POST COMPUTER PROBLEMS IN THIS THREAD ONLY

[Boycey]

It was sorted in the end (it was something to do with files for translation for those of you who are curious) and we managed to find normal MPGs of the files... thanks for the help everyone!

[BeardFaceMan]

I've always been able to use my Xbox One controller with my PC by just plugging it in with the recharge cable i have for the rechargable battery in the controller. The cable recently bit the dust and I bought a cheap 3rd party one. It works fine on the Xbox, no probs there, but on the PC I plug it in and it gives a little rumble but it's not showing as connected. If I press the start button my Xbox comes on. Tried unplugging the Xbox but the PC still won't recognize it. Have I just bought a shit cable? I would have thought any old cable that connects controller to PC would be OK.

[hedgehog90]

It's probably just a charging cable or it's faulty, so you can charge the battery but can't send any inputs or receive any feedback.
The reason it works with the Xbox is because it's falling back on the bluetooth.
Get a better cable.

[BeardFaceMan]

Yeah thats what I feared, bugger. It says 'charging cable' on the box.  Microsoft dont sell the cable on its own, you have to buy the battery too which is why I went for a third party cable as I cant afford to buy the whole plug'n'play kit.

[Zetetic]

I think you just need a standard micro-USB cable; it doesn't need to be anything to do with Xbox controllers in particular.

[BeardFaceMan]

Thats what I thought I had, the xbox charging cable has a little light on it and this one doesnt. And I think the connection on the xbox controller is a one of a kind, I tried all the cables I have, the micro usb on the controller is flatter than a standard micro usb.

[Zetetic]

I don't think it is.

With a USB cable attached, your wireless controller converts to a wired controller. Your controller should've come with a cable, though you can use most USB-certified cables that have a micro-USB connector on one end and a full-size USB connector on the other.

https://support.xbox.com/en-GB/xbox-one/accessories/connect-charge-cable-to-controller

Could be that you either have an awful lot of charging-only cables, or that you've got an awful lot of really terrible normal (i.e. not charging-only) ones.

[BeardFaceMan]

Ah I was using the cables from external hard drives and my mp3 player, after a bit of googling I see that they are mini usb and the xbox controller is micro usb. I didn't know there was a difference, or that there even was a mini and micro. And I don't have any micro usb cables. Bugger again.

[BeardFaceMan]

So it looks like there are two types of micro usb cable, micro is just for charging and micro-b is for data transfer so I need one of those.

[Zetetic]

I don't think that's right.

There are two types of USB 'Micro' connector: Micro A and Micro B. I don't think I've ever seen a 'Micro-A' plug, although it's possible I've never noticed. These are nothing to do with whether the cable is charging-only or not, just the shape of the plugs and sockets.

There are also USB cables that have been specifically designed just for charging - but these aren't termed anything other than "charging-only" or the like. They're a deviation from what you'd expect from a normal USB cable.

[BeardFaceMan]

Yeah I've just been looking at micro-b cables on amazon and some of them have a different shape connector. Thats a bit shit that they make them for charging only, I just thought a usb cable was a usb cable and any one would work. Isn't the whole point of usb is that its for data transfer? Fuck it, I'm just going to have to save up to get a new official plug and play kit, at least I know that works. Or one of the windows 10 wireless adapters they sell, they're the same price but I like a nice wire.

[Cuellar]

Anyone know of any good places to buy graphics cards? Keeping an eye on eBay but for my needs it's quite slim pickings.

Need a low profile one but don't want to spend £200. Rather spend about £60-AT MOST £100.

[Neomod]

This happened yesterday. The display of Helvetica (it seems) has gone a bit tits up in chrome and firefox. It only happens on certain pages. Ebay and discogs being two of them.



fig. 1

Any ideas how to sort this out?

Ta. x

[Neomod]

This happened yesterday. The display of Helvetica (it seems) has gone a bit tits up in chrome and firefox. It only happens on certain pages. Ebay and discogs being two of them.



fig. 1

Any ideas how to sort this out?

Fixed it. Problem was down to having two different versions of helvetica in my fonts folder.

[Twed]

[Cuellar]

Not strictly a computer problem, but computer related.

Bought a graphics card off of ebay on Tuesday, paid straight away, eager to get it know what I mean?

Cunt still hasn't sent it out. Quizzed him last night and he said 'it'll go first thing tomorrow morning [today] once I finish my night shift :)'

Needles to say it still hasn't been sent. Is this a scam? Doesn't look like a scam, he's got some pretty authentic looking photos etc.

When should I sack it in and cancel the order?

[NoSleep]

You've got time. Be patient and at the same time keep an eye on the date for reporting him to ebay.

[Cuellar]

You were right, and patience paid off. Got it yesterday, slapped it into my machine and it worked without a hitch.

Had a quick go of Overwatch last night, although I was sitting cross-legged on the floor. I think knowing the game made up for lack of mouse and keyboard dexterity but I did ok.

Just need to find the physical space to put the bugger now, and probably get some of those mains adapter internet things.

[popcorn]

I've got an embarrassing problem I can't go to the doctor about.

I'm using a shared internet connection in my building, and it's fast and stable, except when I look at grumble. Whenever I go to grumblehub.com, within two or three minutes, suddenly the whole thing slows to a crawl for the next 20 or 30 minutes.

I've tried changing my DNS, using different browsers, and using a VPN, to no improvement.

What is going on here?Iis the ISP throttling grumble? isn't that kind of a weird thing to do? (I live in Japan so maybe it happens here for some reason.)

I could ask the chap who I'm sharing the connection with but that's a bit of a nuclear option.

Please help. This is an extremely distressing problem.

[hedgehog90]

No idea, never heard of that but it's very possible that you're being throttled by Japanese porn nazis.
You could easily query google '<your ISP> grumble throt' (or words to that effect), but they might be censoring these results too.

Please help. This is an extremely distressing problem.

In all likeliness, in the not too distant future access to sites that aren't owned by the big media conglomerates will be throttled to some degree, so you (and the rest of us) better get used to it.

[Blumf]

Any particular grumble site(s)? Does a naught tumblr site do it? You are running ad-blockers and the like?

One way your connection could be slowed is if the dodgy site starts spamming your address with low level TCP/IP and related stuff. Basically DoS'ing your connection by flooding it with connection attempts. Might be some info on your firewall/router logs that show a spike of activity.

[popcorn]

Pornhub is my old reliable. Is it a bad one?

I don't venture much further out from there. I am indeed running adblockers.

[Blumf]

Hum, doubt it's pornhub, but I'd still see if your firewall is logging anything.

[Utter Shit]

Hi all - my laptop has given up the ghost as the display has packed in, however my (older) desktop is on the way out too - am I likely to be able to salvage much/any of the laptop for use in the desktop to give it a longer life? Also, does anyone have a recommendation for a decent laptop? I have a decentish budget of 400 or so and don't require much (basically just use it for Football Manager, Kodi and browsing) but would like it to last a few years. Ideally a big screen too, my old one is 16' which I believe is quite big but I would have preferred a bigger one.

Cheers

[Wilbur]

Eeerm. No. Unless you need it to be a laptop I'd go for a netop and monitor. You won't get a decent large screen laptop in that budget.

W

[Zetetic]

Does anyone have any suggestions where I'd get a Dell 7310 (13" Chromebook) from? Best I can think of is eBay or, occasionally, resellers on Amazon.

Not the 3380 or whatever. Alternative suggestions are welcome in theory.

[Utter Shit]

Eeerm. No. Unless you need it to be a laptop I'd go for a netop and monitor. You won't get a decent large screen laptop in that budget.

W

Cheers, yeah it seems like my current one is as big as I'm likely to get. I'm not that worried about having a bigger screen tbh, most of the time I use the laptop for watching snide streams of football matches I don't care about while I'm sitting on my fat hole, so a bigger screen would be good but not a priority. I very rarely bring the laptop around me so weight and size aren't really relevant. Neither is what it looks like, which I would have thought went without saying but all the laptop review sites seem to think "looks nice" is as valid a positive as "still works when you load more than 6 players on Football Manager". I just want one that prioritises performance, is under £500 and will still be working in a few years time.

Also RAM confuses the shit out of me - my current one is 8mb, but I'm looking at more expensive modern machines and a lot of them seem to be 4mb. Presumably the difference is that my one is DDR3 and the new ones are DDR4, but a) what the fuck does any of that mean? and b) what is the difference in meaningful terms?

Side note: how much am I likely to be able to salvage from my current laptop to put into either the new laptop (one that I've looked at seems really good but has a shit 256gb hard drive, when my current one is 1tb) or into my desktop?

Additional side note: Anyone see anything good/bad/notable about this bastard?

https://www.ebuyer.com/793850-hp-250-g6-i3-laptop-1wy65ea-1wy65ea-abu?mkwid=s_dc&pcrid=51467863979&pkw=&pmt=&gclid=Cj0KCQjwuMrXBRC_ARIsALWZrIi8S1u8pQG7HOzuEhRvRO7vGASPCrD1F7iST1oGlOd0tN4tjYs70ZUaAqXdEALw_wcB

[hedgehog90]

DDR4 is faster than DDR3, but I don't think the difference is that noticeable. I wouldn't worry about it.
As for screen size, best just stick to 15.6"

Your current laptop probably uses DDR3 ram which might be salvageable if you get a new DDR3 compatible laptop, or you could switch out the harddrives, but in the end you probably won't be saving any money doing this. If you're buying a new laptop with all this gear already included it becomes unnecessary, unless you're looking to replace your old one with an even shitter laptop which you can pimp up with old scraps.

The one you linked to is ok, but there's better deals out there.
I just clicked one of the offers down the page on the link you posted, and this looks much but for a fair bit less (346.11):
https://www.ebuyer.com/799644-acer-extensa-2540-laptop-nx-efhek-003

I also came across a very similar HP laptop to the one you linked for the same price (429.99), but with slightly better specs (faster processor* and double the disk space):
https://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/computing/laptops/laptops/hp-15-bs559sa-15-6-laptop-silver-10169036-pdt.html

* CPU comparison

Edit: You can get it 1p cheaper if you get it in red ;)

[BeardFaceMan]

The fan in my PC is starting to make an awful lot of noise (the one cooling the heatsink), it's a Cooler Master A9025-22RB-4BP-F1, can someone recommend a cheap replacement?

[Noonling]

I'll post here on the off chance someone has a magical solution...

So the Internet on my PC has been having problems ever since I moved here a couple of months ago. Sometimes its fine for a few days, but usually its only a few hours before it stops working properly. It mostly seems to work on my phone, although I frequently have to turn on and off the WiFi. The main error page I get says "DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_BAD_CONFIG"

In general it won't show any problem when trying to "diagnose" it. I can't ping, e.g. google.com, but I can ping a DNS server. Flushing the DNS cache does nothing. I tried setting a manual DNS server and this seemed to work for a few days...Then not (probably a coincidence that it worked?). I've tried deleting the wireless network profile. I've tried turning the router off and on again.

Perhaps worth noting I usually try to connect to an extension rather than the router itself, though often neither work. Sometimes switching from one to the other does work, or works for a few minutes.

Other oddities: A couple of times I've got the message that someone on the network is using the same IP address as me (though this doesn't usually pop up). If I disconnect & reconnect it often seems to work for about a minute (sometimes for hours). Sometimes when its kinda working but being super slow I look at speedtest.net, and I notice its using a server that's miles and miles away - this may come with a little warning that its to do with my VPN - I don't use a VPN.

The main oddity right now is that earlier this was genuinely the only website I could access. I couldn't use Google or anything, just Cookd and Bombd.