MOTHERBOARD SUPERTEST ISSUE 226 MAY 2009
PERFORMANCE GEAR & GAMING
ISSUE 226 I’VE BEEN IONIZED, BUT I’M OK NOW
BRAIN MELTING
I’VE BEEN IONIZED, BUT I’M OK NOW
HARDCORE PC ADVICE Pro tips Hacking, Tweaking, Overclocking and Modding
BUDGET PROJECTION: BUILD A SCREEN AND MOUNT ON THE CHEAP
Big screen action on a shoe-string budget
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THERE’S MORE… £550 Intel vs AMD PCs How to fix any PC problem The tech behind new MMOs How to build an
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Issue 226 May 2009 £5.99 Outside UK & ROI £6.49
WORLD IN CONFLICT SOVIET ASSAULT PCF226.cover 1
GODFATHER 2 THOU SHALT NOT KILL 20/3/09 5:30:40 pm
HOW TO BE A
TECH
GURU
Luis Villazon reveals his troubleshooting secrets with reckless disregard for his job
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roubleshooting is curious skill. It’s part detective work, part methodical experimentation and part inspired guesswork, and part Zen Buddhism. That’s a lot of parts but you need them all to be able to sift through a list of symptoms, identify the fault, work out an appropriate remedy and not go barking mad in the process. Knowing how computers work is also handy, but it isn’t enough by itself and it’s much less important than you may think, now that all human knowledge is just a Google search away. Knowing the answers is all very well but the real art is asking the right questions. See what I mean about the Zen?
So I’m not going to give you a fish. I’m not even going to teach you how to fish. I’m going to build you a stinking trawler. Theoretically this ought to put me out of a job but in practice, the well of human stupidity seems to replenish itself far faster than I can pump it out, so there’s no need to worry on my behalf. Before we begin, let us consider the tools of the trade, which are: 1. Another computer 2. A screwdriver 3. A credit card That’s it. The screwdriver I use has a nice flowery handle and a reversible, socket barrel with two double-ended bits so I can swap between Phillips and flat-head in two sizes each, but really, just the smaller of the two Phillips heads would do for 90 per cent of the time.
The other computer should be working and connected to the internet. Ideally, it ought to be a desktop PC of roughly the same vintage as the computer you wish to fix, but even a laptop is better than nothing. Among the many things you will not need include: a set of watchmaker’s screwdrivers, needle-nose pliers, soldering iron, can of compressed air and anti-static wrist strap. I have owned and recommended all of these things in the past, but I’ve never actually used any of them except to impress people when I go round to their houses to fix something. You’ll still see computer magazines listing this ‘essential troubleshooting toolkit’, but it’s honestly just there to fill up a boxout. You are now equipped to attack the five different types of computer problem, which we shall deal with in turn. May 2009
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How to be a tech guru 2. THE ERROR MESSAGE (“I-GAME”)
1. IT USED TO WORK AND NOW IT DOESN’T (“YOOT-WANID”)
This may sound like it could cover every computer problem but it’s actually quite specific. IUTWANID (pronounced yoot-wannid) means that your computer was working perfectly satisfactorily in the recent past and then something
– often even – it will seem that nothing has, in fact, changed recently on your system. This is a common delusion and must be resisted (or beaten out of you). Remember, it used to work. The temptation of course, is to assume that some bit in your computer has just broken, spontaneously and for no reason. This does happen but it’s very,
Above Our love-hate relationship with system restore continues
Every time something doesn’t work on your system and instead you get a window that pops up and tries to blame you, we call this an error message. The standard operating procedure in this kind of situation is to type the error message into Google (on the spare PC, if necessary) and see what results come up. The good thing about error messages is that you can guarantee that at least one other person has already figured out the solution. The bad thing is that lots of the solutions are idiotic. Yahoo! Answers and Ask.com are frequented by mouth breathers and you should ignore whatever they advise. Forums attached to games sites aren’t generally much better. What you really want is a hardware or software manufacturer’s forum; a serious computer site like arstechnica.com or tomshardware.com or Wikipedia (or, if you’re truly desperate, you could always try asking the knowledgeable lads at forum.pcformat.co.uk). If you can’t find anything from a top-drawer resource like that, try refining your search. You’ll need to try a different part of the error message as your search string, leaving out those hexadecimal numbers, or putting the numbers back in. If that doesn’t work try putting different parts of the message in quotes. If you get it right, you’ll find a decent hit in the first three pages of Google results. If it takes more than that to get any solid results, you’re doing it wrong. Read two or three different
“Troubleshooting is frustrating for most people, because they leap too quickly to a ‘something must be broken’ diagnosis” changed that either prevent the PC working at all or disables a significant component completely. At its most extreme, this covers virtually every PC that won’t boot. At one time they did boot and now they don’t – that’s IUTWANID. Less severe examples include the sound suddenly disappearing from games or not being able to connect to the wireless network anymore. To fix IUTWANID, you need to identify the thing that has changed. If you’ve installed software, try uninstalling it. Unplug any new hardware, use System Restore to roll back the registry. Don’t overreact and reformat – that’s effectively rolling back too far. You’ll need to undo changes in strictly reverse chronological order. Sometimes 32
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very very rare. A lot of the reason why computer troubleshooting is so frustrating for most people is because they leap too quickly to a ‘something must be broken’ diagnosis and spend ages swapping stuff around inside their system to no effect. So make sure you have undone every change to your PC first – every software install, every driver update, every patch and every new cable. If all of that draws a complete and utter blank, you can start cannibalising your other PC for components to begin ruling out broken stuff. But the snag is that almost everything you swap will require its own drivers and installing these is itself a change to the system. This is another reason for using this as a last resort.
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How to be a tech guru forum threads on the topic if you can and do whatever they say fixed the problem for them. The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) is the limiting case for error messages and if you find yourself facing one, your best resource is going to be Microsoft itself. First stop, should be to take the specific error code for a spin on the Knowledge Base and follow the instructions. Because a BSOD is pretty catastrophic event, you can also treat this as a kind of IUTWANID instead, if you like. This isn’t usually very productive, though, because it ignores the specific information in the error code, but if the Knowledge Base page is all together far too vague to be of any help at all, and you know you’ve changed something recently, this might be the quicker route.
able to play games at acceptable frames rates and nowadays it seems much jerkier, then we call it IMRTIUTB. The key word in that last sentence is “seems”. Often slowdown is more about your increasing expectations than decreasing performance. When your PC is new, you’re excited and predisposed to think well of it, so the thrashing sound of the hard disk feels like the revving of a powerful engine. That same PC two years later is old and grubby and subconsciously you would love to have an excuse to replace it; now the hard disk seems to wheeze asthmatically. Same noise, different spin. There are two standard responses to IMRTIUTB; upgrade or reformat and reinstall. Both are wrong. Money spent on an upgrade delays the purchase of
“Money spent on an upgrade … offers much less benefit per pound than a new system” 3. IT’S MORE RUBBISH THAN IT USED TO BE (“IM-ROOTY-OOTY-BEE”)
“Rubbish”, in this context nearly always means slower, but this category can also be applied to worsening sound quality, sticking keyboards or increasingly noisy fans. It’s different from IUTWANID, because it refers to a progressive, chronic deterioration. If you had 80fps yesterday and only a mere 20 today, that’s IUTWANID, but if you used to be
your next PC and offers much less benefit per pound than a new system. Upgrading is also like trying to balance a wobbly table; each new component you add creates a bottleneck or an incompatibility somewhere else and what started as just an extra 1GB of RAM quickly becomes a new motherboard, CPU, graphics card and PSU. Reformatting and reinstalling seems like it will get you back to the halcyonicity of a new PC, but you have to
10 THINGS THAT GENERALLY DON’T HELP 1. Scanning for viruses. Because it’s never a virus. 2. Buying computer books. They are big, heavy, expensive and out of date. They are also much too general to fix any actual problems (see page 115). The internet is your friend and faster, and more relevant.
Defrag if you want to, if it makes you feel better…
3. Defragmenting the hard disk. Disk fragmentation is much less of a deal than it used to be and it was never much of a deal to begin with. Any benefit you see is entirely down to the placebo effect. 4. Posting questions on random forums. Although forums do provide a useful source of advice, it’s rarely worth posting your own question. If it’s a common enough problem, someone will have done it already; if it isn’t, no one will know the answer. But this won’t stop them speculating fruitlessly. 5. Ringing tech support. There’s nothing they can diagnose that you can’t work out for yourself in half the time on the net. All the good tech support people get poached away from the front lines very quickly, anyway. 6. Reinstalling Windows. This just replaces your previous problem with another one – the more immediate task of getting a stable operating system installation up and running again. And when you eventually complete that particular task, your old problem will probably come back. 7. Switching to Linux. Frying Pan > Fire. 8. Registry cleaning utilities. Another placebo remedy. It’s like worrying about how tidy the shoe cupboard is. Nobody sees it, so who cares? 9. Partitioning your hard disk. There’s nothing you can do with separate partitions that you cannot achieve more easily and with fewer side effects using folders.
Upgrading: each new component you add creates a bottleneck or an incompatibility
10. Arbitrary lists. Because the last item is always made up.
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How to be a tech guru
remember that all the patches, updates and new drivers downloaded since then will still need to be reinstalled and they were responsible for much of the original slowdown. Instead, IMRTIUTB is best addressed by uninstalling things. Any game, demo, shareware utility or Internet Explorer toolbar add-on that you do not depend on for your life needs to be removed. If you have more than eight icons in your System Tray, get rid of half of them. All software thinks it’s so important that it must run constantly in the background. This is incorrect. Whatever it’s doing can wait. Possibly for eternity. Any other kind of IMRTIUTB is probably dirt. Take the lid off, blow away the dust, run your keyboard through the dishwasher and stop eating pizza while you play Crysis.
4. RANDOMLY, A THING FHAPPENS (“WRATH”)
We live in a deterministic universe. The movement of stars, the radioactive decay of atoms and everything in between is controlled by immutable physical laws. We just don’t know what all of them are yet. If your PC crashes, halts, fails or stymies you, every time something else happens, then it’s either IUTWANID or IGAEM. If it only sometimes happens, what you have is RATH. From a wide enough perspective, of course, random faults are just deterministic ones whose cause you haven’t managed to identify yet. But some causes are better at appearing
random than other causes. Overheating is the classic example of this. Your computer mostly works when you turn it on, but somewhere between a few minutes and an hour after that, it reboots or locks up or the graphics goes very peculiar or the sound goes screwy. Overheating is quite easy to diagnose – rebooting immediately, doesn’t help but shutting down and leaving it for a while does. However, other ‘random’
Above Dirt is evil. It’s eating your machine right now
influences are harder to isolate: radio frequency interference from nearby electrical equipment; heavy network traffic; dry solder joints on circuit boards, broken wires in cables; power surges in the domestic supply. Be methodical, write down a hypothesis, devise a test, record the result and repeat the experiment to confirm your conclusion. Or, just take it as a sign that it’s time for your next PC.
HOW TO FIX YOUR NEIGHBOUR’S PC WITHOUT SUSTAINING UNACCEPTABLE CASUALTIES Fixing a neighbour’s PC is not like fixing your own. It’s more like the plot of Blackhawk Down. You go in, full of enthusiasm and good intention, fully expecting to be back in under 30 minutes. And a day and a half later, you’re still there, ordering replacement motherboards by overnight courier, flashing the BIOS and reinstalling Windows 95 from floppy disks, while RPGs and AK47 rounds slam into the side of the building. It’s a brutal, dispiriting business that pleases no one, least of all your neighbour, who thought you were supposed to be the expert. To avoid this horrific scenario, you must not allow yourself to fall into the trap of using your time to try and save your neighbour money. Wherever possible, opt for the fastest, simplest solution, regardless of the cost to him. Here are some examples: 34
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Neighbour: I upgraded the RAM yesterday and now my PC doesn’t seem to boot. You: You should get a new PC. Neighbour: I get this strange message on the screen when I start Windows. You: You should get a new PC. Neighbour: Crysis seems to slow right down whenever the children are surfing the internet upstairs. You: You should get a new PC. Neighbour: Can you help me install Vista SP1? You: You should get a new PC. Neighbour: How do I change the desktop wallpaper? You: Get a new PC. Neighbour: How do I… You: NEW PC!
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KIT THAT WILL BREAK IN PCS KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON
4 Memory PC acting up? Crashing randomly? Blue screening just because it’s Whisper Wednesday? Good chance your memory is to blame – especially if you’ve been waving your hand around inside your machine like a delinquent magician. Make sure it’s seated properly and hasn’t popped out as you’ve been playing with your cables.
1 1 Power Supply Power supplies adhere to the binary nature of computer repair – if it’s broken it won’t work, if not it will. Without a reliable power source most systems are useless. Have a spare handy just in case. Try stripping out non-essentials to reduce the load if not.
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3 Hard drives Hard drives represent an antiquated collection of mechanical, electrical and magnetic technologies thrown together in the hope that they’ll remember 1s and 0s. These break. Avoid losing sleep over the fact. They’re cheap to replace.
2 Graphics Card It’s generally easy to tell if you’re graphics card has a problem – the display will be corrupted or your games will run slow. Make sure it has enough power, and that the spinning thing is spinning - it keep the card cool.
“The New Thing is exciting … the New Thing will help you meet girls … the New Thing doesn’t work on your old PC” 5. I CAN’T DO THE NEW XTHING (“ICY-DONUT”)
We all want to do the ‘New Thing’. The New Thing is exciting and wonderful. All the magazines are talking about the New Thing. Every website has banner ads reminding you that the New Thing will help you meet girls, earn more money and prevent cancer. The New Thing is good because it’s new. But the New Thing doesn’t work on your old PC. It doesn’t fit in the slot, has the wrong number of pins, requires too much RAM and gives you unacceptable frame rates. The New Thing also doesn’t work in your new PC. It’s really quite buggy still, requires constant driver updates, doesn’t let you run in high resolution and causes all your USB ports to stop responding.
Faced with this, most of you will either blame the old PC or the New Thing. A few may even blame everything on the new PC. But in fact, the blame lies with you. It’s your fault for wanting the New Thing. It’s your fault for thinking you could just install it and skip merrily along. It’s entirely your fault for believing that the New Thing would be reliable and trouble-free. This is not the way of the New Thing. Wherever possible, PCs should only have new software or hardware added in the first year of their lives. Doing this gives you a reasonable chance that your hardware configuration was considered when the developers were developing. After that year, you can continue to use your PC, of course; just don’t add anything new to it. If the computer isn’t
connected to the internet, you could, theoretically, stay in this holding pattern forever, but a networked PC will need to download Windows updates at the very least and your orbit will gradually decay. This, coupled with the fact that you will inevitably occasionally ignore this rule, which will lead to IMRTIUTB over time and when your PC is somewhere between 18 months and three-years-old, you will buy a new one. This, if you absolutely must, is the time to invest in the New Thing. Stipulate to the supplier in writing that you are buying the PC for this purpose, thereby making compatibility a condition of sale. If possible, get the supplier to install the New Thing for you. Then it’s his fault (and therefore problem) if you get ICDNT. The best approach of all, is not to do the New Thing at all. Wait a while; six months or a year. This will turn the New Thing into the Established Thing. The Established Thing is cheaper and has had the rough edges knocked off it. And the forums are already full of helpful advice should you run into IGAEM. May 2009
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AND RELAX
IMPOSSIBLE PROBLEMS FOR WHEN NOTHING ELSE WORKS It is quite possible that you have managed to read this far and I still can’t fit your problem into one of the preceding five categories. This is almost certainly because you are an idiot. I have been answering your questions for thirteen years now and, although I can’t be bothered to actually check, I’m pretty sure that they would all fit into my classification scheme. However, it is my intention to create a truly comprehensive guide and so I have included a sixth category of Impossible Problems as a catch-all. If you decide – either impetuously or after measured consideration – that your problem peg cannot be persuaded into any of the five suitable solution holes, here’s what you do. First you will need to find a hammer. No, the biggest one you can find. Borrow one from a neighbour if you think your hammer isn’t quite large enough. Now hit your PC. Fetch another much heavier hammer and start again, but this time hit it harder. If you can’t hit your PC hard enough consider a six-month weightlifting programme and high protein, muscle building diet. The merits of this tactic are twofold: first, my five categories really are enough to classify any problem and if it doesn’t appear that way, you clearly need to look again; second, since failure to categorise your problem will doom you to repeat the cycle, hopefully you’ll give it your full attention on the first pass. YOOT-WANID Has this thing ever worked? Does it work on the new PC in the shop? Does your spare PC do this thing? The point of IUTWANID is to find a point of comparison and systematically eliminate the differences between the working PC and the unworking one. I-GAME Can you Google something other than the error message text and get a good result? The check box that remains greyed-out, perhaps? Or the name of the feature that is misbehaving or even the model number of your motherboard. IM-ROOTY-OOTY-BEE Even if the problem doesn’t seem to be one of atrophying performance, you should try uninstalling unnecessary software and/or cleaning the insides of your PC anyway. You may have some subtle conflict and removing junk is always a good idea.
Below Can’t fix it? Give up. Look at this man. He’s given up, but he’s still smiling
So there you have it. PC troubleshooting distilled down to an essential oil that you can dab alluringly behind each ear. With the secrets I have revealed here, you are equipped to solve any computer problem ever. If I catch any of you writing the back pages of any major computer magazines, there will be trouble, but otherwise this gift is yours to do with as you wish. But there is one secret I haven’t revealed yet and it is this: nobody really knows what the hell they are doing when it comes to computers. They are all much too complicated to figure out properly and once you stumble on the thing that makes that particular problem go away, who is going to obsessively go back and double check that removing the fix really does make the problem come back? If you manage to keep your PC running tolerably well until it’s time to buy a new one then you’re a winner. After a few years of doing this with different machines, you may develop a feel for the lie of the land. But none of this really amounts to actual expertise. And if that’s true for you, then you should remember that it’s doubly true for that guy at work who is always upgrading his PC and hanging out in the tech forums. PC troubleshooters are charlatans of the worst sort… Except for me, of course. I am an actual PC genius..¤
“PC troubleshooters are charlatans of the worst sort. Except for me…”
WRATH Pretend that your problem is intermittent, rather than persistent. Swap cables around, remove sources of RF interference, lower the ambient temperature. But do it systematically. Don’t just shuffle things around arbitrarily like a crazy. ICY-DONUT Since my advice for this category boils down to ‘give up’, there’s no reason why this can’t be applied to almost any problem. This isn’t defeatist, it’s pragmatic. Giving up gives technology a chance to catch up with you. Everything is easier in the future; try it then.
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