FINALLY get back to CK. My poor pc has had a rough time of it. long story short, nearly 2 weeks ago the lil bugger stopped starting up, he'd restart over and over and over when it got to loading windows. So after Mole had a few attempts at fixing it, we found it was faulty ram and needed a windows repair. Having everythign in storage I took it to the local pc shop to be done. Was gonna cost £25.

Well after they fixed it... turns out actually the fan on the gfx card was buggered (hence it had been getting alarmingly noisy on start up for a wh ile anyway) so I needed a whole new card. Luckily they had a really cheap GeForce 7950GT with 512mb ram (pcie) for only £149! So I had them put that in, plus a new gig of ram. So ended up paying about £230 in the end, but lil guy kicks ass now *pats pc* so here he is, welcome him home!

about bloody time you got back, if you could stop ya MSN being gay then that would be even better

still, glad ya back

Ye its never the lil things that break when talking about computers. Its always one of those expensive components, Murphy said so.

Good to hear those pc problems seem fixed.

So how are your impressions on FF XII ?

msn is being ok tonight mr joke, get on there! hehe

J... random lol. My impressions? I love it. Not better than #7 though. Haven't played it in a while though so can't really remember what i was up to...

welcome back, glad you got that stuff sorted. I hate fixing computers.

Heh... they should probably start making self-testing hardware. It is never hard to detect improper work by the voltage there and there, which is hard for us to measure. But few extra elements (or even a chip) and a lighting diode wouldn't cost too much.

Self testing? how about self repairing? or is that too much into the future

Since PC, fixing has always been more expensive than purchasing new, in principle.
Diagnostics is a problem from the real world.

Question for all: would you pay $10-20 more per PC component, just to have it blink when it die?

Btw wb pev, glad to have ya here.

ta Free


Yep, I'd pay that. At least then I'd know it was worth paying the £149 for a new card, rather than just taking the guys word for it. Of course, there's nothing to stop them trashing the card while its in the store, then getting me in and saying "look, its blinking, you need a new one" but at least i'd know it was buggered then.

Well, most of the time when a component dies, it doesn't completely die... it just becomes unreliable. IE, it'll occasionally return a 0 when it should return a 1 (or whatever). I don't know if logic gates get damaged/destroyed, or there are short circuits in the chip, or what. So just whether or not it's getting power wouldn't be that good a test.

Still, I definetely see merit in the idea. I mean, RAM could have a routine during startup where it reads and writes to itself x number of times and if a bad read/write happens it throws an error to BIOS. Same with graphics card memory. Additional diagnostics could be performed by O/S drivers... for gfx cards you could just shove alot of math into it and make sure the results are right. CPU you could probably do similar. Force read/write attemps to the various output channels...maybe build in some hardware-level loopback stuff into the USB/PCI/serial/SATA controllers so you can test the whole controller.

As for self-fixing, that'd be too expensive for consumers. But it would be great for fault tolerant network devices, like corporate web/db server. They already have multiple power supplies and drive arrays, why not more stuff at the component level?

that's an idea. Anyway, I'd be willing to pay a small amount for self-diagnostic abilities.

I thought the topic was for me too.........

OK I forgot to check up that was all......

*waves anyway*