PC fettling and repairs thread

[DCBassman]

It's pretty disgusting that Dell were selling PCs to the unsuspecting with only 4GB ram last year.

4GB is plenty for office work. But more is always nicer!

 

[Grant Fondo]

4GB is plenty for office work. But more is always nicer!

Oddly MS say Win 11 runs on 4GB, it does, but uses 80% of that RAM up! Bit misleading really?

 

[Proto]

Help, I've fecked my MacBook Air

My wife has broken her MacBook Pro (broken screen - £450 repair!) soin the meantime thought she could use my not often used 2013 MacBook Air. Reset to factory setting, clear the disc and set it up as a new machine with her iCloud account. I obviously made a complete horlicks of it, and now the machine will start but doesn't seem to be seeing a hard disc (SSD)

Switch it on in recovery mode (Option +R) gets me to this: (image1)

Select DisK Utility and I get this page: (image 2)

How do I get the machine to recognise the disc?

If I choose ‘Reinstalled OS X' option from the first image it takes me to a page where it asks where I want the iOS installed, but the option is blank, no disc showing.

So I think the disc is not ‘mounted’ or something. So the recovery partition can’t write to it.

Help !!!!!

 

[DCBassman]

Bummer. I'm PC only in terms of any decent level of knowledge, but there are Mac people on here, somewhere...

 

[Grant Fondo]

Bummer. I'm PC only in terms of any decent level of knowledge, but there are Mac people on here, somewhere...

+1 on that, wish i could help, unless its a cox's orange pippin i'm stuffed on apples

 

[Proto]

Well ………… it’s sorted!!

Not sure my understanding is correct but I thought the problem was that there was no partition for the recovery disc to write to. So, taking bull by the horns, way out of my comfort zone, created a partition on disk0s2.

Then, going to the ‘reinstall OS X’ option, it wrote to the partition and reinstalled Mountain Lion. Took several hours!

Next task was to update OS to El Capitan, and when that was running, a further update to the newest OS release it would accept, Big Sur. This also took several hours 🙈

Then download all my wife’s work software, Zoho, Google suite, mail etc. “Any idea what your password is for Apple ID? Zoho?” “Er, ……….. no.” 🙈 Sorted but another hour gone.

 

[Grant Fondo]

Well ………… it’s sorted!!

Not sure my understanding is correct but I thought the problem was that there was no partition for the recovery disc to write to. So, taking bull by the horns, way out of my comfort zone, created a partition on disk0s2. Then going to the ‘reinstall os x’ option, it wrote to the partition and reinstalled Mountain Lion. Took several hours!

Next task was to update OS to El Capitan, and when that was running, a further update to the newest OS release it would accept, Big Sur. This also took several hours 🙈

Then download all my wife’s work software, Zoho, Google suite, mail etc. “Any idea what your password is for Apple ID? Zoho?” “Er, ……….. no.” 🙈 Sorted but another hour gone.

See, that's why you pay through the nose ... your OS's have lovely exotic names, ours are just numbers

 

[Proto]

Jk

See, that's why you pay through the nose ... your OS's have lovely exotic names, ours are just numbers

I’ve got another machine running Catalina, the broken machine was on Monterey. Latest OS is Ventura. 😀

BTW, new screen, about £450 including fitting. It’s bonded in, so a fiddly job. I’m beginning to hate Apple.

 

[MrGrumpy]

Jk

I’ve got another machine running Catalina, the broken machine was on Monterey. Latest OS is Ventura. 😀

BTW, new screen, about £450 including fitting. It’s bonded in, so a fiddly job. I’m beginning to hate Apple.

Got a MacBook Pro with the same smashed screen . It works fine with a monitor plugged into it ?! Not exactly portable but saves it being skipped !

 

[Grant Fondo]

BTW, new screen, about £450

Gulp! That's what I paid for my 32" 4K monitor 6 years ago ... no wonder they are the worlds richest company!
Apple prices are mad .. you can build a £4k pc which trounces a £40k Apple Mac Pro .. mind you, the case is rather nice

 

[Proto]

I suspect that Apple make the screen as thin and light as possible for their marketingvaims. Consequence is it makes it borderline not fit for purpose.
MacBook Air seems to b3 a much more robust design with a fair amount of ‘frame’ surrounding the screen.

 

[StuAff]

Well ………… it’s sorted!!

Not sure my understanding is correct but I thought the problem was that there was no partition for the recovery disc to write to. So, taking bull by the horns, way out of my comfort zone, created a partition on disk0s2.

Then, going to the ‘reinstall OS X’ option, it wrote to the partition and reinstalled Mountain Lion. Took several hours!

Next task was to update OS to El Capitan, and when that was running, a further update to the newest OS release it would accept, Big Sur. This also took several hours 🙈

Then download all my wife’s work software, Zoho, Google suite, mail etc. “Any idea what your password is for Apple ID? Zoho?” “Er, ……….. no.” 🙈 Sorted but another hour gone.

Glad you got it sorted. I took one look at that Disk Utility window and could see that was the problem. Was writing a reply to the earlier post when I noticed that one.
Typing this on my new-to-me (Apple refurb, came with 3 battery cycles) M1 Pro MBP. Goes like the proverbial off a gardening implement. Iif you think that install was slow, I've just replaced a 2009 MacBook…!!

 

[StuAff]

Gulp! That's what I paid for my 32" 4K monitor 6 years ago ... no wonder they are the worlds richest company!
Apple prices are mad .. you can build a £4k pc which trounces a £40k Apple Mac Pro .. mind you, the case is rather nice
View attachment 675712

Yes, they are extremely expensive, but the notion of the £40k system is, in the real world, utter nonsense. No-one with an ounce of sense would pay Apple's prices for RAM- you can save £15,000 by DIYing a 1.5TB config. SSD prices equally silly, but you'd just put NVMe drives on PCIe carriers instead. Same with GPUs, a couple of 6900XTs are about £4,000 less than buying one Apple 6900 MPX module. Apple's CPU prices are actually at going market rate, it's Intel that make those Xeons exorbitant.

The 2019 MP is a white elephant right now anyway, the Apple Silicon one will be a very different story. The newly launched M2 Pro mini kicks sand in the face of that thing!

 

[DCBassman]

My latest acquisition is an HP 110 Mini netbook. This is one of the later variants in that it originally came with Windows 7. Later doesn't mean higher spec, though. It's a 32-bit machine, using an Intel Atom N270. This is a hyper-threaded single core chip (think Pentium 4HT was the first chip that did this). It has just a single RAM slot, which I've populated with 2GB of DDR2. A PNY CS900 120GB SSD should move things along reasonably well.
So, what OS? 32-bit really bites as a limitation; the only continuously maintained Linux that still does 32-bit is Debian, not known for its ease of installation. Suggestions?
Edit: I didn't pay enough attention to the ads. What I somehow perceived as rose gold (bad enough, but bearable) is in fact bright bubblegum pink...

 

[ColinJ]

Could some of you please do me a favour?

I enter scores of online competitions a month*** via a site named Loquax. THIS URL is the one I use to access the site. Over the past month or so I have been getting a lot of Cloudfare 520 errors when I do my evening trawl of the latest competitions. Sometimes the site works for a while, then the errors start and I can no longer access it. For a while I assumed that the site was having problems but then I discovered that I can still access it using alternative browsers. Very strange!

I am using Chrome v109.0.5414.120 on Windows 10.

If you are a Win 10/Chrome browser user could you please do some random checks at different times of day to see if you have any problems with the site? Getting on a few times doesn't tell me that much because I can often do it myself, but it would be helpful to know if you eventually get the 520 errors too. [I just tried again... I loaded the first page but got a 520 error when I tried going to the next!]

Can anybody think of a reason why Chrome would suffer but Edge and Brave do not?






*** It isn't quite as hopeless as you might think... After a conversation on a forum ride a few years ago in which a fellow member reported multiple wins, I thought I would have a go. I have won over £5,000 worth of prizes since then!