RF Generation Message Board

Well, this summer my house got hit by lightning and alot of my stuff also got hit, including my PC.  Ever since then I've had troubles with it.  The first time the power supply and ram got hit.  A month or so later... the motherboard, power supply, and video card were gone.  And now a few more weeks later, for sure the power supply is dead, and who knows what else.

This is getting frustrating, I think I might just buy a new computer if when I take it to the shop something else is wrong with it.

Sorry I just needed to vent about this.  Anyone else have alot of computer troubles?

I spent 7,5 hours yesterday messing with my computer. The network was acting freaky and it made no sense at all. I reinstalled windows several times, and changed the position of most of the pci cards, untill it worked.
Now it's fine, but I won't be surprised if certain things will stop working again soon. I guess my pc is just too full of crap.

My network gets screwed up all the time.
My computer disconnects from the internet for no reason and i will have to reboot and repair the connection manually.
Sometimes i have to restart a few times. Sometimes i just have to unplug the router and plug it back in.

My computer 95% of the time isn't trouble.
And my old computer i gace my bro on the other hand there is almost always something going haywire.

A few days ago whenever I would turn on my computer nothing would show up on my monitor.  So after about an hour of messing with it, it turns out that one of the ram sticks so now I have to settle with only having one gig of ram until they send me the replacement.

My little black box is fine.  Though its due for an oil change as soon as I get time for it.  Just did it to the lappy, and that breathed some life into it, it's fairly old though.  

I would recommend getting all new components if your computer was struck by lightning.  If some of the capacitors (or more likely inductors) have broken, the thing may still function, although it will not be safe to use it.  If some of those components are near death, they can spike and cause further damage to the other components.  Are you using a surge protector?  

I need to get RAM and a new video card. My pc is so slow. Maybe tomorrow i'll go over to micro center.


Dude Hydro, that galstaff thing rocks. I'm currently DM'ing a group of 8 to 10 year olds and its not unsimilar.

Wait a month or so, and get some RAM and a video card real cheap on black friday (day after thanksgiving).



Where are the cheetos?
Next to the Mountain Dew, duh!

My old PC was very slow for no reason at all it seemed.

My new PC flies and I am happy.

Is it my imagination or do computers get slower over time? I have the feeling my computer was quicker when I had just purchased it, and I'm using pretty much the same software on a clean install of windows xp.

They absolutely do, using a computer will make it slightly slower over time.  Some things that can help are minimizing the amount of software you have run on system start and making sure you defrag regularly.

I know mine has slowed considerably since I first got it. My problem is I work with a lot of hi-res art. It gets backed up and removed when I'm done with it but when work is in progress my PC is pretty loaded down.

I pretty lazy about file management and defragging too.

It's also healthy to re-install Windows every 6 months or so.  It makes a considerable difference.

I would reinstall window Xp every 6 months or so but it still didnt seem to make a difference.

I just took my computer up to the shop a litle while ago, so hopefully I'll find out what all is wrong with it.  If its more than the power supply I'm just going to build a new computer.

Strange, I usually re-install every 3-4 months, and I can notice a  large performance difference when I do.

Can you reinstall Windows without losing all your files?

- Zac

Not that I know of... just have to back everything up.

I got the computer back, and they said the power supply got hit by a surge again?  They said I need to check my wires?  I called my dad and he said they're probably just telling me some BS and their power supplies are bad.  But if it goes bad again I'm just going to buy one myself.  I also bought a brand new surge protector... so we will see.

those surge protectors are useless in most cases.  By the time the surge protector trips, the damage is done.  Also, some homes suffer from voltage droop.  The voltage and frequency will vary in a house.  This is just as bad b/c it destroys your data over time.

The best option is to get a UPS.  It will prevent the droop, and the nice ones have a sensing unit that will send a signal from the input to to the breaker that will trip before the lightning surge gets through the charging unit.

Yeah they're useless against surges, but you can plug nine million things into 'em.

You won't be able to save your program files easily, but you can save all your documents, movies, music, etc. and not have to back them all up on discs.  Just partition your hard drive.  I have a 120 GB drive in my PC that has 15 GB set aside for Windows and my program installations and a 105 GB partition set aside for all of my files.  That way when I reformat to reinstall Windows, I only have to do it on the 15 GB partition of the drive, and I don't lose any of my files on the 105 GB partition.

One final note, when you go to reinstall, make sure to reformat your hard drive.   You can put two copies of windows onto the same drive, and that won't help you at all.  

I did that^ the first time i reinstalled. Not fun.

remember to backup your drivers ;)

No need to just make sure you download all teh drivers you need first.   ;)

unless it's your onboard lan driver.  it happened to me so i thought i would just download the drivers to my flash drive at work.  well, the xp disc also didn't have an updated driver for my usb ports.  i had to borrow a friend's pc to burn the drivers to cd.  i had to learn the hard way.  i also misplaced my xp cd once so now i back up the i386 folder to the root drive on all my new builds.

I hooked up a newer larger monitor to my PC today and it has the smell of burning plastic....

Hopefully that goes away... because i'm not unhooking it yet.

My CPU fan broke.
Put in a new fan started it up and windows is corrupted.

ANd i have a HUGE project that i cannot access now :'(

Is it the main drive or a second drive in the PC?

Main drive.

I had to format it.
I *MIGHT* be able to recover some shit later with a program.
Right now i had to take the day off school to retype this paper.
Which is what i am going to get back to doing.
Its worth 20% of my grade.

I lost tons of pics/vids of myself family and friends, 20gigs of music, all my work on UT and UT2k4,  any papers i have typed in the last 3ish years and a bunch of other stuff.

Try the program R Studio it kicks ass for getting data back.

I'll look into it.
I messed around with WinUndelete i think it was called a bit before.
It warned about causing permanent harddrive damage though...

Especially if you recover a deleted item from a harddrive back onto the same drive.

Thanks for the heads up.

My brother recovered files off a drive after he installed Linux over Windows XP.