Look, I’d suggest you don't take what guys like crimsonfalcon38 are saying too seriously—either he’s totally out of the loop or he’s just trolling at this point.
When it comes to motherboard sales, Dell usually leads the pack, followed closely by Intel. While those rankings might shift slightly from month to month, I can tell you one thing for sure: an Intel board isn't some piece of junk.
I’m not entirely sure if I can offer much help here—you probably already know the answer yourself. It really just comes down to this: mixing old and new RAM sticks often leads to them clashing, and that's pretty much the end of the story. I actually ran into this myself with my desktop once. I was running 6GB of RAM—three 2GB sticks—and wanted to bump it up to 8GB total. So, I grabbed another 2GB stick, but of course, it wouldn't work. I double-checked everything—latencies, speeds, all that technical junk—and they were an absolute match for the other three sticks, but still, no luck. I ended up taking it right back to Best Buy. A few months later, I decided to take another gamble, but this time I went with a different manufacturer, and it actually worked! No fighting, no issues, and the PC recognized the full 8GB perfectly. Honestly, you need a little bit of luck involved; the easiest and smartest move is always to try the RAM out in the machine before you officially buy it.
Well, at least now you know the culprit was just that noisy CPU fan. If you’re still looking to dial down the noise, you can always hop into your BIOS settings—look under the CPU fan section—and drop the RPM from "full" down to "low" or "normal." It should help quiet that little cooler down quite a bit.
If the fan noise from your CPU cooler is starting to get on your nerves, you can always jump into the BIOS—you should be able to tweak the RPM settings there to either "silent" or "normal" if it's currently cranked up to "high."
As for that YouTube issue? Honestly, I haven't got a clue.
If you're hearing that noise coming from your graphics card, it’s most likely what darkowl72 mentioned—coil whine. It's actually pretty common, so don't worry, it doesn't mean your card is broken or anything. Just a heads-up so you aren't stressing about it—they won't be swapping out your hardware just because of that (assuming that really is the issue)
stormywalker68 said:Let me explain what's going on—I've got an ASUS X55A laptop running Windows 7 Ultimate. It’s about two and a half years old, and honestly, I haven't had a single hardware or software hiccup until now. I mostly just use this thing for browsing, streaming movies or shows, listening to music—that kind of stuff. For actual gaming, I just stick to my desktop.
The thing is, a few days ago, the laptop pulled down a massive pile of updates, and ever since then, everything has gone completely south. It's been a total nightmare.
Now, when I boot it up, it takes about five minutes just to get Windows running, and then it spends another 15 to 20 minutes loading various background services. Once it finally settles, the whole system is incredibly sluggish, and opening any program feels like pulling teeth.
Web browsing is a disaster. Every time I try to open a new tab in Firefox, it freezes up for two or three minutes with that "Mozilla Firefox not responding" error, and even when it finally unfreezes, the page loads painfully slow.
To make matters worse, there's no sound at all. Even though the system claims everything is working perfectly, I'm getting nothing. I tried reinstalling the drivers—wiped the old ones and put in new ones—but no luck. I even followed some troubleshooting tips from the ASUS website specifically for this model, but still nothing.
I ran scans with AVG and Malwarebytes, and everything came back clean.
It’s just incredibly frustrating because the laptop has become basically useless—unless I wanted to sell it to someone who actually enjoys suffering.
Should I just wipe everything and do a fresh install?
If you want, shoot me a private message and I can send you a link for Windows 7 Ultimate that has all the updates integrated through this month. That way, when you reinstall, you won't waste three hours waiting for every single update from 2009 to today to download. These are "clean" versions, too—not some sketchy build with random extra programs shoved in.
You shouldn't have any trouble reactivating Windows. Just a quick heads-up—before you swap in that SSD, make sure you format the hard drive first. It’s probably better to wipe things clean before you move Windows over to the SSD, just so you don't run into any annoying activation headaches later on.
Do you have any critical data sitting on that hard drive? If not, I honestly think you could afford a fresh installation of Windows without much trouble...
At first glance, I’m thinking your hard drive might be on its way out...
Try running CrystalDiskInfo to see what kind of shape the drive is actually in—if you want, just grab a screenshot and post it here so we can take a look together.
Exactly—you aren't going to be running any of the latest titles at Full HD resolution because that card just isn't built for gaming. Besides, laptop GPUs and desktop graphics cards are two completely different animals (just so you know). If this is actually the laptop you're looking to pick up, check this out:
I noticed the video memory on the graphics card is running at DDR3 speeds, which isn't great. It really should have been at least DDR5 speeds if they wanted things to feel smooth and fast. My personal take? I wouldn't buy this laptop if your main plan is to spend most of your time hooked up to an external monitor just to play games.
Patrick Moore53 said:Thanks a ton! You kind of threw me for a loop with those specs—like whether I should go with a 350W or 500W power supply, or if I really need integrated graphics. Also, regarding the guys handling shipping, can I just swing by and pick up the package myself?
I originally budgeted up to $667, but it looks like I can actually snag a better deal.
Thanks again to everyone on the forum! 🙂
That setup featuring the Intel Celeron G1840 processor is going to be incredibly low-power, so you really don't need to worry about grabbing a high-wattage power supply.
Try heading into your BIOS to see if the drive is actually being detected—and if it isn't set to AHCI mode, you should definitely switch it over to that. I mean, you're going to have to install macOS on it anyway, right? Once you get to the OS installation stage, the installer needs to be able to see the partitions on the drive so you can actually pick it as the destination for your installation...