Calling all geeks: Now Including Tech-o-Wienies!

[1992casey]

While the trackpad doesn't look like it's all that easy to use, this still looks like it could be a handy gizmo.

 

MIX Gestures Wireless Mini Keyboard Mouse

 

http://www.techozz.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/MIX-Gestures.jpg

[1992casey]

I was really hoping that the new Mac Mini would have BluRay. If it did I would have bought it in a heartbeat. I still may use it there but it would have been really nice to have the one device that controls everything.

I'm seeing rumors on the Internet that Apple is going to be deeming optical drives obsolete and is going to stop including them as internal devices, starting with the notebooks. That might be part of the rationale for Apple resisting BluRay.

[Patrick425]

I purchased my first smart phone a few days ago, the new Nexus 4G phone. It will take me a while to get use to but I like it except for one major issue. The battery life. It's ridiculous. Yesterday I hardly did anything on it except make and receive a few phone calls and half the battery life drained from it. Overnight while it was just sitting there another 25% drained from it. When I charge it, it charges ridiculously slow. It took me 45 minutes to get to work this morning, I had the phone plugged in the entire ride and it only added about 12% charge time.

 

When I got to work I checked out what was using up the battery. The number one culprit was the Android system at 30% (not sure what I can do about that..can't really turn that off..right?) and number two was Maps at 24%. The only time I used maps was a few times driving as I was testing out the navigation system. I then checked out my running apps and Maps was still running. I turned it off.

 

Here is my question. After I ran the GPS navigator and got to my destination, the phone kept telling me something like "GPS signal lost"..this was 5 or 10 minutes after I was done with it. I closed the application and I thought I shut it off, but it kept wanting to talk to me. How do I turn it off??

 

I still can't believe that this is my entire battery issue, but we will see.

[DocBrewPack]

Just because you close the maps app doest necessarily mean its not running. Theres other free apps that you can use to make sure you are not using any unnecessary battery. The one ive settled on and use is Juice Defender(free). Id say this gave about another full day worth of battery just by letting that run in the background. I also leave my GPS off all the time except when im specifically using it.

[RightFieldCoder]

I have a Blackberry Curve, so it's not exactly the same, but closing the application is more akin to minimizing it. If you want it to stop running on a Blackberry, you have to use the in app menu to close it. I imagine the Android would act in a similar fashion.

[Invader3K]

Anyone else use iTunes on Windows 7? It seems to freeze up or crash quite frequently. Is there a way to fix this, or should I just ditch iTunes?

[endaround]

iTunes is terrible. Apple just doesn't really care. The worst part is that even when its just in the background it still have 4 processes running. I don't care if they aren't major drains, background programs shouldn't have that many processes because that's just asking to create a memory leak.

[Invader3K]

Yeah, I'm noticing more and more that it's a resource hog. One of the main reasons I decided against buying an iPad was that I didn't want to have to synch it with iTunes.

 

Anyone know any good iTunes alternatives? I have over 3000 mp3s that I want to keep organized and accessible.

[Baldkin]

I use Media Monkey, and love it.

[Invader3K]

I use Media Monkey, and love it.

Thanks. I may give that a shot.

[zurch1818]

My brother is having issues with his desktop. It starts up just fine, but after a few minutes of running, the screen starts to shake and the whole screen slowly migrates to the left. After a few minutes of shaking, the screen just goes black and won't come back on. By no means am I a "tech-o-weenie," but I figured it might be dust causing the computer overheat. So yesterday we took it apart, found a lot of dust and we used compressed air to clean the fans. Once we fired the computer back up, it took a little longer for the screen to start shaking, but the screen did eventually go black. The computer is dust-free now, so dust can be eliminated from the cause. What else could it be? Thanks for your help.

[nate82]

My brother is having issues with his desktop. It starts up just fine, but after a few minutes of running, the screen starts to shake and the whole screen slowly migrates to the left. After a few minutes of shaking, the screen just goes black and won't come back on. By no means am I a "tech-o-weenie," but I figured it might be dust causing the computer overheat. So yesterday we took it apart, found a lot of dust and we used compressed air to clean the fans. Once we fired the computer back up, it took a little longer for the screen to start shaking, but the screen did eventually go black. The computer is dust-free now, so dust can be eliminated from the cause. What else could it be? Thanks for your help.

On board video or does he have a video card? A video card would be something attached to the PCI, AGP, or PCI-X slot normally on the bottom half of the motherboard. If no card is in the slot then it is on board video. It maybe the monitor or it might be the on board video going bad. Only way to know for sure is to test a different monitor or test the monitor with another PC. It could also be a driver issue you might want to try and update the video drivers on the computer first.

With what you are describing I am going to go with the video card or the on board video being bad though it could just be the monitor dying. How old is the monitor?

[zurch1818]

Without actually opening up the case, I'm fairly certain he has a nvidia video card. The monitor is only 3 years old, so I doubt that is the issue, especially since the monitor always works when it boots up. I'll try his monitor on my computer tomorrow (where I know I have on board video) along with updating the drivers on the video card on his computer. Just out of curiosity, what would happen if the video card was taken out? Is there a video card on the motherboard that would begin to work? He really only uses the computer for internet surfing, downloading music, and on a rare rare occasion using the tv tuner, so he would probably be fine with the on board video.

[bullox]

Most motherboards come with onboard video, but not all. Check the rear of the PC near the usb ports, if there is a video connector on the small panel there (not the video card output) then the motherboard has onboard video. If that's the case then I would definitely try taking out the video card and plugging the monitor right in to the onboard video and test it that way.

 

It's also possible that the video card doesn't have enough power going to it, if the card is a newer gaming type card. The solution to that would be a new power supply.

 

Check for onboard video first imo. That way you can narrow down the possibilities.

[zurch1818]

Well I updated the video card drivers last night. After the install and reboot, the screen was still vibrating a very little bit. To test it, I took off any screen saver and any sleep mode last night and just let it run. Just in case the screen went black, I had the mouse on the shutdown button. This morning when I got up, the screen was still up, so updating the drivers might have worked. If it fails, I will check for an on board video card. I know he does not have a newer gaming card as he is not a gamer. If you are interested, the card is a nVidia geForce GT 120.

 

After thinking about the back of his computer (it is not the easiest place to get to), I believe there probably isn't an on board video card because there is only one monitor jack on the back. So if it fails, odds are he will have to get a new video card. Would it be better for him to get that or just get a whole new desktop? With technology being so cheap these days, it might be a better long term solution. All he would have to do is pop in his old hard drive into his new computer if there were any files that weren't backed up.

 

On a side note, he was complaining about Vista being slow. After looking at his startup processes in the task mananger after a reboot, he had 95 running. Just after killing all the autoupdates process/services, we dropped it down to 70 and it was running about 50 times quicker.

[Invader3K]

I feel really dumb for asking this, but I have an HP desktop computer (just a couple years old, not sure of the model number) with Windows 7. I am trying to use the SD card slot on the computer for the first time, in order to upload some JPEG files to the computer. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to actually access the files on the SD slot. The SD card isn't showing up in File Manager, even though the green light is on next to the card slot. Anyone know what I'm supposed to do?

[zurch1818]

Does the SD card show up in the device manager? If it does, I've had this problem before then. Try uninstalling it in the device manager and then restart your computer. It should automatically reinstall upon being rebooted.

[RightFieldCoder]

zurch1818 wrote:

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On a side note, he was complaining about Vista being slow. After looking at his startup processes in the task mananger after a reboot, he had 95 running. Just after killing all the autoupdates process/services, we dropped it down to 70 and it was running about 50 times quicker.

This might be the obvious answer, but I've got to ask. First, Vista is slow. Second, how much RAM does the computer have? I know of a desktop that was sold from Gateway with Vista already installed. The person complained it was slow and wanted to get a new, faster computer. I checked and found there was 512 MB of RAM on it. That's just enough to run Vista, if you aren't planning on running anything else like antivirus or a web browser. For $50 I got them 4GB (8 times the amount) of RAM and it was like a new computer.

[Invader3K]

Does the SD card show up in the device manager? If it does, I've had this problem before then. Try uninstalling it in the device manager and then restart your computer. It should automatically reinstall upon being rebooted.

Thanks, I managed to get it working.

As far as Vista, I think it's the worst thing Microsoft has ever done. I have a laptop that came with it, and I eventually upgraded to 4 GB of RAM. It was still slow and not good at multitasking. I eventually got so tired of it that I uninstalled Vista and put on an old copy of XP thatI had from a different computer. The laptop now runs lightning task, and I can actually multitask on it. Vista sucks.

 

[zurch1818]

This might be the obvious answer, but I've got to ask. First, Vista is slow. Second, how much RAM does the computer have? I know of a desktop that was sold from Gateway with Vista already installed. The person complained it was slow and wanted to get a new, faster computer. I checked and found there was 512 MB of RAM on it. That's just enough to run Vista, if you aren't planning on running anything else like antivirus or a web browser. For $50 I got them 4GB (8 times the amount) of RAM and it was like a new computer.

The computer has 8 gigs of RAM. It just took forever for his computer to process everything. I know Vista is slow and it sucks, but I don't really I don't do enough computing to really see this. I would love to upgrade to 7 but I just don't want to spend the time or money on it. Plus there are some programs that are on here that I would prefer not to download again.

 

Great to hear you got it working Invader

[RightFieldCoder]

Having 8GB I'm assuming it's a 64 bit system. 64 bit Vista is even worse than 32 bit Vista. The only real answer is to upgrade. If you buy the upgrade only CD, you won't need to re-install any programs. The only pain would be if you ever wipe the hard drive you would need to install Vista and then upgrade again. I'm typing this now on my new (got it Monday) work 64 bit Win 7 box. I feel so dirty using my 32 bit Vista laptop at home now.

[Hammer]

Just purchased a Toshiba Satellite Pro L740 laptop and am 100% impressed at this point. $449 at Best Buy and it is the fastest, most user friendly lapper that I have ever owned. Would really recommend this for the people in the market for a new machine...

[zurch1818]

This thread has been good to me this month....lets see if the brewerfan tech-o-weenies can help again. This time it is my computer. I've got a 64 bit vista desktop (I know that is already bad) that the cd-rom drive is not working. Last night when I plugged my zune in to charge it, a screen popped up saying there was a disc in my drive in addition to the computer recognizing there was a zune already plugged into the computer. I doubt these are related, but they came up within a few seconds of each other. The problem is that there was no disk in the drive. This fake "cd" had a 2mb capacity and had one audio file on it. The computer recognized it as an audio cd. However, it couldn't be ejected or formatted. When I put a real disc in the drive, it would spin, but the computer wouldn't recognize it. I haven't opened up my computer or messed with any of the connections in a long time, so I know it probably isn't something I physically did. Maybe a connection became loose, but I don't know. I thought restarting my computer would fix it, but it only made the problem worse. Now the drive isn't posting in the device manager and I'm pretty sure it isn't even posting in the BIOS. Usually when I start up my computer, it would look for something in the cd drive first to boot off of, but it doesn't do that anymore.

 

I tried a system restore to see if that would fix the problem, but that bluescreened of death when it was rebooting back after the restore took place. This is a problem I've had this problem before. It would actually loop the blue screen non-stop. I fixed this before with a vista recovery disc, but I didn't have this option as my disc drive was not working. Luckily it booted up in safemode. The drive still wasn't recongnized though. I then undid the system restore and it booted up normally without any blue screen. So I at least I was able to get back to where I started. The drive still isn't recognized though.

 

Where should I go next? I know I never use the disc drive, but I also know it is probably not good to have a computer without one. To me, it feels like driving a car with no spare tire. My USB backup works just fine, so data backup is a non-issue. Thanks.

[zurch1818]

Just an update here. I chose to do nothing with my dvd drive to see if that would fix the problem. Today when I restarted my computer, I saw that my disc drive posted and it now works. I didn't open up my computer or anything. Good old Vista.

[Patrick425]

So, I purchased a new car in late July, a 2012 Subaru Legacy. This is the first car I had with Bluetooth. I paired my phone with the car's bluetooth shortly after I purchased the car and it worked great, I loved it. About 7-10 days ago I started having an issue where I can not hear the person on the other end of the call when I make or receive a call. I have tried "unpairing" and "re-pairing" the phone. That did not fix it. I then had my wife pair her phone to my car and she had the same issue (I have an android phone - Nexus and she has an iphone). So, it does not appear to be phone related.

 

Also, I have no problem playing music or pandora from my phone through my car's bluetooth.

 

I have searched all over the internet. I found lot's of "Other caller can not hear me", but not "I can't hear other caller" type issues.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!