PC fettling and repairs thread

[DCLane]

The PC I'd been using for Zwift stopped working during the summer and, it was large and noisy, I pinched the expensive one I'd bought for SWMBO last Christmas (a Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny). Which she wasn't using as it had Windows 11 and the pair of 24" screens weren't touchscreen: she has used a lovely Lenovo touchscreen PC for the past 10 years.

This evening I had a look as I thought it was the motherboard. Turns out instead the hard drive data is corrupted but it's been a pain to re-install. The bios wasn't UEFI-enabled so that's been done and Windows is re-installed. It'll be kept as a spare though since SWMBO isn't getting her tiny PC back.

 

[MontyVeda]

...

Dedicated graphics card is the way to go... just need to check what available slots and space I've got in the box.

[edit] ...and if I've got a suitable one in a cupboard somewhere. Hmmm.

I've pulled the graphics card from my old PC but it may be under spec.

on board GPU is DDR3, the card is DDR2, although i have no idea what DDR is. It's only 512mb too... but keeping an eye on GPU-Z, the dedicated memory seldom goes higher than 180mb, so with that in mind, 512mb might be plenty?

 

[Grant Fondo]

I've pulled the graphics card from my old PC but it may be under spec.

on board GPU is DDR3, the card is DDR2, although i have no idea what DDR is. It's only 512mb too... but keeping an eye on GPU-Z, the dedicated memory seldom goes higher than 180mb, so with that in mind, 512mb might be plenty?

Have you tried it out? I think it should work.

 

[MontyVeda]

Have you tried it out? I think it should work.

I've stuck it in but it's not giving me 1920pix through the VGA connection, saying 1600 is the max. Drivers are up to date so maybe this graphics card isn't ideal.

[edit] tried putting the VGA back into the onboard GPU, hoping that'd give me 1920px back but no... seems i can't have on board GPU for one monitor and the card running the other.

 

[Grant Fondo]

I've stuck it in but it's not giving me 1920pix through the VGA connection, saying 1600 is the max. Drivers are up to date so maybe this graphics card isn't ideal.

[edit] tried putting the VGA back into the onboard GPU, hoping that'd give me 1920px back but no... seems i can't have on board GPU for one monitor and the card running the other.

The first HD graphics cards were around 2006, so Nvidia 8 series is yours older than this?

 

[MontyVeda]

The first HD graphics cards were around 2006, so Nvidia 8 series is yours older than this?

2008 according to GPU-Z.. although the 'look-up' feature shows a card with a fan which mine doesn't have.

I've ordered something slightly less archaic which will hopefully fit the bill.

 

[Grant Fondo]

2008 according to GPU-Z.. although the 'look-up' feature shows a card with a fan which mine doesn't have.

I've ordered something slightly less archaic which will hopefully fit the bill.

Sounds like the best bet, at least cheap modern gpu's will run 4K over multi monitors, it used to cost big bucks!
I still have my first HD card, the venerable 8800GT from 2007, served me well for 5 years or so.

 

[MontyVeda]

it always amazes me just how much dust gets clogged up in the CPU heatsink when i look inside my PC

 

[PeteXXX]

 

[DCBassman]

Current computer shenanigans...
Still messing with Apples. Current count is the aforementioned 2011 iMac and MacBook Pro, now augmented by a white 2007 Macbook running Snow Leopard and a 2009 Mac Mini running El Capitan. For sheer snappiness, the polycarbonate Macbook running SL beats almost anything I've ever used. And this from a Core 2 Duo T7200, 3GB RAM, and an SSD. Only a usable modern browser slows it up. The Mini is just a cute little box that also runs well. I also got, in the bundle with these two Macs, a Time Capsule 1TB. Ecept it turned out to be 4TB! Win! The Mini had also been upgraded to a 1TB HDD and the max 8GB RAM, so I did well for 90 squids. There's muh experimenting to do!
Have reduced 3 Asus S200E notebooks to two by virtue of rebuilding using one as a parts donor. Two really good ones is the result.

 

[Svendo]

I have had a successful 2-day endeavour to replace the 1TB HDD in the laptop with a 2TB Crucial MX500 SSD. Used the OEM Acronis cloning software, which took roughly 4 goes to create a clone. 1st failed to allow adjustment of partitions due to errors, sorted with chkdsk (which I should have done anyway). 2nd just hung really early, third got half way asked for a restart then failed. For the final go (before creating a bootable USB with Acronis on it and doing it that way) I used task monitor to close as much background stuff as possible, and disconnected from the internet, and just before midnight Acronis declared success.
Physically swapped the drives, and after a nerve-wracking diversion into the boot menu to select the bootable drive it started very quickly and is looking exactly as before albeit quicker and with an extra 1TB of memory to fill with films, photos and music!
The only niggle is I couldn't get it to allow me to increase only the windows partition, so I had to settle for proportional sizes and lost 25GB to the Lenovo partition. If it continues to annoy me I'll try resizing the partitions with Disk Management.
I'll put the old HDD in an enclosure and see if it'll work with the routers in built NAS facility, but that's for another time.

 

[Grant Fondo]

Current computer shenanigans...
Still messing with Apples. Current count is the aforementioned 2011 iMac and MacBook Pro, now augmented by a white 2007 Macbook running Snow Leopard and a 2009 Mac Mini running El Capitan. For sheer snappiness, the polycarbonate Macbook running SL beats almost anything I've ever used. And this from a Core 2 Duo T7200, 3GB RAM, and an SSD. Only a usable modern browser slows it up. The Mini is just a cute little box that also runs well. I also got, in the bundle with these two Macs, a Time Capsule 1TB. Ecept it turned out to be 4TB! Win! The Mini had also been upgraded to a 1TB HDD and the max 8GB RAM, so I did well for 90 squids. There's muh experimenting to do!
Have reduced 3 Asus S200E notebooks to two by virtue of rebuilding using one as a parts donor. Two really good ones is the result.

A mate of mine has just sent his new Macbook Pro back, didn't work well with the design software he uses so he's back on the pc i specced him a couple of years ago!