Tech Support

Just buy a new card yo

Okay, rather than just giving you suggestions on what to get, here's my teach-you-how-to-fish suggestion: Look for reviews of different cards, comparisons and all that. Look into what elements are important (e.g. usually ram amount is less important than gpu clock speeds - incidentally that is a good place to start), then compare them with graphics cards in your price range in order to find the most optimal approach.

This helplessness is getting tiresome.

The only thing that I've read out there is that, due to GPU manufacturing yields, there are fishy models. For ex: for a small price difference such as 30-50$ there is one model with 1GB GDDR5 and another model with GDDR3, but the GDDR5 model has fewer ROPs, fewer cores, etc. It's like they cut off on the processor and then try to compensate with overclocking the ram.

overclock.net forums has the Dust Brothers thread. It will give you an idea of how dusty a computer can get.

Some gems:

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EDIT: most newer mid end gpu's are pretty capable of running current games on 1920*1080. More than 1GB of video RAM is not very important unless you are running a resolution higher than 1920*1080/1200, multiple monitors, or using very high texture pack mods.

You could check out reviews for the AMD 7790 and Nvidia 650 Ti Boost, or go up a level to the 7850 or 660, which are probably significantly better.

All of what I said is easily found information or stuff doable through google searches, all it requires is some curiosity on the subject at hand. Since your PC is probably one of the few things you want to care about, why not take the time to inform yourself about what you need to make an maintain one? In the long run it'll save you time and effort, and in the short run it'll save you money, so I don't see why anyone would be reluctant to just try.

I realize I might have come off as brash, and that wasn't really my intention. BUT it is still sound advice because of reasons.

Maybe intersting

Quote from 0kelvin

http://lifehacker.com/5823227/save-d…ake-in-the-oven

Ever heard about this?

Fun fact, just tried this with my old 8800GTX that had artifacts all over the screen and wasn't even detected correctly in windows anymore and so far its actually running again.

Regarding which card to buy, just look at benchmarks sites. I still use Tom's Hardware lists, here is their July update:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming…eview,3107.html

If you just want to follow their recommendations go to the chart on the last page of the article and see what's the best one on your price range.

Rule of thumb though, in the below 150€/$ range ATI cards perform better, above that price range NVIDIA is usually better

Quote from sven

It will give you an idea of how dusty a computer can get.

The absolute worst computers always belong to those who smoke. It's not just dusty, but caked with brown tarish goop. Smokers might be pursuaded to quit by taking a look inside their computers and realizing that that's what's going on inside their lungs. Ewwwwwww....

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Renamed this thread since that's what it evolved into anyway. Now, as for my problem:

I have a Sony Vaio PCG-91211M laptop. Yesterday it crashed and now it won't boot. It just says "OS not found". The bios doesn't show the harddisk so I already know the answer, but I'm hoping to avoid that. If I change the boot sequence so that it boots from te dvd drive, I can run any Windows setup. However, it won't continue because there's no harddisk found.

I have no recovery disk for this laptop (bought it from someone else a long time ago). The Assist option is therefor not working. I have yet to find a download location for that recovery disk. Most of them ask for a ridiculous amount of money. Now do you think it could be a faulty MBR or driver issue? If so, is that fixable through the recovery disk?

I'm currently waiting to borrow an external case for the laptop hdd so I can hook it up to my pc to see what it does there. But I'm pobably going to have to replace it and hope I can save my data.

@Sprony How old is the laptop? If it's saying no OS and isn't appearing in BIOS it's probably fubar and you might need to talk to a data recovery specialist as I have nfi how to progress from there.

I would definitely recommend sticking it in an external drive a) to make sure it's definitely powering up and b) chance of some level of file recovery. If you can access it externally, you may find the files are locked behind some form of windows security as it's not being accessed from the computer the OS recognises as it's own.

Another possible option if you can detect the drive, is to take a fresh installation of windows (you wont need a key it'll just be a trial version), install it with as little formatting as possible, and then once inside windows run a program called "Recuva" by Piriform (the same guys who make CCleaner, Speccy and Defraggler) and as the OS usually only occupies the "start" of the HDD. I would hope you would be able to scan and pick up a load of files.

These are the steps I would take, but you could also just take it to a repair shop and ask for help.

we use HDD caddies at work for this sort of thing.

if you have any other laptop HDDs kicking about I would swap it into the vaio and see if it boots. That'll rule out anything else if it does.

Thanks @jackophant and @Vaya. I'll resort to testing the HD first.

obvs I mean if DOESNT boot

Quote from Vaya

obvs I mean if DOESNT boot

Yeah, poor choice of words, but you know what I mean

@Sprony if you don't do it already, I highly advise using a cloud based solution for normal files.

Dropbox / Google Drive both use a locally cached folder system which can be interacted with just like any other folder in Windows. It would be great for any articles or reviews you are working on and you can always access them from a different computer without fear of losing them.

Google also let you upload unlimited photos to their servers as long as they are under 2MP and if they're over, they'll just compress them for you so it's another good way to save those memories.

Yeah, good advice @jackophant. Luckily, al my writing is already backed up on Google Drive