Desktop PC problems.

[pamela]

I have a couple of old but working desktop PCs in the spare room which were given to me when my system sounded as if it might be giving up the ghost and I have yet to look at them. Thanks.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Given I built this one, if it proves terminal, I'll build another. Why would I pay someone else to do a simple job like that?

Be interesting to know how long the warranty is. ;-)

[whisky-dave]

If you get bored building them or you want something a bit specail or you d on't like windows or linux. But then again I don;t understand why everyone doesn't buy the cheapest car on the market, why buy a car that can do 200 mph when the spped limit is 7

0 and in london you rarely get above 50. I can hire a car and a driver 24/7 /365 .

Why do some spend £1000s on a watch, I haven't worn one since 2002.

It would be looks like I wasted applecare my imac will be 3 years old in oc tober and so far hasn't gone wrong at all, I haven't needed to re-install the sof tware, I:ve only had to force restart a few times and that seeme dto be bec ause of a USB stick that wasn't working properly. I've not had to pay for a ny upgrades. I feel teh same way about car computers and TV's and most prod ucts I don't want to have to DIY they should work as designed, if they don' t I don't want them. But then again for me DIY isn't something I wanted to make a living from.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I'd guess you'd not understand, but assembling a PC is something that can be done on the kitchen table. A car, a different matter. Unless you have a very large kitchen.

But I take it if performance doesn't matter - as you seem to think with a car - you'd be happy with the oldest PC ever made?

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I'd hope not given the very high prices of anything with an 'i' in the name.

But you didn't read I was asking about the warranty on a re-furbished PC, not new?

[T i m]

Or your lap in some cases! ;-)

To be fair I only let the Mrs grind the valves in in the kitchen, the kitcar we actually built in the back yard. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[GB]

I overtook a Lamborghini the other day. He was stuck in a lane doing

2MPH, and I was in a lane going at 4MPH. So, twice his speed!

[michael adams]

The more time you spend sitting in traffic jams, or in slow moving traffic, the more attention you're going to be paying to the interior of your car. Maybe comparing yourself with the cars in the other lanes. It would be even more depressing to be sitting in a cheap car with a matching interior while all around you are clearly sitting in comparative luxury enjoying all those features your car clearly lacks.

michael adams

...

[whisky-dave]

Why would I want to assembe a PC on a kitchen table ?

The person that married by Ex used to repair and service his bike in the living room, and it;s where he kept it.

I'd get one that suited me I don't go around telling porsche owners they've spent to much on their car and they could have brought one much cheaper than can do the same thing.

Not sure if you've seen the windows 10 PC advert where they have a trendy/hip school teacher (USA) that is also teaches in a rapper style and has a strange almost bee-hive hair style. Well in that ad he says "I couldn't do this on my Mac." It makes me wonder why he has a Mac in the first place, unless he's trying to say this is the first windows PC that's I've actually been able to do something useful on. Maybe I should ask the advertisers what they were/are getting at. I;m betting 99.8% don't even notice what he says.

[pamela]

I can't see how they make much profit even if they get the PCs free as company clearance.

They have to dust them down, check them over, reload the OS and check the licence details, make sure it's electrically safe, stick it on a shelf in the shop and fix it if it goes wrong in the next

6 or 12 (?) months.

It must take a few hours to do all that and I'm sure that person's utilisation is less than 100% depending on how many PCs they get in, so average labour cost per PC will be higher.

The shop I saw looked big enough to have to pay VAT which then reduces their portion of the sale price.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Sorry - forgot that sort of thing is beyond you.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Finally got some time to look at it.

After being totally powered down (unplugged) for a couple of days, it still wouldn't go beyond the start up pic.

Unplugged the latest addition - the SSD (which was a clone of the Win7 HD, still in place) - and it attempted to boot. But failed half way through the Win7 boot process.

Tried again but selected the XP HD. That booted normally.

Replugged the SSD and it again attempted to boot to Win7. But again failed half way through.

Unplugged the old Win7 HD, and everything back to normal.

So totally confused.

I use Easy BCD to allow multiple booting, and could boot from the old HD or SSD before all this.

[alan_m]

What happens if you hold down the appropriate Funtion key at the start of boot-up to get Win7 safe mode?

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I did try that but it froze after loading the various bits - as it does before safe mode.

But it's OK now.

The drive that *appeared* to be causing the problem was an IDE so probably yonks old. The other two are SATA.

[whisky-dave]

Real DIY men would have a workshop or an area to work on not have to rely on a kitchen table as their workbench.

[whisky-dave]

A friend had that problem he found out thatv cloning a windows 7 home editi on he brought via ebay wasn't valid license wise so wouldnlt install proper ly. He also found that cloning onto a larger drive didn't update certain boot s ectors of the disc properly in that it didn't identify the new HD as the 1T B he brought and still consider teh OS to be on he's old 250GB drive, so it wasn't using all the space for swop files on the new drive. He eventually got it working by NOT cloning but doing a fresh install.

This is one of the reasons we both prefer Macs.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I take it by that you have a workshop at home, then?

But more likely don't have a kitchen table.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

My Win7 is legit.

So you can run stolen software?

[Mark]

Personally I think a kitchen table would be fine for this purpose. A workshop is likely to be more dirty.

[RJH]

I think they get them for very little by the pallet load, and sell on the hope people buy anti-virus software or somesuch.