Quote from matijapkc :

"ordered a new cable" - Was it a cable built for that specific model or not? Check I/O if not.
If both ends of the cable are same, you can even try turning it around. I know the possibility for this is like 0,000001%, but I've seen a few of these cases.
So what I'm trying to say is that the laptop probably doesn't recognise the screen, so it won't do anything. If none of these work, my guess would be a faulty MB.

It's the right cable, it's got different ends at each end (i.e. you couldn't plug it in the wrong way if you tried). Dug it out of the cupboard, put the new cable in, wouldn't turn on, put the old cable back in, same problem

I'm leaning towards motherboard failure but I really hope not!

Hi,

Having a problem with a friends laptop and I wondered if you guys could help.

The laptop originally had a fault where the screen would have a blue hue. I took it apart and diagnosed the screen cable as being faulty (reseat the cable and hold it at the right angle and it goes away). I put the laptop to one side and ordered a new cable.

The cable arrived last week, turned on the machine and now it doesn't boot. No display (either on the screen, or when connected to an external monitor), not even the POST stuff. Fan comes on at full speed, then slows down. Caps lock key illuminates as normal but does not flash or anything. After maybe 10 mins it just shuts off.

The laptop is currently largely disasambled on my desk.

I've tried a CMOS reset, and removing the memory (which gave me a flashing Caps Lock light but nothing else). Any ideas?

I suspect the laptop has been dropped at some point as the casing is showing cracks. I've also noticed when connected to the mains a faint "clicking" can be heard coming from the motherboard. Sometimes.


Laptop is an HP G62-a28SA (specs here - http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfr ... lc=en&product=4226614 )

Quote from The Very End :

And RWD is more expensive and mostly impossible to find these days :/

Not at all comparable as you live in Norway, taxation central, but in the UK BMW are desperate to shift M135i's. You can pick one up (on a lease basis) for 10,000 miles pa (~16,000 km pa) over 3 years for less than £300 a month (~$500).

Was very *very* tempted once I worked out how much cash I have left over each month after all my bills etc.

Quote from Scrabby :

On-topic:
I'm looking for a navigation head unit. I saw the Andrive unit (andrive.co.uk) wich is it 599£ and you can do about everything with it. And it's standalone Android 4.0.4. Anyone else has experience with these kind of things? I want a dedicated Android and not a Windows CE with an Android over it.

I've been very tempted (I want an "in dash" TomTom unit) but the Android / Windows CE headunits all get poor reviews as actual head units (i.e. for audio quality, speed of interface, simplicity to use etc). Seems to be the typical Chinese quality just at an inflated price

EDIT - I don't know much about e90's but £600 seems expensive - a guy on the ZT forum sells Android ones for ~£400 (the ZT uses pretty much the same odd slightly-more-than-double-DIN fitment as an e46)

I got rid of a lot of stuff when I moved out - the key questions were "does it work" (anything other than "yes" was binned).

Currently I've managed to slim down all my cables into a couple of boxes but I think next I'll need to move to some sort of draw system with labelled drawers for each item. At last count I had an ice-cream tubs worth of SATA cables!

Quote from HenkkaWRC :

Monitor, that its used in gaming, shouldnt have more than 2ms response time. Anything more than that creates input lag

I would strongly disagree with this statement - 2ms will always cause input lag (because you've got an extra 2ms lag...) but of course this isn't noticeable.

I've used 16 and 25ms displays and not noticed it.

You'll also find that once you find monitors advertised at 8ms and under the testing methodology used to determine the response time gets dodgy and makes cross comparison very difficult - it's an artificially deflated number.

You decided to dump her "mid-december" but only just told her 2 days ago?

Bit cruel to play her along for 2 weeks...

Related - 6 years this month. Celebrated at the best Steak restaurant in Edinburgh (it's called Steak - if you live in or anywhere near Edinburgh - you must go. Thank me later). Been living together for 4 months. Going well

For the love of god please stop calling it an "an Insim".

It's the equivalent of asking "can someone make me an HTTP" when they want a web server.

Although your PSU isn't ideal, you should be ok with nothing more than a 4->8-pin adaptor to save on cash (I think, with the options and budget your working with, you want to be saving cash for the good stuff).

Ignoring your request for request for Christmas delivery (realistically it'll be Christmas Eve before an order is dispatched unfortunately), if it was my £350 I think I'd look on eBay for a second hand i5 3rd generation (or even a 3770k if budget allows) / motherboard. The problem is that Socket 1155 is "dead" so it seems counter productive to sink too much cash in, but if you go for the Haswell socket then you end up spending quite a lot more on the motherboard and get little real performance improvement.

Memory is a tough one - it's very expensive right now, but for a gaming PC all you *need* is 8GB. But for a day-to-day PC, I wouldn't want less than 16GB...

(as always, my opinion != the best advice)

I don't think there's a viable business in selling InSim applications in LFS - and even if there was, the value would be very very very low.

Your more likely to have someone pay to develop an application for them, but even then I don't think your likely to get much.

PS - Love the description of "it has some common features and some additional ones". Thats pretty much any application... ever.

Quote from Bmxtwins :

I memorize my way to school and there are more than 140 turns.

For reference my drive to work this morning was 80 corners, across ~23 miles of Suffolk's finest B-Roads. Same again in reverse (but surface is different on the other side of the road, lines are different etc). I certainly now how to get work and could identify each corner in order... it's not a hard task.

Quote from amp88 :

redefining maths

Quote from Foilpact :

ID be tempted just to get the Win 8 Pro upgrade edition for £25 and use the downgrade license to exchange it for Win 7 Pro for free.

I don't think any end-user version of Windows 8 includes the downgrade license - only a subset of PC's sold with Windows 8 Pro include the Windows 7 Downgrade, and it's not mentioned in any of Microsofts public or retail material.

Quote from BlueFlame :

...

Had a go at this last night - really struggled to warm to it though. I suspect more than anything it's just being out of practice at sims though (the layer of dust was thick on my G25, I think its been 3 years since it was last used) - I seemed to continually reach the apex, let off the brake and then just suddenly start wildly understeering with no extra steering or any power. First sim (excluding LFS) where drifting has felt very natural though.

The old Lotus F1 car reminds me a lot of GPL - even down to the dodgy gear stick animation and the way the body rises up from the wheels when you hit the accelerator!

Quote from Bmxtwins :

No, I just didn't know if I should take the metal case off :P

Last time I tried that (clearance issues) half the memory chips came with it... d'oh.

Quote from eddy678 :

I got two quotes, £836.53 and £876.35 annually. I said that I had a uk provisional licence...silly question but will I have to re-apply for car insurance once I get my full UK licence or will the cost still be at £836.53 once I get the full licence?

My insurance doubled (difference of £1k) when I passed.

Quote from Becky Rose :

Do you have evidence of that? Because usually when parked off road or in a garage the premium comes down because insurance only covers you when on a public road - on private property it comes off the property insurance. This is why you see so many "At your own risk" signs about in car parks and what-not.

I've never had a car park crash myself but I did have a guy have a go at me once whilst turning around and reversing the back of my car onto his drive, he came running out and started ranting about some bloke who crashed into his wall 6 months earlier doing a similar thing and who then claimed on his house insurance which put his premiums up.

People are ****s.

You seem to be applying logic to an insurance company!

Although you would expect it to get cheaper - it doesn't when I've tried changing the details (and when I've heard of other people trying the same thing). Insurers claim lots of incidents occur involving the car getting scratched in the garage or crashing into things - but who knows.


I think more likely is that if you've gone to the effort of getting a garage, and preparing to park your car in it (sadly most garages in the UK are too full of crap to park a car in), you'll use it even if it costs you slightly more on the insurance... so they'll take all the money they can get off you.

Quote from e2mustang :

good example me,being 28(first insurance in uk tho) it didnt matter what car i got or what occupation i entered(i entered mechanic at the end and it went down a bit,which is wierd) all it mattered is the adress,and 10 month policy isntead of 12. the end result is 1600 gbp on a 2002 325i

Thats good going - I saved £100 just changing my occupation from "customer advisor" to "non-travelling salesman" when I was at PC World. I've heard "mechanic" is supposed to be very expensive as well

Quote from Mustafur :

Yeah but its insurance, they dont have to know that stuff.

Insurers ask for lots of information (arguably far more than they need). You usually can't "not tell them" something (as a pose to just lieing about it)

Quote from Mustafur :

take away the job(they are 17, why would they be working full time?) and say its in a locked garage, and no peak hour driving.

I got 2 quotes under 1000 pounds the rest where like 3-6k.

Still calling bullshit. Garages usually increase the premium (for no good reason), and declaring yourself "unemployed" also increases the cost quite a lot. And irrespective of my views on "no peak hour driving" I don't think any insurers load for it.

Most people who have cars aged 17 usually have a job to pay for even some of it.

Quote from Mustafur :

i just made up some details of what an average 17 year old and got a quote for 780 pounds on a 1999 E36 316Ti Compact manual using that go compare.

Just got a quote with an E36 Compact 316i, using average details of a 17 year old, just passed their test, work full time in a supermarket, good area, £500 excess, third party fire and theft.

Best price was £5,456.30. Only 13 out of 125 insurers even provided a quote.

I then ran it again with two older parents on there, good driving history etc as a named driver. £3,754.52 (which was quite a lot cheaper than I thought it'd be).

No way would you get a quote of £780.

Quote from Bose321 :

I do believe BF4 takes advantage of all cores though, not sure.

A quick Google says that it uses 4 threads, no idea how balanced that is though.

I'd love a hex / octo core but if my PC was only for gaming and I was on a realistic budget theres no point.

If gaming is your thing, an 8 core CPU really isn't what you want.

Quote from cargame.nl :

Maybe you need to go back for some time to an old fashioned hard drive to experience the lag, heat and unreliability again.

I don't think HDD heat is much of a problem, and SSD's are definitely less reliable than conventional disks

I also didn't see much difference going from HDD's to SSD's (beside bootup / install) for general use, although I will admit all my PC's only use SSD's as their main drives so I probably haven't had a frame of reference for a while.

Quote from Bmxtwins :

Thanks to EliteAti, he was able to explain to me that it pretty much is my processor. Apparently it's the modern day equivalent of an i3. So, that explains quite a bit

The i3 is arguably "more modern" than the x2, and actually not a bad CPU for basic / mid use - my work PC has one and its not a problem.

For reference, heres a comparative list of CPU's - http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php

EDIT - You have an x4, not an x2. Your X4 scores 3284, virtually all 3rd gen desktop i3's are faster.

However - your PC specs don't explain jitter or a temporary freeze that you seem to be experiencing.

Also remember location is very important - middle of nowhere, expensive premiums, live in Bradford, get a buss pass...

EDIT - In the interests of fairness our cars and car-related-taxes are very cheap compared to similar European countries so we really can't complain that much.

Quote from eddy678 :

So really what you guys are saying is, I could go for most of the cars on that list, apart from the Opel Manta and Opel Ascona OR try to find a not so common car which is driven by teens in the UK which will lower the cost of insurance?

What were saying is get a quote. Then you'll know.

You'll struggle with older cars as while classic insurance is cheap, very few companies offer it to <25's and usually it also comes with a very low mileage stipulation / no commuting use - a friends Dad bought him a Triumph TRsomething as his first car, had to sell it (after making some decent money hiring it out!) as not a single company would insure him on it.

Quote from eddy678 :

out of that list and if you were me living in the UK at almost 17, which car would you go for and why? Feel free to add a car which isnt on that list though .

Something unusual. Volvo 340 / 440? Seem to remember a 106 Rallye was quite cheap as well although somehow I doubt it will be anymore. My car was also quite cheap to insure (comparatively) which is why I bought it in the first place.

Quote from Matrixi :

Get a NA RX-7, that's what I did for my first car. It's listed as a 1.3 so the insurance and tax bills are tiny.

Not that insurance in the UK is affected much by engine size, but usually something like an RX8 would be treated as a 2.6L engine.

Plus side is once you get even slightly older, it gets a lot cheaper. I got quotes as low as £350 this year...