After moving interstate from Queensland to Tasmania, it came to pass that my primary PC wouldn't start. I tried all sorts of things and no go, it was dead in the water.... or so I thought. Upon removing some of the components to make way for a new build, I inadvertently touched the Start button on the motherboard and the machine started. Turns out it was a faulty hard-drive, that once removed the machine started without issue. Thing is, I had already set my heart on an AM...
I was so pleased with myself once I had gotten my Cosmos II Big Beastie all set up with Win 10 and all of my most used programs. It was a long time coming, what with mobo issues and the like, and it was fantastic to sit here in front of the 35" ultra wide screen connected to it....UNTIL MS decided to sneak in an update around 3.00 AM and borked quite a bit of stuff. I know it was around 3.00AM cos I walked past the machine to go to the toilet at 3.06 AM and noticed it was on and downloa...
Yeah, as the title suggests, I'm having trouble with notepad.exe constantly reinventing itself.... no matter how many times I end the process in Taskmanager/Taskkill in CMD as administrator. I no sooner end it and it is back pretty much instantly. When this happens the CPU is running at over 90%, often at full tilt, 100%. Not only that, it is writing files that I cannot find. So far it has written over 30Gb of files I am unable to locate, and on a 120Gb SSD, I will run ou...
Couldn't wait 'til after Christmas, which apart from Christmas Dinner and Christmas Pud is just another day for me these days. We'll just have a quiet dinner and day here among ourselves, and maybe visit or get a visit from my sister. Other than that it'll be fairly non-eventful, which suits me fine. So anyway, I've been wanting to rebuild for a while now, and earlier this evening I decided to bite the bullet and order the parts I want: Asus ROG Crosshair Hero VI/ AMD Ryzen 1700 bun...
At long last, after various hold-ups and distractions, days when I felt like crap with vertigo and arthritis, I finally got my AMD FX 8350 in the Thermaltake Level 10 case up and running again. Admittedly, there were a few things I needed to do to it - like install an AMD GFX card to match the CPU brand-wise, swap out some RAM and HDDS, etc - but that was just one part of a larger project. I've also been remodelling my desk and reorganising everything so I'm not using as much...
Well the title say it all, I just found a portable apps manager in Liberkey and I'm finding quite useful indeed. Not only does it keep all the apps handy in the one place, I've been able to uninstall several similar/equivelant programs to save space on my SSD, being the Liberkey versions tend to have a smaller footprint. The program is similar to Nirsoft's app manager, but I like Liberkey better. Now for those of you who don't know about Liberkey, take a look here...
Just when I thought I'd overcome the keyboard and mouse issues that came with Windows Update, Microsux goes a messes thing up again... and not through regular Windows Update... this time. Last night I was working on some video conversions when all of a sudden my machine BEGINS TO REBOOT: ''Working on Updates. Do Not Turn Off Your Machine'' Like WTF? Windows Update is disabled. No, it was done through Scheduled Maintenance which was running in the background ...
Yup, you read it right, Apple created a one-handed pop out keyboard for both left and right handed users, yet it is locked away because Apple does not want people using it. Like I said, how stupid is that? You can read more about it here. The only way an IOS user can access this feature is to jailbreak their phone, thus voiding the warranty and possibly messing up the phone entirely. Perhaps a 3rd-party developer will come up with one.... IF Apple allows it to appear in...
Okay, just kidding. Stardock can't do/think of everything; however, this nifty little tool from Nurgo Software is pretty cool.... not to mention somewhat useful. Yup, TidyTabs adds tabbed browsing to Windows Explorer and programs such as Word, Notepad and others. While the program does detect tabbable programs, there is a whitelist and blacklist to either add your own or remove those you don't need or use. I got is earlier and am quite chuffed at how useful it is.... havin...
In the early days I made it quite clear that I did not like Win 10 and that I'd stick with Win 8.1 because it is fast, stable and reliable. In fact, I'm still using 8.1 on my main rig and am happy with the choice to remain with it. However, I have Win 10 0n my HP 2-in1 and like it much better now that I've tweaked it to suit my likes and needs. In some cases I used 3rd-party apps to achieve the desired result, but often times I could adjust things in 'Settings&#...
The title pretty much says what the problem is, and for the most part it isn't an issue.... until I want to use various 3rd party programs to defrag and/or clean up. For example, the wipe free space in Ccleaner is unavailable, with the select boxes for each HDD greyed out and the drive description being SSD, which it isn't. The other program I can't use is SmartDefrag. Again, the select boxes for my HDDs are greyed out, and the drives are recognised as SSDs. Thing i...
Well my CoolerMaster Cosmos II, ASUS Maximus VII Hero mobo and CPU cooler have arrived... at long fechen last. Oops, I did say rant off, didn't I? Still, I waited long enough... and maybe there's a little residual frustration lingering. Anyway, I unpacked the Cosmos II.... and what a beastie it is, too! I thought the Thermaltake Level 10 was a beastie, but this beastie beats that beastie by quite a bit. It's fechen huge! Put it this way, and not...
So, a month ago now I ordered a new motherboard, liquid CPU cooler and a Coolermaster Cosmos II case, and I'm still fechen waiting on the arrival of these items. Why????? EOFYS, that's fechen why.... End of Financial Year Stocktake. Well that's a large part of it. The other part is that the mobo I originally ordered had suddenly became unavailable - in part because of stocktaking, but also something to do with a model revision to include USB 3.1 - and I'...
I hadn't planned to make any more tech purchases once I'd gotten my CoolerMaster Cosmos II and a Z97 motherboard to upgrade my i7 4790K rig, but plans do not always go to plan, as I found out yesterday, now. So there I was, trawling through price comparison pages for PC tech, as you do, when I spied this ASUS ROG Mars 760 Dual GPU graphcs card going for an unusually low price... and better still, the place selling it is just 20 minutes away by bus. Anyway, to cut a long story short...
Just as the title says, AMD is claiming that its upcoming Zen processor, which will be based on 14nm process tecnology, will compete with the best Intel can produce. To be honest, I really hope so. While my main machine is currently Intel based, I have run several AMD machines over the years and hope the company can again become competitive because I have been happy with its products and would rather see it remain a force in the tech world than fold, as some journalists/tech comme...