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Some Computer Help
Topic Started: Feb 12 2012, 03:43 AM (395 Views)
Professional Protagonist
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Girl power
So I've got this laptop here and I've had it for a couple years now. When I first got it, I paid a good amount of money and it was top of the line. It's a Dell working on Vista with an Intel Core Duo. It's always been very nice but lately things have been slowing down and I can't figure out how to stop this issue. It was never made for intense gaming, but I could play Starcraft 2 on lower settings just fine before, and now it heats up almost to the point of auto shutdown with Plants vs. Zombies. Running my browser (Firefox) seems to tax it, especially when I go to Google, where it just freezes, sometimes for a few minutes and sometimes completely.

My old cooling pad wore down and doesn't work anymore, but it never did a whole lot to be honest, yet my new one is a piece of shit. With all these issues I'm facing, I'm about to go mad and just throw this thing which I used to love so much against a wall. Anybody think they can offer some help?
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Charnobyl
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Chan eil.
You need to upgrade yo' shizz, Jeeves.

Seriously though, it sounds like it's just past it's prime. I'd look into some online help forums and see what they suggest for over-heating solutions.
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POOHEAD189
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I also have another problem that's more annoying than anything.
See, this is how my computer was before. The Icons and the windows into things like MSN seem curvy. And when I clicked on icons at the bottom of my screen, they popped up and showed me what I was hovering my mouse over visually.
Posted Image

Now everything is squared, and when I click on an icon, it just lists it. What happened?

And yes, I did block out Teen's Email.
Edited by POOHEAD189, Feb 13 2012, 09:57 AM.
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Lithas
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The One
Poo, can you snag a "current appearance" screen shot? I think I see your problem, but I wanna be sure.

Anyway: here's a link to a tutorial on getting your border transparencies back. Basically you just right-click and go to personalize. http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/282-window-color-appearance-change.html?filter[2]=Appearance%20Personalize

And for the hover-preview, here's one on that: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/75804-taskbar-list-thumbnail-previews-mode-change.html
Edited by Lithas, Feb 13 2012, 03:57 PM.
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Setsu
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Resident Waterbender
I helped him on Skype. He just forgot to post here saying it was fixed. But yeah, his theme was set to Windows 7 Basic.

And ProPro. The only thing I can think of is either defragging your hard drive, or just reformatting it and starting over.
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Lithas
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The One
Setsugami
Feb 15 2012, 12:48 AM
I helped him on Skype. He just forgot to post here saying it was fixed. But yeah, his theme was set to Windows 7 Basic.

And ProPro. The only thing I can think of is either defragging your hard drive, or just reformatting it and starting over.
Actually, I doubt it's his harddrive. His problems are with hardware, though. He probably needs to clean his vents, check his heatsink's connection to the processor, and upgrade his RAM.
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POOHEAD189
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I think I need to clean out the inside of my computer maybe. But for some reason my computer just froze and made a weird noise for a little less than a minute, then just kept going as if nothing happened.
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Damon
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Ancient Bartender
Luke, I wouldn't suggest urging someone to open up a laptop if they don't have experience with computer hardware, which Jeff might have, but I don't know whether or not. I would never open up a laptop to try and fix it, and I just built a computer from scratch.
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Lithas
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The One
Damon
Feb 15 2012, 05:38 PM
Luke, I wouldn't suggest urging someone to open up a laptop if they don't have experience with computer hardware, which Jeff might have, but I don't know whether or not. I would never open up a laptop to try and fix it, and I just built a computer from scratch.
Actually, if you follow the manufacturer manuals online you can do laptop maintenance pretty safely ^.^ Dell, I know, has detailed instructions on all of their models for everything from cleaning out dust to replacing your keyboard, to changing RAM.

@Poo: What kind of computer is it and what did the noise sound like clicking, grating, beeping, whirring?
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POOHEAD189
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Its an Asus desktop computer, and it sounded like a grating and a whirring.
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Lithas
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The One
POOHEAD189
Feb 15 2012, 09:06 PM
Its an Asus desktop computer, and it sounded like a grating and a whirring.
Sounds like you may have blown out a fan. Open it up, and sniff around a little bit (literally) to see if anything is burned out. Check to see if any of your fans don't spin when you turn on the machine. If I had to guess what happened was that your processor got hot, kicked on your fans and then one blew out (causing the grating) the rest of the fans got turned higher to make up for this, which cooled the processor some more.

Solution: New fan, clean out the ventilation on your box.


The other thing it could have been was a hard drive. I really really doubt this, because any grating noise coming from there would probably trash the hard drive. However, I'd still recommend backing up your data in case your machine decides it's not worth keeping anymore.
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POOHEAD189
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Hey, DMM's computer keeps turning off.

When he turned his computer on, it says at the bottom

"USB Device Over Current Status Detected."
Then it says going to power save mode, then it just shuts off...
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Lithas
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The One
try turning it on without anything but a keyboard and a monitor plugged into it.

A.)If it works plug in things one at a time and try turning it on until it faults.

B.) if it doesn't try booting into safemode, or try using a different keyboard.

If i had to guess I'd say you either have a bad USB port or some corrupted drivers. It's kinda weird problem, though, so I'll do some snooping around and see what I can find.

EDIT: if it's not your USB ports it looks like it's your mobo, tough dice. :/ You can either bring in the computer to a repair center and have them go through all the stuff in the link down there (V) or get a new one. If you're confident you can try it yourself, but make sure you're careful about static and the like.

http://www.whoho.com/2011/03/usb-device-over-current-status-detected.html
Edited by Lithas, Feb 19 2012, 04:55 PM.
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