unused Creative Pebble ones that I will send you for £20 including postage.

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after the recommendation on here i buy a zoostorm pc with with 2tb memory and a 3.3Ghz quad core intel processor which is still running like a dream after 11 years and as fast as you like and has never let me down, still got loads of memory left after ripping a couple of thousand cd's and 40 years worth of photos, my mum is looking to upgrade her pc with something similar that can access the internet has decent memory / storage for photos and documents and at a decent price point. can i ask for some recommendations.

basic wimdows package would be great
fast processor
no need for an inbuilt wifi internet access thingy, plug round the back for a internet cable would be perfectly sufficient

what has tickled your fancy recently ?

ooops just re read all my posts about the zoostorm, the power unit did go pop about 6 years ago and i upgraded the c: drive to a 2 TB ssd at a local computer repair shop at the same time, but i'll still say the pc has been fantastic has done everything i wanted it to and is still as quick as a cheetah. i've barely dowloaded any apps to it just foobar / dbpoweramp / ableton / libreoffice and music bee on the desktop so it hasn't been weighed down with massive amounts of applications, i couldn't have wished for a better recommendation.

same again please.

After my posts a month or so ago about struggling to get a windows install for my blanked laptop, I went ahead and installed Ubuntu on it instead but now I'm having an issue with the screen randomly going black. Can be 30 seconds after booting or 30 minutes. All I'm doing is Firefox browsing but it isn't consistent with doing anything else in particular. Computer stays on but screen dies and there's no way to get it back on but force shut down and restart.
I've switched off all power saving and screen sleeping options but still persists.
Any ideas?
Alternatively would someone post me a windows 11 boot usb? I can pay the post and return the usb after.

Assuming you have a licence key why don't you create your own?

https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows11

think the problem was the USB sticks he had weren't being recognised by the BIOS or were hanging halfway through

@PhilDAS happy to post a couple of sticks out to you. PM me address and can sort

This ^ but also I've no other windows machine in the household with which to create the bootable USB. Otherwise I would just buy a new usb drive and try again. But you need windows in the first place to download windows. 😬
I've tried the programs that people say on Mac can do it but that's where I was getting errors trying to install it.

Ah sorry missed that. If duncs doesn't hook you up I can. Don't worry about returning the stick either

You can do it from a Mac - I did - but I wouldn’t recommend it. You get into installing homebrew libraries and command line stuff.

If you want I can go back and look at what I did but it was easily half a day of faffing.

Did you try unetbootin ? Works on Linux or Mac and should let you create a bootable USB if you download the ISO (third option down on the link) from Microsoft.

Have you had a read of this?

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/BlankScreen

Maybe try plugging in an external monitor when the issue occurs, to see if that works. It's useful to find out if it's a software issue like X11 crashing, a GPU driver issue, or a hardware fault.

Balena Etcher also works well on MacOS, I’ve made several functional Win11 boot USBs using it.

Nevermind, it's died completely now. FFS
2 orange blinks, 3 white. Indicates no memory found. Which would be fine only it's soldered to the board, non replaceable.

balena etcher also likes to fuck up the readability of usb sticks by windows machines.

keep this bookmarked if you use it. i've relied on it many times to unfuck my cards.

https://blog.balena.io/did-etcher-break-my-usb-sd-card/

I use the free version of this
https://www.partitionwizard.com/
for doing that. Nice easy GUI to sort stuff out.

I'm about to replace one of my 4TB drives with a larger one and it seems sensible to replace the least healthy one. Is there anything out there that can tell me this or is it not something that can be really measured?

Most drives are Seagate so I have the Seatools software but that just seems to be pass/fail so far as I can tell.

https://crystalmark.info/en/download/ will tell you what you want

Want to expand my C: drive into the unallocated space.

This seems to be an acknowledged limitation of windows drive management, but I've seen suggestions that various third party utilities can do it. Any recommendations for something that won't go tits up and make me reinstall the OS?

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