PC fettling and repairs thread

[DCBassman]

Update time - yes I can see the SSD now, and it has some data on it, but of course (doh!) my chums at the Mac Repairers have formatted it as a Mac HDD, so I guess I'll have to reformat it as a regular external HDD for Mac.

But it does have c17gb of data on it which I'd like to capture - any ideas on how to do this latter step brave comrades?

Can you pull it from the ssd to one of the hub ports with an appropriate flash drive? Then you can transfer it to wherever you need it.
Edit: Apple don't make these things easy, do they?

 

[Bonefish Blues]

Can you pull it from the ssd to one of the hub ports with an appropriate flash drive? Then you can transfer it to wherever you need it.
Edit: Apple don't make these things easy, do they?

On reflection, since what I've done is load my profile on the Mini as well as the full-fat Macs, most of that 17 gigabimbles will simply be a duplicate operating system (minus about 4 generations!), with a few random files of 'stuff'. My wife has iCloud, so they should be on there anyway, and I'm rapidly coming round to the view that I CBA with all that mullarky, and it's best simply reformatted and start again.

What am I missing?!

 

[DCBassman]

Assuming what you've said is accurate - check that cloud! - then I see no reason not to just reformat and carry on.

 

[DCBassman]

Another build-a-laptop project. This time, a Toshiba A100 out of two broken ones.
Messed about with various lightweight Linux installs, didn't like any of them. Decided to see if I could get Windows 7 Ultimate on, and updated. The answer: yes, if you have another machine to get Service Pack 1 dowloaded. Once that was done, it was a mere matter of downloading every single update for Win 7, ever, and installing them. Windows Update does this, of course, but not until SP1 is in place. Discovered that MS Security Essentials also still works, and gets current updates for another year or so. Now to see if Microsoft will give me another free Win 10 licence if I upgrade it. Then pull the T2400 Pentium DC and replace with a Core 2 Duo T7200.

 

[MontyVeda]

The new-to-me Asus P9X79 motherboard, complete with 32GB of 1866MHz DDR3 Corsair RAM. Will start the build later. View attachment 630800

Nice!

I wonder if you can advise me?

currently i have AMD Athlon(tm) 5350 APU with Radeon(tm) R3 2.05 GHz with 8gb RAM... (most of that means nothing to me).

What I'm looking for is something of similar spec that has a standard PCI slot and a PCI-express slot (the long one), which the MB above seems to have. What sort of price would i be looking at?

Current MB has no PCI which means i can't put my soundcard in it and benefit from sturdy phone connections instead of shody 3.5mm jacks, hence wanting to change.

edit...
something like this could work... if it exists for old PCI to the newer compact PCI-e?

TIA

 

[DCBassman]

Nice!

I wonder if you can advise me?

currently i have AMD Athlon(tm) 5350 APU with Radeon(tm) R3 2.05 GHz with 8gb RAM... (most of that means nothing to me).

What I'm looking for is something of similar spec that has a standard PCI slot and a PCI-express slot (the long one), which the MB above seems to have. What sort of price would i be looking at?

Current MB has no PCI which means i can't put my soundcard in it and benefit from sturdy phone connections instead of shody 3.5mm jacks, hence wanting to change.

edit...
something like this could work... if it exists for old PCI to the newer compact PCI-e?
View attachment 638986

TIA

If you actually need a PCI slot, as opposed to the various types of PCI-e slot, you're probably out of luck. There are not many about! What is the sound card you want to use?

 

[MontyVeda]

If you actually need a PCI slot, as opposed to the various types of PCI-e slot, you're probably out of luck. There are not many about! What is the sound card you want to use?

Audiophile 24/96

Is the pale blue slot, 2nd from bottom in your MB not an old PCI?

I figured i probably was out of luck until i saw that MB.

 

[DCBassman]

I checked, and indeed it is a standard PCI slot!
Not a motherboard you can use with your components though. A cheap build would be to find an Asus P8H61 board, a Core i5-3470 cpu and two 4GB sticks of ddr3 1333 SDRam. Cheap, simple, from one to three PCI slots according to exact model. Mini-ITX version has none, but all else would work. My secondary PC has one, it just works. Your current components won't fit anything with such a slot so far as I cn see.

 

[DCBassman]

Charity shop visiting day. This doesn't happen as much as it did, as walking is a problem. In the Sue Ryder shop was a small pile of keyboards. One cheap and nasty, one nice Dell, and a Microsoft Laser 6000 v2 wireless. Grabbed that, and gave it the once-over. Corroded batteries still in it. Rats. Shop guy gave it to me for free as revealing the problem made it unsaleable. Got it home, managed to prise out the manky cells and clean it up. It works fine. I shall drop in the £4 it was labelled at the earliest opportunity!

 

[FishFright]

Audiophile 24/96
View attachment 639002

Is the pale blue slot, 2nd from bottom in your MB not an old PCI?
View attachment 639003

I figured i probably was out of luck until i saw that MB.

I have one of those ADAC's. It was pretty nice but I think the driver stopped at win 7.

 

[MontyVeda]

I have one of those ADAC's. It was pretty nice but I think the driver stopped at win 7.

checked online before purchase and read that the W7 driver for it does work with win10

 

[slowmotion]

Nice!

I wonder if you can advise me?

currently i have AMD Athlon(tm) 5350 APU with Radeon(tm) R3 2.05 GHz with 8gb RAM... (most of that means nothing to me).

What I'm looking for is something of similar spec that has a standard PCI slot and a PCI-express slot (the long one), which the MB above seems to have. What sort of price would i be looking at?

Current MB has no PCI which means i can't put my soundcard in it and benefit from sturdy phone connections instead of shody 3.5mm jacks, hence wanting to change.

edit...
something like this could work... if it exists for old PCI to the newer compact PCI-e?
View attachment 638986

TIA

I bought an HP Pavilion desktop for £25 on Gumtree a few weeks ago. It's got XP for running legacy software, one PCI-e, and three PCI slots. You can buy cards to fit the slots for absolute buttons on FleaBay. Fight back against "upgrade" tyranny!

 

[Grant Fondo]

I bought an HP Pavilion desktop for £25 on Gumtree a few weeks ago. It's got XP for running legacy software, one PCI-e, and three PCI slots. You can buy cards to fit the slots for absolute buttons on FleaBay. Fight back against "upgrade" tyranny!

It is tyranny when Intel make you swap motherboards every two gens!

 

[DCBassman]

It is tyranny when Intel make you swap motherboards every two gens!

Just post the old stuff over here, I'll recycle it for you...

 

[Grant Fondo]

Just post the old stuff over here, I'll recycle it for you...

Unless its really old you get good s/h prices. Got £250 for Skylake mobo/cpu, which takes the sting out of the upgrade, thankfully