Dalo Harkin

Take the fan and heatsink off and use a new paintbrush to get all the dust out - compressed air is only needed in places you cannot get to easily like GPU fan units

This is common on most wifi adapters - It happened on my ABIT one and in the post that I previously deleted :confused: I said about the driver unticking the box that you mentioned in your first post should have worked. On a laptop the power saving menus are a load of rubbish set the lot to max and never turn off the monitor - most laptops now just have an eco button that you can press that drops the power usage, so set the lot to max and then just using that button will do it anyway.

Hi and welcome to free pc help. Ok - if you can see the files on the HDD you can just copy and paste them onto your laptop HDD. I may have misunderstood but are you trying to boot from the IDE enclosure so that you can log in on that O/S? If you are trying to do that so you can burn them to disk you would have to change the boot order in the BIOS and it may not be able to do it as not all can access external HDD's. Try and copy and paste the files as mentioned above and see if that works and then you can put them on a DVD or CD.

you will only get a budget PC from one of those retailers for that amount of money - if you do buy from one of these make sure that all the parts are NOT integrated onto the mortherboard or it is impossible for you to upgrade it in the future - You could build a much better spec PC for £400 than you can buy one for and in the future when you want to upgrade the graphics card for example you can just swap it out.

As Seth has previously said unless they are willing to put you a new HDD in and install an OS to that then you will have the data on your old HDD - but how will you extract it?

Do you have anything in the PCI slots - WIfi adapters, sound card anything like that they are more likely to be the culprit. do you know your way around the BIOS?

Lol - that is spot on :rolleyes: I do agree in the fact that it is not practical - as for them actually getting this up and running with no hitches (cough, cough) very doubtful - in fact to coin a phrase of wolfeys - about bearing on the town hall steps :p

In regards to new O/S - can't wait until Googles is released :D

Normally cleaning the dirt off the feet will sort this :D sounds daft - see it all the time lol

If you are using Internet Explorer, it is easier to save them as Web Pages on your Favourites. When you open a Web Page that you want to save, there are two stars at the top left; one is big and gold and the one next to it is smaller with a green cross over it. When you are on a page that you want to save that is to say Ebay in this case, click the smaller one with the green cross on and then click the big star to the left of it. In this way, they are stored in there. When you want to access them, click it again and they are stored in there (you can rename the pages to whatever you want when you save them). Sorry if this sounds patronizing but its the easiest way to do what you are describing.

Only at stock my friend - there is NO WAY that chip is capable of overclocking as much as the Q6600 GO SLACR Quad core from 2.4(stock) to 4.0(Oc'ed) even the newer quads can't run that fast. thats a 16Ghz chip for £150 :eek: obviously you need a whopping cooler that would cost £200-£300 but we will overlook that :D

If you have the latest BIOS there should be no reason as to why it wont work in PCIE 1.1 mode - it just means that it wont run as fast as it should (you wouldnt notice the differerence anyway) I think that the PCIE 2.0 just means that if you run 2 cards they both run at PCIE 16 speed rather than one at 16 and one at 8 as older boards do - check the Nvidea website and just double check that its backward compatible - I would be astonished if it wasn't :eek:

If you can - build your own - you get better components and can choose makers that you know will compliment each other, and save yourself some cash. from what you have described what you are using the PC for I would go for an 8800GT (this card is great upto a 1680x1050 resolution) (Nvidea reference one the Overclocked ones are expensive for little or no gain) A decent MOBO - ASUS or GIGABYTE and a Core 2 Duo processor and some decent RAM (2GB PATRIOT is £25 at the mo :eek: PC6400 dual channel) all in all you are looking £250 - £300 depending on the MOBO and Core2duo you go for and then you just need to pick a case and a PSU if you need any more help post here and I will help

Have you installed any new hardware recently? I have seen this on many occasions and its documented on the web - its NORMALLY down to bad drivers if you have installed hardware.

Can you also check that the HDD that has the OS on it is on its OWN power lead from the PSU - no fans inbetween or anything else - sounds like an intermitten problem with the PSU or MOBO. Have you tried one stick of RAM and if it does it try the other seperately? There are so many things that can cause this its a process of elimination - is there a build up of heat in the PC - try cleaning all the fans - is the North and South bridge passively cooled, if there are fans on them check they are spinning and check the one on the GPU too whilst you are there - hope this helps, try the above and if not come back to us please

And don't get a really cheap MOBO - they are cheap because the Capacitors are rubbish and will not last 2 minutes. Try and get a named brand if you can - ASUS is my personal option, but some of the GIGABYTE ones are cheap but at the same time not nasty ;)

I would opt for the third chip that you have mentioned as Goku says its the fastest of the three and they are exceptionally cheap now, make sure that the FSB is supported by the MOBO without a BIOS update (you will find this difficult without a chip in it, to get on the net ;) If you are not overclocking then get the cheapest BRANDED RAM that you can, think that PATRIOT do a 2GB PC6400 for £25

Hi - welcome to free pc help I am sure that you will enjoy your stay with us. :D

It must be the fan on the GPU as there is nothing else around there that would cause it - as the southbridge is passively cooled

when you start Vista it doesnt automatically recognise the drive - go into the control panel and then admin tools then computer management under storage there is a disk management - is it showing 2 drives in there?

When the PC freezes does it ever recover? do you have an HDD activity light on your tower? when it freezes is the light solid or flickering? It could be the HDD sticking

Sounds like the RAM has had it - if there are 2 sticks run memtest on each stick and see which if not both are broke and either replace both or if one is broke just that one Glad we could help

Striping is faster than mirroring as it writes for eg if there are 10 pieces of data, it writes 1,3,5,7,9 to one and 2,4,6,8,10 to the other and this is faster than 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 to a drive. hope this makes sense as its hard to explain - STRIPING is for performance MIRRORING is for backup

It sounds like they are both trying to access the same IP address and one cant connect when the other is. do you remember how to get into the routers home page - the ip address etc. Routers are such a pain some will only let you connect to them if the router is setup to recognise them - I am unfamiliar with your router but its worth checking on the home page and see if there are options for adding and this will confuse you 'Mac addresses' <<not just for Macs lol

Have you looked at the resources tab on the task manager - just to see if the CPU is throttling or the memory usage is higher than normal?