28 posts shown.
Eric Taylor55 said:So I fired up the computer after a long time away, and it was just doing that thing where the image on the screen flickers like before (I think that's why it used to crash)... it hasn't crashed this time, but I haven't actually done anything besides checking the properties. I have no idea where to find the specs for the power supply...
Basically, here is what I'm running right now:
Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.00GHz
2 GB RAM
Radeon X550 / X700 Series
I don't know which of this is worth keeping or if it's just an issue with the graphics card?
Man, that thing is basically a relic from fifteen years ago...
It might even be the monitor itself—try plugging it into another computer if you can manage that.
If I were you, I’d just scrap the whole thing and start over—case, power supply, motherboard, CPU, hard drive—because trying to salvage this is just asking for a headache. Your hard drive might even be using those old IDE connections, which won't even plug into a modern motherboard without some sketchy adapter. Not to mention, that drive could give up the ghost at any second. You don't really need a dedicated graphics card anymore anyway, since most modern motherboards come with decent integrated graphics built-in, and playing chess doesn't exactly require a high-end GPU.
Your keyboard and mouse probably use those old PS2 ports too, which you won't find on any new motherboards these days.
Since he needs Microsoft Office and chess, he’ll obviously need an OS. I'm assuming it's running Windows XP right now, which is a terrible idea if he's planning on doing anything like online banking. Either way, if he sticks with XP and goes online, he should just prepare to live in constant coexistence with whatever viruses decide to crawl in.
Just head over to
http://forum.pcekspert.com/ and post the exact same question there.
There are a few veteran users based out in Savannah, so they’ll probably be happy to point you toward some reliable local repair guy in your neck of the woods.
Trying to DIY this via a forum is just asking for a headache, honestly, because there are way too many variables that can go sideways, and since you already admitted you aren't exactly a tech wizard...
nimbleheron4 said:Hey there,
I’m looking for a bit of advice if anyone here actually knows what they're talking about.
I need a laptop by $1667 at the latest. My main priority is having enough juice to run Adobe Creative Cloud smoothly. I'm not doing high-end professional graphic design, but I find myself jumping into Photoshop and Illustrator pretty frequently.
This specific model caught my eye:
https://www.bestbuy.com/laptop-example-link
Intel Core i7 (2M Cache, up to 3.6 GHz), 16GB DDR4 RAM (2x8GB), 256GB SSD, 15.6" FHD 1920x1080 Dell UltraSharp display, NVIDIA GeForce 2GB VRAM, DVD-Super Multi DL drive 8x, USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C port; 2 xUSB 2.0, 2 xUSB 3.0 ports, one with power-off USB charging, Ethernet (RJ-45) port, HDMI port, VGA port, SD card reader, Dell UltraSharp webcam, WiFi 802.11, Bluetooth 4.0, 4-cell battery (8.5h), weight 2.23 kg, Black color, Boot-up Linux, 2-year warranty for individuals/1-year for businesses
I've already got an external hard drive, so I can just plug that in to fix the storage situation.
Plz let me know if this is a good pick or if you have better suggestions.🙂
Honestly, it looks like a decent enough machine for under $500... though I wouldn't be the guy to vouch for how it handles Adobe Creative Cloud; I'm still dragging along with Adobe Creative Suite 3—it's ancient, sure, but it gets the job done for me. I've got an old i7-2630QM in my current laptop that's still somehow about 20% faster than that FX-9800P. With 8GB of RAM, it handles Adobe just fine, but then again, my photos aren't massive resolutions and I don't mess around with dozens of layers. 16GB should be plenty for most amateur projects, and frankly, you aren't going to find much more than that for $500 anyway. You'll obviously have to buy Windows yourself, since I highly doubt Adobe will play nice on Linux—you could probably make it work with some masochistic tinkering through Wine, but I wouldn't touch that with a ten-foot pole.
I don't know about this one at that N4200 processor feels a bit sketchy to me, honestly. It's one of those chips designed for passive cooling, which basically means you're trading any semblance of actual speed just to squeeze out a little extra battery life. If I were in your shoes, I’d happily sacrifice 4GB of RAM just to get a decent i3 instead—and look, let's be real, an i3 isn't exactly a powerhouse either, but hey, you get what you pay for, right?
Maybe try this one... you might even score a little dedicated graphics card as a nice little bonus.
Yeah, it should work just fine
DDR3? Seriously? I feel like I’m staring at a fossil from a bygone era every time someone brings up that obsolete tech. It’s honestly a bit surreal how quickly we move from "cutting edge" to "dusty relic," but here we are, still talking about memory standards that belong in a museum next to rotary phones and floppy disks. At this point, pushing DDR3 is less about computing and more about archaeological preservation.
PCI? You know, I was sitting there yesterday, just staring at my monitor, thinking about how much we take for granted with these hardware standards. It’s funny how we just assume everything will slot together and work perfectly, like some kind of universal truth, when in reality, it’s all just layers of legacy protocols held together by sheer willpower and a lot of copper. People start asking about PCI like it's this simple, straightforward thing, but once you start digging into the nuances of bandwidth, lane configurations, and how much heat a modern card is actually going to dump into a chassis, the whole concept starts feeling a bit more complicated than your average plug-and-play experience. It’s one of those things where you think you understand the rules until you're halfway through a build and realize you've miscalculated exactly how much throughput you need to keep from bottlenecking your entire system. Honestly, most people don't even give it a second thought until something fails, which is pretty much how most things go in life, isn't it? Just cruising along until the connection drops or the speed throttles, and then suddenly you're left wondering why you didn't pay closer attention to the specs in the first place.
If you’ve got a DVI port on the back (this one here: I was just scrolling through some technical diagrams earlier when I stumbled upon this image of an RJ45 jack, and honestly, it’s one of those things that looks incredibly straightforward until you actually have to sit there with a crimping tool in your hand and try to make sense of the wiring order. It’s funny how we take all this connectivity for granted, assuming everything just clicks together perfectly, but there's always that slight tension when you're staring at a tiny plastic socket wondering if you've aligned the pins correctly or if you're about to waste half an hour of your life on a dead connection. You look at these schematics and they seem so clinical and organized, yet anyone who has ever spent a rainy Sunday afternoon trying to patch a network in a basement knows it's usually a much more chaotic process involving stripped wires and a fair bit of frustration. It’s just one of those little details of modern life that most people ignore, but once you start looking into the mechanics of how we stay plugged in, you realize just how much fragile little hardware is keeping our entire digital existence from collapsing into nothingness.So, at that point, all you're really looking for is a cable—specifically this one: I was browsing through Amazon earlier and stumbled upon this basic DVI to HDMI adapter, and honestly, it’s one of those things that just sits there in the digital ether waiting for someone to realize they need it. You know how it goes—you’re digging around in a dusty drawer in your home office in Chicago, pulling out some old hardware from five years ago, and suddenly you realize everything you own uses a different connection than the monitor sitting on your desk. It’s a minor annoyance, really, but it’s the kind of little friction that defines modern life. This little piece of plastic and copper is basically a bridge between two eras of tech, helping an older desktop finally talk to a modern screen without making a massive production out of it. It’s cheap, it’s functional, and it doesn't pretend to be anything more than what it is, which is probably more than I can say for most things you buy online these days. If you've got an old setup gathering dust, it's a simple fix, though I suppose we'll all be replacing these interfaces entirely before we even realize it.)
If you don't have a DVI port on your setup, then you might as well just grab the cheapest graphics card you can find—specifically this one: I was scrolling through Amazon earlier and stumbled upon this MSI GeForce GT 720 listing, and honestly, looking at these specs just makes me feel old, or maybe it's just that everything is getting worse, I can't tell anymore. It’s one of those cards that feels like a relic from a different era, much like how you look back at an old Dell Optiplex 330 and wonder why anyone ever thought that setup was enough to get through a workday. You see these things pop up in search results and you have to wonder if people actually think this is going to handle anything modern, because let's be real, it's basically a paperweight for anyone trying to do more than just push pixels around a screen. I remember when having a dedicated GPU felt like a luxury, but now seeing this priced out there just feels like a weird glitch in the matrix where we pretend outdated hardware still has a purpose in a world driven by massive processing power. It’s fine, I guess, if your idea of high-end gaming is something from twenty years ago, but for the rest of us living in the real world, it's just a strange little reminder of how fast everything moves toward obsolescence.)
Nicholas Wells74 said:I'm looking to root this thing because my little nephew has been messing around with it, installing, deleting, and reinstalling a mountain of games from the App Store. Ever since I got it, I haven't been able to get any kind of AdBlocker running on it without rooting first. Now that the kid has really done a number on it, it’s stuttering like crazy and feels incredibly sluggish.
I’m not even sure if I have a USB cable long enough to plug it into my computer and try to run Magisk. Honestly, I couldn't care less about iOS devices, and frankly, I'm losing interest in macOS computers too. All I ever want is to turn something on and have it actually work.
But hey, maybe I'll see what happens if I give Magisk a shot.
In that case, honestly, it might be a lot easier to just perform a factory reset rather than dealing with the headache of rooting. Just keep in mind that doing a reset will wipe everything "yours" off the tablet—so you should probably move all your photos and anything else you actually care about over to an external drive first.
Usually, rooting the device is going to void your warranty, whereas a reset won't.
So, I’ve given it a shot myself—did you try running that Magisk APK directly, or were you messing around with it via a PC?
https://root-apk.magiskapp.com/