The New Computer Problems Thread

[Reese Tora]

quick question: Where and how do I tweak the settings for windows that stops it from chugging so much while scrolling?  Whenever I click and drag a window it wants to display the entire window while It's being moved, and it's sloowing things down quite a bit.   And, as I said, it's chugging a lot while scrolling, as though it's loading more than it usually does for some reason, and I dunno what to adjust to fix this. 

right click desktop, choose properties
go to the appearance tab, click 'effects...' in the lower right
second check-box from the bottom will disable/enable show window contents.

can't help with the scrolling thing, though.

[Goatmon]

Thanks.  I'm thinking updating my vid drivers will help with the latter issue. 

Edit: Yes, it helped.  All is well. 

[Joe3210]

Any advise on building my own computer?

I'm thinking of buying a case that allows for four 120mm fans and a motherboard that supports AMD.  Any other ideas?

[Tapewolf]

Any advise on building my own computer?
I'm thinking of buying a case that allows for four 120mm fans and a motherboard that supports AMD.  Any other ideas?

Depends what you plan to use it for, really.  And which OS you plan to run on it.

[Ryudo Lee]

I'm actually having a problem with Portal, and I've run out of ideas.

Certain textures in the game are flickering.  The textures are:
-the frames around the signs (the ones that show the chamber number and the warnings)
-the trapdoors that deliver the cubes
-the little clipboards that you see in the offices
-the mechanical arms that appear in the first turret ambush, and in the ending that snuffs out the candle on the cake

I've tried every possible video setting, I've replaced the video card (I had to anyway, my old one was going out), I've reinstalled DirectX 9c, I've completely blown away Portal and reinstalled it (from Steam). 

This started happening shortly after I saw a mod on putting the Portal gun into HL2, and I tried it (instructions found here).  It required copying a bunch of HL2 files into the Portal directory.  Now these textures are flickering and I don't know how to make them stop doing that.  It's only doing this in Portal.  HL2 and it's episodes and mods are working perfectly.  I'm out of ideas.  Any suggestions?

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

... when you un-installed it, did you check that the files and directories were gone?

If not, chances are the uninstall removed the Portal files, but not the HL2 files... so when you reinstalled, it reinstalled them right next to the problem.

[Ryudo Lee]

I did think of that.  Steam has a "Delete Local Content" command which performs an uninstall of the individual game.  But I did go in afterwards and delete the folders and files that were left behind.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Nuts.

Registry clean out after uninstalling?

[Ryudo Lee]

I only found one registry entry for Portal.  I've uninstalled Portal again and removed the leftover folders and then cleared out that registry entry.  Reinstalling now.  Will edit when the installation is done.

EDIT:
Clearing out the Portal registry entry and reinstalling it didn't do the trick. 

But somehow I ended up fixing it.  I went into my Add/Remove Programs list to see if there's anything in there that might be interfering with all this.  I found the Ageia PhysX drivers that I needed to install because Clive Barker's Jericho required it (it's a good game, btw).  I uninstalled them, but that also didn't do it. 

So I redownloaded the PhysX drivers and at the same time I downloaded the latest Forceware drivers (I'm running an nVidia GeForce 8800 GT, btw).  I reinstalled PhysX and then installed the new Forceware drivers.  I don't know which one did it, but now the textures aren't flickering anymore!

[Joe3210]

Any advise on building my own computer?
I'm thinking of buying a case that allows for four 120mm fans and a motherboard that supports AMD.  Any other ideas?

Depends what you plan to use it for, really.  And which OS you plan to run on it.

Ubuntu/Windows duel boot.  Ubuntu to check email and such, but Windows for gaming and the like.

[Tapewolf]

Ubuntu/Windows dual boot.  Ubuntu to check email and such, but Windows for gaming and the like.

Get a 64-bit system for the future, preferably a multicore one.  No-one is really utilizing either feature in general-purpose environments yet, but it's still good to have.

For now I'd avoid a 64-bit OS since there isn't much in the way of drivers and native applications, especially for Windows (*).

You'll be wanting an nVidia graphics card.  The linux drivers are not open source which is a pain, but I believe Ubuntu normally manages this itself without intervention.  Someone else will have to confirm that as I run a modified kernel myself (and have to do a manual update).

Unless you're doing something weird like high-end video editing or running a 32-track home studio with thousands of dollars of plugins, you'll probably be happy with 2gb of memory or even 1gb.  I don't think XP32 and Vista32 can see more than 4gb of memory unless they use PAE and in any case they can't provide more than 2gb per process owing to the way the win32 memorymap works.

In short, with the current state of the industry I think you'll be hard-pressed to build a system that isn't overkill for basic usage purposes.  (Although Vista comes close in my experience).

I realise this is very general, but hopefully it should be some use...

(*) Vista64 prevents non-WHQL drivers from loading.  This is an exciting development as I believe it finally heralds the end of the Windows era.  Once no-one can use any device  at all unless its drivers have been signed by Microsoft for tens of thousands of dollars a go, it will only be economically viable to develop new hardware or market anything sub $100 for Linux and the MacOS.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

You'll be wanting an nVidia graphics card.  The linux drivers are not open source which is a pain, but I believe Ubuntu normally manages this itself without intervention.  Someone else will have to confirm that as I run a modified kernel myself (and have to do a manual update).

Why specifically nVidia? Personally, I prefer ATI, since the drivers tend to be more stable and more easily included in things like the debian package system, but I'll admit I haven't bought any new hardware for a couple of years now...

[Tapewolf]

Why specifically nVidia? Personally, I prefer ATI, since the drivers tend to be more stable and more easily included in things like the debian package system, but I'll admit I haven't bought any new hardware for a couple of years now...

I've had a number of bad experiences with ATI's earlier efforts and heard awful things about their current crop of drivers.  Now AMD seems to have forced them to release the source for the drivers which were previously closed, very buggy and IIRC often took months after a card came out to appear at all, things will slowly improve.  If they've already fixed it and got a fully-accelerated high performance driver for the latest cards in the Xorg mainline, then awesome - but I was expecting it to take longer than they've had so far

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

I'll have a word with Saist, and see what the latest is from his point of view.

I've had some bad experiences with nVidia cards - long-term instabilities and annoyances, and no updates to the linux drivers for -years- at a stretch - so it depends on precisely what hardware you use it with, and what you do with it, I guess. *shrug*

[Tapewolf]

Yeah, it would be nice to have a working fbcon that didn't break X, but they weren't even able to get that working with the Radeon 7200 or 8500 which had the specs, so I'm not holding my breath.

[Reese Tora]

actually, My gaming mag that I got yesterday says that there's little difference between ATI and nVidia in terms of performance and stability, so the best choice would be what's the most cost effective performance and for which you have the easiest time getting Linux drivers

As for windows addressing RAM, XP and Vista can only address 3 GB of RAM unless you get the 64 bit versions (and, IIRC, you need to do some fiddling with the boot.ini to enable 3BG in XP, though I may be thinking win2k)

[Tapewolf]

As for windows addressing RAM, XP and Vista can only address 3 GB of RAM unless you get the 64 bit versions (and, IIRC, you need to do some fiddling with the boot.ini to enable 3BG in XP, though I may be thinking win2k)

AFAIK it's still the case with XP.  I don't know about Vista.  I've been going over this again and again on HomeRecording, where someone was actually defending - for audio use - an OS which is purpose-built to prevent audio processing at the sample level (!).  There, they said that the performance issues with Vista and the fact that it seems to need 2GB for itself would cease to be a problem as more memory becomes cheaper, to which I pointed out that it could only see 4GB total and less owing to the 2G/3G limit...

But I digress.  The point is, that to the best of my knowledge the 2G/3G limit is how much memory is exposed to each application by the VMM - the total amount of memory the OS can see is going to be 4GB, or maybe 64GB at a performance penalty if it uses the PAE extension.
Which again is probably a kernel parameter.

**EDIT**
Substantial reworking of the 2G/3G limit

[Ryudo Lee]

Just to chime in about the ATI vs nVidia thing...

I've had issues with ATI cards dying out completely (as in hardware failure) within a year of purchase, but every nVidia card that I've ever bought has lasted me 2 or 3 years until replacement is called for or a hardware failure occurs.  As it is, my laptop came with an ATI Radeon XPress 1100... I don't have much hope for it.  So I always recommend nVidia over ATI.

But this is just one man's observations.  Other people I know have had the exact opposite experience with ATI and nVidia cards, where nVidia cards die within a year and the ATI's last forever.

I guess it can be attributed to what the computer is being used for (gaming vs internet/work) or the environment the computer is in (high/low humidity) or even how much dust and hair floats around in your house.  I once lost an nVidia card after three years of running fine due to the fan freezing up because it had become clogged with cat hair, and the card subsequently overheated.

I find the same situations apply when it comes to the Pentium vs AMD argument.  I've always had issues with AMD processors but Pentium processors have never given me any trouble whatsoever.  And yet other people I know tell me that their experience is the exact opposite.

[Joe3210]

Thanks for all of the information.  I'll go out and purchase an 64-bit capable motherboard and see about buying other stuff as money flows in.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

by the way, the PAE extensions suck for performance.

If you're buying a new machine today, I wouldn't buy -anything- that wasn't 64 bit.

[superluser]

AARGH!  I can't take it anymore!

Why is it that no one supports 64-bit applications/libraries?  I mean, it's not like we've had 64-bit processors since 1991, or that we've had Intel-compatible ones since 2003.

My current beef is with Adventure Game Studio, which has a Linux port that needs a 32-bit version of libxml.so.1.  Naturally, I only have the 64-bit version.  So I tried their statically linked version, which links to the same files as the dynamically linked version.  Yeah.  (I remember having similar fun when somebody decided to dynamically link something in sbin to popt.)

So does anyone know of a way to get 32-bit libraries for a 64-bit system?  I'm running Gentoo, and gcc -march=i386 gives me errors.