Blocked PC scam

[arith]

I tried OpenSuse but couldn't get it to work: I'm not geeky but have taken and passed sophomore level programming courses in C++, Fortran and the rest, but for the life of me cannot ever remember acronyms so without a list of meanings stuck in front of my face cannot do a thing.
The problem with OpenSuse was getting it on the internet without a hard wired connection, even with help I couldn't do it, but now with advancement in technology I have wifi over a mobile network and just had a look to see if that is any easier.
Well the first word 'sudo' in a list of acronyms a page long is the only one vaguely familiar, so it doesn't look easy at all.
But then Windows isn't easy; or rather they neglect to tell you the right way to install, with a scratch pad first, but then I've also got partitions separate from the C: drive because I heard that virus's mostly cannot jump the partition and was told it is easier also to re-install.
Mmm well, I'm not a geek for sure.

[Inkanyezi]

Oh they are not actually acronyms, but commands, or more correctly, programs, just as the programs in Windows that you use from the command line. But if you use any of the graphical distributions, there is a chance you will never ever use the command line. I only use it for some instances where users that I help with the system have escaped the automatic file system check too many times, so the file checker must be invoked from a terminal.

"sudo" is a little program that will let you do things as superuser on the system without first logging in as superuser. The program won't act before you give the superuser password, but it is only used to invoke any other command that requires superuser rights. It is one example of the power you may have in the system, without being constantly logged in as administrator. In Windows systems, by default, the first user on the system is administrator, and many users are constantly logged in as administrator, which is the root of many evils on Windows computers.

In Ubuntu, you may be the administrator on the system, and it can automagically log you in to your desktop if you so wish, but you may never do any administrating chores from the graphical desktop without knowing that you do; administration is locked as long as you do not invoke the sudo command or use administrative programs, which invariably will ask you for the password before doing anything on the system. From the command line (terminal), you could invoke "sudo su" that makes you superuser until you exit it, but normally, any Linux distro will never put you in a position where you can do harm to the system, unless you specifically order it to do that.

Most non-geeks on Ubuntu aren't even aware of what their computer runs. They just use it. I have installed it for scores of new users that never had a computer before, and very seldom will they ask me to do any maintenance. Usually it just runs with no hassle at all.

[Hero]

It does depend on your definition of geeky. If Ubuntu comes pre-installed on computers (and I have seen some Dell computers that had this) it is fine. If you have to do it yourself on an existing Windows computer (and have to create extra space next to your Windows installation) it is slightly different. A lot of people I know would balk at this.
But I agree that, once installed, Ubuntu works fine. Good programs and much faster.

hmm the installer (ubu 10.4) just asked me if i wanted to overwrite everything, use all the free diskspace or a certain part of the free space. Wouldn't know how to make that bit easier on the user. (and much better then windows which will overwrite anything on the disk(s) without even asking.)

[Tygart]

And have to create extra space next to your Windows installation) it is slightly different.

As said above, When I was installing Kubuntu it gave me a graphical installer, with a choice of full install or using a the exicsting space (Create a partition.) I did a full install.

As for the command line (Terminal) I haven't needed to do anything in it, But I have, mostly educational...

[Inkanyezi]

When Ubuntu is used as a desktop system, it will run the file system checker at startup for every thirtieth boot. This check may be escaped by the user, and the system then will do it at the next startup. If the user repeatedly escapes this automatic check, sooner or later the file system errors might be too many to run the test automatically, and the system will seem to hang. In fact, it does not hang, it waits for user input.

When there are too many errors in the file system, the program fsck must be run manually. It has switches for doing all corrrections without asking, so with the correct command line it can be done without user interference. If only invoked by its name, it will ask for input whenever an error is encountered. If there are many errors, it is time consuming, so the best is always to let the system make its auto-check whenever it does that. A user that does not interfere with the auto check will not run into problems. And of course, fsck is a system command that works on a very low level, it needs the sudo command, otherwise it just exits without doing anything.

And that is the only maintenance raindance I ever had to make for any of the users where I installed Ubuntu.

[Letrow]

hmm the installer (ubu 10.4) just asked me if i wanted to overwrite everything, use all the free diskspace or a certain part of the free space. Wouldn't know how to make that bit easier on the user. (and much better then windows which will overwrite anything on the disk(s) without even asking.)

Oh, I agree, it is better than Windows. But for the average user getting these messages (e.g. on a Windows computer) will look pretty scary. I am guessing most of them have never formatted a harddisk (or overwritten it).
For someone who has worked in DOS it is a lot easier, but most users are familiar with Windows only.

And, Ubuntu (and other Linux programs) do not install on all computers in the same easy way (and the DVD can't run either as standalone program). I have had that experience on two of my older Windows computers. Probably something in the settings or the video card.

But it is a great program.

[arith]

Talk about coincidence; yesterday I found my pc switched off when I'm pretty sure I didn't switch it off, and so I run Kasperski full scan. Today I tried to power up and got BIOS system message, 'do not shut down or reset while system tries to recover.'

I'm back to original BIOS I've put a new battery in just in case it was caused by a power failure, but I don't know what happened and I'm sure don't think I like to find the correct BIOS.

[Ady]

and much better then windows which will overwrite anything on the disk(s) without even asking.)

Hi Hero, it's been a while since you did an install of Windows, for some time now you have had the option to manage disks and partitions during installation, if memory serves it's been that way since Windows XP.

The thing you can't do during an install is resize a partition, though with recent versions of Windows you can boot to a command prompt using the install media and use DISKPART to resize the partition before you start the install process.

Cheers,
A

[Hero]

Lethrow:
1) Regarding formatting and partitioning and stuff, that's never easy for the average user regardless of the OS.
2) *nitpick warning* Ubuntu and any other linux distribution is a collection of operating system and a bunch of programs. You wouldn't call windows (which is essentially the same be it that it has a lot less programs build in) a program either.
3) There are some problems regarding drivers for hardware, but that's usually due to exotic hardware. I've had my share, but so have many people who installed windows7 only to find out the manufacturer of their hardware couldn't be *ahum* to write new drivers for their old products. With videocards both windows and linux have failsave (vesa) options for both OS and installer disc (although I have to admit that on the linux side the howto is a tad hard to find)

Ady: it's been a few years, but the incident I was referring to was with an OEM windows-xp disc which only gave me a choice between installing and repairing. If you choose installing no further input is asked until after the first reboot. With a normal install disc it will only overwrite the MBR, which renders your linux install unbootable. (Luckily it's easy to overcome by rerunning grub's configuration, but still isn't a nice thing to do.) Most other OSses will ask you first before doing such harsh things.

[Letrow]

Lethrow:
1) Regarding formatting and partitioning and stuff, that's never easy for the average user regardless of the OS.
2) *nitpick warning* Ubuntu and any other linux distribution is a collection of operating system and a bunch of programs. You wouldn't call windows (which is essentially the same be it that it has a lot less programs build in) a program either.

The point is though that on most computers Windows comes pre-installed. For the average user formatting and partitioning is something that he will probably never encounter. As long as Linux distributions are not pre-installed like that (and as I mentioned there are some limited examples of companies doing this) the usage of this program will remain limited to those people who feel confident enough to try things out on their own I think.
And your second point is nitpicking indeed. I think that in everyday speech a lot of casual readers will not make that differentiation.

On Ubuntu, I like it personally. I use it as a back-up system on my home computers in case Windows crashes. Why you might ask...well, the other users at home felt more comfortable in a Windows environment than in Ubuntu, so the house geek (me) was left alone in his enthusiasm.

[Ady]

OEM windows-xp disc which only gave me a choice between installing and repairing

Ah, fair enough, to be honest I can't remember the last time I used an OEM disk. Having worked in the industry (IT) for 25+ years I have collected original media for pretty much everything. I guess that's one of the problems, folks like me forgetting the typical experience of someone with a retail PC stuck with iffy OEM media

[arith]

In the

industry (IT) for 25+ years I have collected original media for pretty much everything

Ahhh lovely.

Adrian I wonder if you could tell me what could cause my PC to switch off by itself, without trying to restart. Then after restarting and shutting down again manually, the next start fails with a BIOS corrupted or missing message.

It is working normally on original BIOS now, not what it had before but I don't like updating BIOS; but I'm planning a replacement and I'm having bother choosing a cooler, preferably a passive tower like Thor, for an 8 core Bulldozer.

Any ideas welcome?

[Ady]

Hi Steve,

Is the missing/corrupt BIOS error for the system firmware or for a BIOS extension such as a disk controller? Main reason I ask is it tends to be pretty rare for a conventional system BIOS to function well enough to boot the machine but to then fail, forcing a hardware reset, and then go missing.

If it's a BIOS system that holds two different firmware images then it may be as simple as the code for the primary being iffy and need re-flashing. When the primary fails the BIOS detects the failure and uses the backup, but I have seen instances where the BIOS keeps defaulting to the primary firmware image even if it's a bit iffy. More often than not after a cold start where the power has previously been completely disconnected.

I more often see instances of things like flaky disk controller chip-sets generating errors, which will cause a failure during use. If the disk controller is becoming flaky it can prevent the BIOS loading the extension at boot as the controller is not responding, or at least not responding appropriately, so you get an error that looks on first inspection like a BIOS failure. If it's an intermittent failure related to something like temperature a few minutes of shut-down and everything is fine again.

I have seen similar issues with power supplies that are failing or a bit marginal in terms of power output, so at some point during more intense operation or plugging in one more power hungry USB device will push the PSU beyond what it can deliver, so the voltages/current falls and the machine shuts down. You then try to start the machine and the disks spin up and all those other internal and external peripherals start drawing full power and there just isn't enough oomph in the PSU to maintain the supply that the motherboard needs to go through POST and into bootstrapping. As a result the boot fails, often with a false error. I've seen this issue throw 'false' errors about BIOS, disks, RAID adapters etc... If the PSU is marginal it present itself as an intermittent fault as sometimes the voltage and current are just within what the motherboard can tolerate.

But to be honest without the results from a POST diagnostic card, or getting my hands on the hardware it's difficult to say.

On the cooler front there is the Cooler Master V8, they do have a fan but at 120mm it is pretty damn quiet and it has a built in fan speed controller so you can roll the voltage back to as little as 7v which caps the RPM and reduces the noise to something like 16dBA. Which is going to be significantly quieter than the GPU fan(s), unless you are going with a passive graphics card of course. In something like the Antec P193 V3 case (I used one of these as a case for a music studio PC where it performed admirably), which is reasonably sound proofed, it's almost completely silent.

Got to go now (photog job) but happy to continue later if my thoughts are of interest.

Cheers,
A

[arith]

Adrian,what a fantastic answer but shows just how little I know. I didn't know what a disc controller was but the HDD is brand new almost and SATA. It is a replacement for a drive that failed where I had to get a service engineer since I had no access to a computer, it was he who said it failed but I was very sceptical since I was able to get it working again enough to clone which he set up.
Before it failed I had BSOD but I've not often suffered from this; the pc is about 3.5 years old and has failed very rarely, it isn't overclocked and temperatures remain less than 40 in all circumstances.
However; I now have wifi, an external USB device and have suffered BSOD when disabling it, and also on start up where I forgot and left it connected.Just odd all this started after getting the wifi thing.
The yellow text telling me to wait while BIOS was recovered was at the bottom of the screen, but it was hard to tell if POST was completed since for some reason I got a dirty big picture instead of a report, but I know there was some text in white above that looked like POST, I didn't read it but just sorta stared at the yellow countdown, once in to BIOS straight off to jumperfree and turn the voltage down to 1.25 since it was too high, the board sets it too high by default.
In BIOS I noticed that I had a multiplier going up beyond 12x which means something odd has happened, same with the high speed link, could be set higher than originally.
Things on this pc are rated between 20,000 and 50,000 hrs, so I think maybe I need a new one, trouble is that I like photography and ones good enough for photography cost more than a thousand pounds, when I got this pc the minimums were stated as 1.3Ghz pentium or better, now it is 2Ghz dual core or better, so in two years I expect 2Ghz quad core to be the minimum for some photo software, and so I need faster and 3-4Ghz 8 core on 8 GB ram will keep me going for a few years.
I like the Cooler Master V8 but I found a site testing coolers on a 140w Bulldozer, and the Zalman http://www.zalman.com/eng/product/Pr...ad.asp?Idx=378 looks like it will do the job. I was thinking ASUS passive nVidia GT520 but maybe I need a fan if I don't put one on the side. It would be nice to have the V1 AX thermaltake cooler as in this pc but they don't make it and the new thing Spin Q showed temperature over 60 in the test.
http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.ph...&limitstart=11

[Ady]

Hmm, it does sound like the primary system BIOS, which is either a dual firmware image type or has a backup to HDD function for recovery. For example the Gigabyte motherboards have a recovery system that keeps a backup on the primary HDD but it is a system that is known to be a bit flaky. The integrity of the initial backup seems to be an issue on some systems so when there is an error detected the BIOS recovers a firmware image from the disk that is not necessarily any better (and potentially worse) than the version throwing the error.

In this instance flashing the BIOS is usually the only option, which I agree can be a difficult experience, especially if the NVRAM itself is flaky, resulting in any new flash of the BIOS corrupt and unusable.

It is odd that it coincided with the addition of a USB wi-fi adapter, but it could just be coincidence. If your BIOS supports it you might try setting BIOS support for USB legacy devices only and see if that helps. As a rule you don't need support for USB devices in the BIOS controlled stages of the boot process (unless you are booting from a USB device of course). If your BIOS allows you to enable support only for USB legacy devices it will ignore anything USB apart from USB keyboard input which it will capture and emulate as a PS/2 device. This should rule out any USB devices causing issues with the BIOS during the boot process.

Just to give you some perspective on processors and RAM I currently run an old Core 2 quad with 8Gb RAM and I find that adequate for most things. I do have a number of multi-layer 70+ mega-pixel images that cause Photoshop CS5 to crawl a little but that's the only time I find myself craving a bit more processing power. So I would image an 8 core processor with 8Gb RAM will do you for a fair while. On the subject of video cards I have a personal preference for the passively cooled ATI/AMD cards, they do seem to be able to get a bit more oomph from a passive design without suffering too much from temperature issues. The heatsinks are on the chunky side so the case needs to be reasonably large but cards like the Sapphire 11192-06-20G HD6670 1GB Ultimate will give you three or four times the processing power of the GT520 but still as a passive card.

The Zalman CNPS10X should be adequate unless you are thinking of over-clocking but even then I notice it has the option to add a second 120mm fan, so should be fine in a case with reasonable airflow, which the Thor V2 from Rosewill will certainly give.

If disk performance is a concern but you don't want to go down the SSD route yet then I would thoroughly recommend the Western Digital VelociRapter 600Gb (WD6000HLHX) as it's as fast as you will get without invesing in either SSD or SAS/FC SCSI disks and a high end controller.

Cheers for now,
A

[arith]

Cheers Adrian; what was bugging me was the cpu multiplier and voltage; because before the problem it was locked and only went up to 12x with max voltage 1.25v. Now it is unlimited and so very easy to break the cpu.

Well I've gone mad, because I get really uncomfortable with a computer I don't know what is going on with, and ordered the bits, really expensive bits. I'm going to have Ballistx 1.5V dual channel ddr3 cas 8,8,8,24 1600Hz 8GB pair, and 2TB Western Digital sataIII, no raid except for ram.

I'm looking at overclocking for voltages and the best I can see is setting to stock but lowered voltage to 1.116v apparently gives more stable results in the 8150, but this is an 8120 so I'll suck it and see.

Then I'm going to get Windows 7 premium OEM; I just found out my XP is OEM even though I paid for retail, you can't trust anybody but Amazon have gone to the trouble to explain what OEM is.

Don't know how to install W7 yet though; advice seems to be to let it install in the first partition, and not create a page file partition, just allow enough room about 30GB.

It will take me a while to do this, and I'm getting the parts insured for accident, because I haven't a clue what I'm doing.

[arith]

Cor; I wished I never thought of this computer lark. Got an email telling me my payment failed and my skype wouldn't call the traders number. Invalid it said. So I used my mobile and tried to pay for it again and it got failed again, and again. So I'm told to get in touch with both paypal and my bank; which I did and after being driven round the bend they tell me it was just a security check, for my safety.

Why did they choose this moment costing me £10 in phone calls; I would have rather got myself a nice lens, if I new what was wrong with the pc. I'm thinking since the cpu is now unlocked and that normally involves short circuit, maybe that is what has happened.

Well, back on course again, touch wood. I think maybe reading about pc problems is contagious.

[Ady]

Hi there, unless you put the page file on a physically separate disk to your OS you may as well leave the whole disk as a single partition (or two if you want to keep your data on a separate partition for ease of management). There is a theoretical advantage to creating multiple partitions on a single disk but to be honest if you keep your OS partition defragged, including the pagefile you won't see a tangible real world benefit of using multiple partitions. A 3rd party defrag tool is required for boot time system file defrag and drive optimization, such as positioning files in particular regions of the disk something like UltraDefrag or Puran Defrag) or a commercial offering.

Generally speaking to realise any significant, tangible benefit you really do need to place pagefile, data and OS on separate spindles (separate physical disks), but I wouldn't worry about anything like that until you have run the new setup for a while and worked out where any performance bottlenecks are and if they have a big enough impact to warrant spending extra on drives, controllers etc. Most folks find that they are quite happy with OS, pagefile and data on a single disk as long as that disk is reasonably quick and they are not pushing image file sizes too much. With 8Gb RAM you shouldn't be too reliant on paging to disk if your image files aren't huge. With the bulldozer in there the CPU certainly shouldn't be a bottleneck!

Sorry to hear your woes around ordering, and yes once you start to get into the guts of how your machine ticks it can become compelling to the point of addiction. I have friends who spend more time testing and replacing their hardware, convinced that something is making it slower than it should be, than they do actually using it. When it comes to my personal computing I'm only interested in the PC as a tool these days, though I do have to confess to recently getting rid of a huge collection of servers/worstations/CRT monitors (I loved my old CRTs when they were stable, much nicer than this new-fangled flat stuff) and a couple of printers.

Well good luck and I hope all works out well in the end!

I'm happy to offer advice/opinion if you need any in future, assuming you find my advice/opinion worth having!

Cheers,
A

[arith]

Cheers Adrian; I got most of the stuff today and I don't have to buy any screws, plus I got a free toothbrush. The memory Ballistix 1600Mhx CAS 8, 8, 8, 24 has a nasty sharp fins on top so I might push them in with a piece of card, and the case Fractal Define R3 comes with loads of stuff including electrical thingies that fit on the back

Everything checks out and the graphics are slightly more expensive because I don't like to wait:

FX 8120 Bulldozer which will be set to stock but I will try a lower volt; 4Ghz on turbo.
Zalman Performa 10 cooler
Gigabyte GA 970A UD3
EVGA GT520 2GB DDR3 with 3D
8GB dual memory 1600Mhz
Corsair 600W builder power
Sony DVD RW
Western Digital 2GB HDD
Fractal Case with 2 fans

and whatever else I need, leaving blueray player unti I can afford it. Since I started this I haven't had any probs with the old pc, what's the betting it lasts for years.

[Ady]

plus I got a free toothbrush

erm... either I'm missing something or that is the oddest PC related freebie I've come across

Since I started this I haven't had any probs with the old pc, what's the betting it lasts for years.

right up to the point when you decide it's stable enough to use it for something else

Have fun, all the best,
A