PC Tech Thread

Do you mean combining various flavours of cable into a single loom? If so, Canford (among others) sell a load of various types of braided looming sleeves, with velcro/zips/ties options to wrap the assembly together.

If you mean actually soldering/crimping ends onto bulk cable: unless you’re making very specific lengths for a very specific reason, then don’t bother. Crimping BNC is easy enough, but the tool and proper dies for Neutrik connectors is very expensive. HDMI is way too pin-dense to DIY reliably.

The latter. In which case, any recs for someone/where that will do me some in custom colours?

Have had a google and tbf Custom Lynx seem to have a good range but never heard of them before today and they don't do d-tap etc or HDMI in a colour I'd want. Am sure there must be a film/video specific supplier somewhere?

Edit: https://formcave.com/pages/specialty-cables comes cl0se - but USA

I still don’t get why you’d want to spend £££ on custom coloured cables?

At my company, we just put ~100mm of coloured heat shrink tubing on the ends of stock cables if needed.

Cables are consumables as far as I’m concerned; I really wouldn’t go out of my way in effort and cost to get something bespoke made for little benefit, only to have it all wear out/break after a couple of months/years.

I was wondering about how non-standard input devices work by default when attached to a machine to plug-and-play. I have a razer mouse with functions like side scroll and scroll wheel lock. Generally you have to install their 300mb driver for full functionality. Can't install this on the work computer, but strangely enough the additional functions occasionally work even without the proprietary driver install, but more often than not they don't. Can't quite figure out why or how this happens?

At my company..

Cool.

Different use case - my understanding is you do quite large scale AV stuff? This is small commercial stuff with crews who like shiny things. Give them a reliable and well looked after package, make sure they have a good experience, they take the photos, other ACs book it on their next job. Entirely agree on cables being consumables, but I'm going to spend money on good cables anyway, why not spend a relatively small amount extra on some branding?

Makes sense. Would love to see what you end up with, I'm a sucker for shiny things.

I spent a lot of effort 'grooming' the cabling in the data racks in our XR studio, which is all visible behind glass panels. All adds to the feelgood-factor for clients, that I deffo agree with.

Would love to see what you end up with

So would I : (

i know a guy in glasgow who does this. Interested?

having a bit of a wtf moment with my pc

last week it just stopped working. Wouldn't turn on, no POST, no motherboard lights. Nothing.

Sent the PSU back to Corsair who presumably found the PSU at fault and shipped me another unit (free upgrade too I guess, going from a 650w to a 850w). Just wired in the new PSU tonight and having the exactly same problem. I can't imagine what the issue could be.

I know it's not the power cable because i've tried two (and tested them both). Any ideas what the issue could be?

Could the old PSU breaking just fried the motherboard or something? No signs of damage anywhere.

Could well be - link? Feel free to DM a name or something if no web address/shop. TBH I won't be doing a big order yet but likely around May and I haven't found anywhere else that ticks all boxes yet.

Yes but not for pc which I think must require more specialist crimping tools to connect the cables to the connectors.

henry(at) henrysmithaudio(dot) com

Could the old PSU breaking just fried the motherboard

I've had this in the past (probably 15 years ago). It was a power surge that killed the PSU but then subsequently discovered other stuff was dead too.

Sorry, meant to thank you for this at the time. Will get in touch.

Recommended free program to open .dwg files?
Just received some files from the Environment Agency in response to a request for surveys of the River Pinn, and they are .dwg

DWG Trueview

Thanks

Fucksake.

PC just booted with "Reboot and select proper boot device" screen.

I've got a Samsung 950 PRO M.2 512GB NVMe SSD as the boot device and this ain't showing in the BIOS.

Anyone know what the lifespan of an NVMe SSD is? Did I just find it out? Any clever ideas?

Depending on how you heavily read or write to it, 5/10 years?

First step is remove, reseat, reboot. Next is testing outside the machine, do you have an enclosure/another computer to test it in?

For reference, here's my primary boot drive bought in 2018. For a good couple of years it was my only drive and I installed/reinstalled a lot of games.

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It's ~8 year old.

I had a look and I can't get to it without removing the massive heatsink. Which I don't know how to do yet so I'll need to google that thing - it looks like it should just unclip somehow.
I don't have any other machines these days, at least, not desktops to test with.

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I might have a look at my data drive. Guess it's worth doing a full image of that now before it goes. Do you have any ideas for an M.2 cradle I could try in a laptop or is it better to just find someone with a PC? Maybe I'll just take it to a shop. I care so little about dealing with this shit these days.

Well, that's shit. This makes it look like the whole thing is one piece so I'll have to disturb the CPU just to get at the mobo? What a shit design.

I think it's this: https://www.quietpc.com/nof-cr-95c and I can't tell if the fins detach from the base or not

Update: Poking drive with a chopstick a bit didn't help.

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Found my Win10 bootable USB installer. First it failed with some error, then disabled Intel PTT in the bios and it worked. I can see D: (normal SSD) is still there but the m.2 C: drive doesn't exist (the poking didn't work). I might install a new version of Windows onto D: and just ignore the boot drive, assuming it's now fried.

But then I could just use the laptop and install everything onto that. Maybe send the PC back to QuietPC to be gutted and upgraded. Or just buy a new PC or maybe a new laptop. I was half way through ripping a bunch of audio tapes and video tapes though so I'd then need video capture cards that worked via USB or some shit.

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No drive viewable in the bios, does not look good.

Can you remove the drive easily?