Comments for Ask the PC Guy

Comment on NVIDIA Graphics Drivers by Danny

Danny — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 17:33:45 +0000

Uninstalling the graphic driver and reinstalling the proper one shouldn’t be any trouble at all. The only thing that you will notice is that after you uninstall the wrong one and reboot, your screen will probably revert back 640×480 resolution. Just pop in the disc, or better yet, just go to the nvidia site and download the newest the greatest driver if you can stand navigating with that screen res, and install it.

Comment on Power Supply Getting Hot by Danny

Danny — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 17:29:43 +0000

I suggest swapping it out for a newer PSU before it actually does fry itself. If not, a PSU, depending on how it chooses to die, could bring several other components with it, not to mention pose a serious fire hazard!

Comment on Internet Connection Dies Often by Danny

Danny — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 17:27:32 +0000

I was going to suggest that your ISP may have a dynamic IP address that rotates out every couple hours. I know it is a real pain in the but for my brother-in-law that plays WoW and then suddently gets disconnected for a few seconds while the IP changes. But his always comes back about 10 seconds later…

Have you recently upgraded to Vista? There could be some driver issues for you there.

Comment on Desktop Can’t find IP Address by Danny

Danny — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 17:20:00 +0000

You may have had your ethernet card or your highspeed modem go bad on you. You can contact AT&T and, using your customer information, they can try to “ping” your pc to see if it is working online properly. If they can find and access the DSL modem, then it is most likely a faulty network card and will need to be replaced.

Comment on I think I might have found the problem by Danny

Danny — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 17:15:34 +0000

Ted,
If your cd burner is not compatible with DVD discs, then you are correct, you found your problem.

If the drive is a standard CD+/-R burner, then they will not work with DVD discs.

DVD +/- R’s will only work in a DVD/CDR multi drive or a DVD burner.

Comment on AVG Free Edition 7.5 by Danny

Danny — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 17:03:55 +0000

I too have had this problem, and typically I just uninstall and then reinstall. I see this problem occur sometimes when AVG does a software update, and not just an update to the virus database. I have only ever had it NOT fix the problem one time, and I just waited until the next update, then did the install process over again.

Comment on Bios says yes, dxdiag says no? :sigh: by Danny

Danny — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 16:54:27 +0000

I did a search and found a related article that may be of some interest to you.

http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion/index.php?t39088.html

Scroll down the page to “deeko’s” second post, and you should find what you are looking for.

Comment on Lost volume dial control on Toshiba Laptop by Danny

Danny — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 16:37:13 +0000

CarlaO,
It sounds like you are having another “driver” headache if the external dial is no longer working. You may want to check with Toshiba customer service to see if there are any fixes for it. Another concern is that when I ran a search for your problem, it seems there is a 50/50 chance that this model will develop problems with the hardware in the first few months of use, so it may not be a driver problem at all, but a defect that just happened to go bad when you were dealing with the other driver problems.

http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Satellite-A135-S4437-Widescreen-SuperMulti/dp/B000M8WTI6

Let me know if you have any luck, or if you need some more help.

Comment on New Laptop Questions - MATT by Danny

Danny — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 16:23:59 +0000

Matt,
Thank you for taking time to ask your question. I hope some of my answers help.

"I currently have a toshiba A135 S4407 but I don’t know if this suits me. Perhaps you can recommend a laptop or maybe this one is good enough."

PCGUY: The A135, going by what you have listed below, is a very good laptop for the money. Except for the $2K and up laptops that are specifically built for gaming and heavy duty video processing, standard laptops just will not compete with a PC as far as having a great gaming experience.

As you have said, you will be using this machine for some work applications and internet media. Your model I pulled up in my search stated that it came with 1 gig of ram, a multipurpose DVD drive and a duel core processor. Those are all excellent features and consumers should not settle for anything less when purchasing a new machine in 2007. My only concern is that you stated you preferred Windows Vista Premium. I strongly recommend upgrading the ram on your machine to 2 gigabytes, as Windows Vista will be taking up a large portion of your current available ram to run. Just by doing that, you will see an improvement in the running speed of your machine, especially when multitasking and video processing.

As far as the hard drive space, 100 gigs can be on the low side of hard drives in the current market. If you are using external drives and burning CD’s and DVD’s to store your large files, you shouldn’t have problems with space some time. I do suggest that when you install applications, to install them to the internal hard drive and not the external. You will see a performance hit if you are trying to run apps and even some “light weight” games from an external drive. Also, remember to run system tools like Disk Cleaner and Defrag. They are your friends!