HOUR 3:
Tech News & Commentary
Jay in State College, Pennsylvania listening on WPSC 1390 asked: “My Compaq PC is starting to shut it self off several times a day. Doesn’t give me any warning. I’m able to turn it on right after it turns off, but it’s doing it multiple times per day and I can’t figure out why.”
Unfortunately there are many, many reasons why this could be happening and tracking down the problem affecting you won’t be easy. First thing we can probably rule out is heat. When a processor overheats, it shuts itself off to prevent suffering irreparable damage. This could be happening to you, but you wouldn’t always be able to turn your PC back on right away.
Another possible culprit is your power source. Sometimes your computer’s components demand more power than the source can give them. That results in certain components being starved and shutting off. Your power source may have developed a problem over the years, but given that this is a Compaq-built PC, odds are the power source is not the problem. The power source would be a more likely culprit if this was a custom built PC. Sometimes custom builders don’t do the math right and end up with source that falls short of being able to feed their high powered computers’ components.
Your problem may stem from software issues, so before you take anything apart update Windows to the latest service pack and update your drivers, this may come from a faulty driver mismanaging it’s hardware. Since the problem just started happening to you, try to remember if you installed any drivers recently. If you did, you may have to do the opposite of what we just told you and uninstall any drivers you’ve updated recently and roll them back to a previous version. Sometimes drivers have bugs and you may have encountered a really bad one.
Now, software would pretty much be the best case scenario, but you could also be experiencing problems stemming from anything from a bad cable (which would be fairly easy to find and cheap to fix), to a busted memory module (which would be easy to find with the right software, and not too expensive to fix), to a broken motherboard (which would be more difficult to find and not that cheap to fix).
Modern day chips are made up of layers upon layers of microscopic components, so something as small and hard to find as a hairline crack can mean that under the right temperature, when components swell up, a connection may be severed and your computer can shut off.
Unless you’re very tech savvy and comfortable with cracking your computer open, and potentially doing things like inspecting the motherboard and it’s capacitors under a magnifying glass, we’d recommend you take your computer in and have it looked at by a pro. They can run tests on the memory modules, test parts individually and find out if there is a specific part that’s shorting out.
Just make sure they can give you a reason before they make you buy an expensive part. If they say: “well, new motherboards won’t work with your processor, so you’ll need a new one of them, too”… find out about getting a new computer, it might be a better deal.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
“Into Gaming Update” Weekly Feature with Mark Lautenschlager
Omar in Saudi Arabia listens to the podcast and asked: “I have a question regarding Aperture on my MacBook Pro. I always shoot in RAW format through my DSLR and I know that the size of these files are huge! Is there a way to have only the edited version on the Aperture library instead of copying the whole RAW file there? Because currently the Aperture library file is 25GB, which is a duplicate of the original files located on my laptop.
Thank you and keep up the great show!”
You could just get rid of the RAW file after you’re done editing it, and just keep the edited JPG. If you take a lot of pictures, deleting each RAW manually, one by one, could take a lot of effort, instead you can make a new Smart Album and set the condition to “file type is RAW”. That should show you all the files whose format is RAW, and you can delete them from there. RAW files are pretty huge, so you should see those 25GB shrink by a lot right away!
We should mention, there is another option. RAW files will fill up your hard drive, and if you’re sure you never want to use them again, then by all means delete them and keep the pictures in a compressed format. Having said that, if you think you may want to edit your pictures some more later, hard drives are pretty cheap, you could buy a multi-terabyte hard drive and keep it for picture storage only.
The RAW files don’t even have to be in your Aperture library, but if you ever need them you can copy them from the hard drive.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Guests in this hour:
Andrea Woroch, Consumer Savings Expert
Are offers from daily deal websites like GroupOn worth buying? Do you actually use the coupon after? Andrea shares at least 8 ways to get the most out of your deal-of-the-day.
“IFA History Feature” brought to you by Messe-Berlin
Television first got color in 1954 in the US with a shadow stripe mask using the NTSC standard. (jokingly referred to as “Never The Same Color”). Germany had just started TV broadcast in black and white as the allied forces had to authorize the use of TV, and no more than 4.000 TV sets had been sold in 1952, with the not so impressive screen size of 9 x 9 inch. Much later in 1963, first shown at IFA, a European color technology was introduced with the PAL system, which solved the problems of NTSC using phase alternation, invented by Prof. Dr. Walter Bruch.
That’s this week’s IFA Update brought to you by Messe-Berlin. Be sure to visit IFA-Berlin.com.
Rickey in Columbus, Ohio listening via the podcast asked two questions: “I have a netbook from work and I need to reload Windows XP on the Netbook. Obviously, the netbooks don’t have an optical drive. I’m using an external CD drive, but it fails during the installation process. What can I do to fix that?
Second Question: I have 2 iMac G5s that I’m trying to restore the OS on. Where can I get my hands on a copy of Mac OSX that would be supported by them?”
You didn’t really say how it wasn’t working for you. Is it failing to read the disc? That might be a bad drive. More likely, I think, it’s not able to boot from the external drive (many computers can’t boot from a USB CD drive and Windows XP requires a reboot as part of the installation process). You might be able to use a USB flash drive, though.
Before you can install Windows XP from a flash drive, you have to prep the flash drive from a computer that has a working installation of Windows XP on it. If you don’t have such a computer, then you can’t use the flash drive, and you’re back to an external optical drive (but many of those won’t work because the computer will refuse to boot from them).
You can find instructions on prepping the flash drive at this two links: OCIA and TechRepublic, but in the meantime we also want to ask whether you’ve checked for a reinstallation partition on the hard drive? On a Dell netbook, for instance, you can press F8 while it’s booting, select the Repair option, then the Reload Factory Software, and you’re all set. Other manufacturers are different, of course.
About the second question: iMac G5s will run any Mac OS X that supports PowerPC processors. That means that you should be fine running anything up to Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard), but you won’t be able to run anything newer, including the latest Mac OS 10.7 (Lion), on them. You can still find Leopard online. We found it on Amazon for you, click here to go to it.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Listener Art asked: “Why would Netgear come out with a DSL modem/wireless router, when DSL
is slow and old technology?”
DSL isn’t necessarily slow and old, in some places (places with decent phone lines, that are not too far from phone exchanges) you can get very respectable DSL speeds.
Generally speaking cable is faster (and fiber optic lines even faster), but phone lines are more common than cable TV, so DSL can be very convenient for a lot of people who may not have cable, or access to cable internet.
And then there’s the obvious economic reason, it doesn’t matter if DSL is the top of the line, best way to get internet or not, what matters is that it’s popular and as long as it’s popular Netgear and it’s competitors will try make and try to sell DSL modems.
Tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast for more details.
If you have any questions about any of this week’s show info, please email us here.
This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners
Endangerbles: Several music CDs to help children learn about endangered species
VSO Software: Copies of Convert-X-to-DVD 4 – Lets you convert videos to DVD and watch on any DVD player.
wEASEL: Several wEASEL Easel Smartphone Stand with Hanging Loop in Black or White
