Questions you want answered.

Eleima wrote:

No display on the motherboard, unfortunately.
I just watched the codes "99", "9C", "92" and then stay on "A2" on my husband's monitor, so I guess that's not it. Just as well, I didn't want to go back to a 1280x1024 monitor...
I'm Googling a bit and finding threads in the asus forums. Doesn't look good. Maybe I'm gonna need to move this to the "loathe" thread.

Interesting. I just tried unplugging ALL my USB devices, and while the boot still hangs, the A2 error code disappeared (so it just hangs on a black screen).

Sounds like instead of error messages on screen your bios on the motherboard is outputting to the screen, so yeah check the manual for your motherboard (either physical or online) and see what the error code A2 is talking about... oh quick easy thing, try removing one stick of RAM at a time and booting.

Also for funzies reseat every internal connection (vid card, hard drive) and blow out for dust

I was just at the hairdresser where I was offered 'thinners' put in (or used on? I didn't get it clear) the back of my hair. Does anyone know what that is? I couldn't grasp the meaning of what it was from what the hairdresser said and it was so noisy and I just wanted to get it cut and get out of there that I didn't ask.

Heh, I think blowing out dust will be mandatory, whatever the final outcome. It's just so dusty here and homes don't have central air.

The good news is that I think I've narrowed it down. After unplugging everything, I took. Off one of the panels. Except it was the one for the back of my motherboard. Space is an issue here, so my case is in a corner, lodged between my desk's supports. Probably not a great idea for air flow, but it's temporary and I really don't have any alternative at this point. Anyhow, I wanted to clear the CMOS but I found myself staring at the wrong side of the motherboard, sighed and just pulled all four cables to my HDDs the CMOS. And it booted up! So I figure the SSD with my OS, RAM, GPU, CPU, PSU... I figure all that's okay, and it's one of my storage drives. But which one?... Haven't figured it out yet, because of the bad news:
Bad news is baby's up. XD
Gosh, I just hope it isn't the hard drive with all my Steam games. I have redundant backups for photos, music, and I wouldn't cry over losing my movies and Tv shows, but my games?... Yeah, I'd probably cry over that.

Sorry to hear you're not feeling too peachy, Roland.

RolandofGilead wrote:

Will I be loveless and childless until I die?
Despite the wording, I don't think dying will actually improve those two.

Well, I'm in this boat and have fully embraced it. There are advantages. You aren't breeding, so your impact on the planet is massively reduced. I really would love to see some statistics on that. Not reproducing would technically help reduce humanity's impact on the planet way, way, way more than little things like recycling, etc.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:
RolandofGilead wrote:

Will I be loveless and childless until I die?
Despite the wording, I don't think dying will actually improve those two.

There are advantages.

That's my other problem, I'm not as young as I used to be, I don't think I can survive a lot of Hookers'n'Blow.

re: the environment and stuff, humanity truly deserves whatever happens to it, by definition, since we made things the way they are.

Eleima wrote:

Sorry to hear you're not feeling too peachy, Roland. :(

Thanks. I currently feel better than when I originally had the idea for the post, but I went ahead with it anyway. Despite day to day differences in mood, it is the next great fork in the road. Even if I choose not to decide I still have made a choice.

So anyway, I need to be more positive. See spoiler section for the LiveJournal that inspired this outlook.

Spoiler:

Reluctance to be serious in this endeavor is due to how I view my self-worth, but I view things through the prism of what I can offer and what I expect in return and I am incomplete.
There's nearly a decade of my life missing, spent in stasis in an apartment and a basement. I have poor social skills and abilities; or rather, I have a good conscious understanding of social and bonding processes but I can't even emulate them due to fear due to lessons learned early. I have no regular friends and no social life and I don't know what either of those look like anymore and I wonder if I ever did.

I don't avoid people out of introversion or shyness. If not an extrovert, I'm split down the middle, I avoid others out of creeping fear. Exhaustion after being with a group is based on fighting social anxiety. My personality dictates one way to act and be, but lessons learned from a young age make man's nature undeniable and I am a very good learner.

I'm not unfunctional, but my sexuality is broken in several ways.

Given I want three children, I'd really prefer a wife in her mid-20s, but I don't have the body of a mid-20s man for certain. (31 and just barely in the obese category, it's the just barely that annoys me so much cause I don't look it).

And as cliche as it is, I never got to sow my wild oats.
edit: and I don't think I have enough money to hire a dozen pornstars.

Finally, to quote Groucho Marx and Woody Allen, I'd never join a club that would have me as a member.

If you have an external drive bay try plugging your system into that, or have you tried other ports on the mobo or diff cables? Just trying to think of alternatives to the drive itself failing.

The good news is that my system is booting up again. The bad news is that the problem seems to be coming from my fourth and last drive. The one that has my backups and... my Steam games (I'd split it into two partitions, apparently). Which really, really really SUCKS. I'm not sure things are that simple, though, because I'm not seeing my CD-ROM drive anymore, and that's hooked up through SATA too, so I need to power down later and try unplugging that. Maybe I can salvage my Steam library and saved games...

Edit: The CD drive was working just fine, I'm just sleep deprived and blind.

assuming the HDD is failing, as soon as you get it back up and running: back it up! (or at the very least anything you can't download again) Don't wait to do it later, get it backed up ASAP!

No external bay but yeah, I'm going to try that next. I intend to unplug the CD tray and switch the cables. Hopefully, it isn't the hard drive. Pretty sure that's the 2gig I bought last year too, I've never had a Western Digital fail so quickly.

Edit (two hours later): so I tried swapping the cables (plug HDD 3's SATA cable into HDD 4 and then HDD4's cable into HDD3) and it seems to be the hard drive. I think I have an external hard drive case lying around so I'm going to try and put the drive in there, see if I can read it that way.
Sigh. This wasn't how I thought I'd spend what little free time I have on Saturdays.

Edit 2: I mounted the HDD in my external case and it works! Reads just fine! I'm at a loss as to what's going on here... At least I can salvage my data, though. But I'm really stumped.

Absolutely! I'm going to transfer all my Steam files right now, and the rest are just my #2 backups (I have three). Still, I'm really, really stumped. :/
This might take a while though. Stupid USB2...

Edit: so it seems I can transfer to the drive but not from it...
A chkdsk yields error "6672732e637878 41a" and I'm finding diddly squat on the net, this is not good...

RolandofGilead wrote:
Eleima wrote:

Sorry to hear you're not feeling too peachy, Roland. :(

Thanks. I currently feel better than when I originally had the idea for the post, but I went ahead with it anyway. Despite day to day differences in mood, it is the next great fork in the road. Even if I choose not to decide I still have made a choice.

So anyway, I need to be more positive. See spoiler section for the LiveJournal that inspired this outlook.

Spoiler:

Reluctance to be serious in this endeavor is due to how I view my self-worth, but I view things through the prism of what I can offer and what I expect in return and I am incomplete.
There's nearly a decade of my life missing, spent in stasis in an apartment and a basement. I have poor social skills and abilities; or rather, I have a good conscious understanding of social and bonding processes but I can't even emulate them due to fear due to lessons learned early. I have no regular friends and no social life and I don't know what either of those look like anymore and I wonder if I ever did.

I don't avoid people out of introversion or shyness. If not an extrovert, I'm split down the middle, I avoid others out of creeping fear. Exhaustion after being with a group is based on fighting social anxiety. My personality dictates one way to act and be, but lessons learned from a young age make man's nature undeniable and I am a very good learner.

I'm not unfunctional, but my sexuality is broken in several ways.

Given I want three children, I'd really prefer a wife in her mid-20s, but I don't have the body of a mid-20s man for certain. (31 and just barely in the obese category, it's the just barely that annoys me so much cause I don't look it).

And as cliche as it is, I never got to sow my wild oats.
edit: and I don't think I have enough money to hire a dozen pornstars.

Finally, to quote Groucho Marx and Woody Allen, I'd never join a club that would have me as a member.

I've been there man, and I am sure others here have too. I'd be happy to go give what little advice I can, but this isn't a short thing. Do you mind having a thread devoted to this topic? or is there already one out there? I'm not sure if the dating thread is quite right for this.

Speaking of computer problems... since I built my new computer I haven't been able to attach a printer via usb and get anything to work. The computer says my driver is out of date, but then it says it can't find a driver.

The below is copied directly from the Device and Printers screen when I try to get windows to fix it.

6 Universal Serial Bus (USB) Controller doesn't have a driver Not fixed Not Fixed

There is no driver installed for Universal Serial Bus (USB) Controller.
InformationalDevice information
Name: Universal Serial Bus (USB) Controller
ID: PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_8C31&SUBSYS_85341043&REV_04\3&11583659&0&A0
Error code: 28

Apply solution for driver problem Completed

Follow the instructions in the solution to address the driver problem.
Install a driver for this device Completed

The driver for Universal Serial Bus (USB) Controller is not installed. Install the latest driver for the device.

Problem with PnP devices Detected Detected

There are problems with some PnP devices. Windows will take additional steps to further troubleshoot these devices.

This is my Motherboard if that helps...

Who cares less? Someone who could care less or someone who couldn't care less?

strangederby wrote:

Who cares less? Someone who could care less or someone who couldn't care less?

Someone who could not care less. The person who could care less, well.. that person CAN care less, and therefore has not achieved maximum "not caring."
Yeah. That made sense, right?

Eleima wrote:

Absolutely! I'm going to transfer all my Steam files right now, and the rest are just my #2 backups (I have three). Still, I'm really, really stumped. :/
This might take a while though. Stupid USB2...

Edit: so it seems I can transfer to the drive but not from it...
A chkdsk yields error "6672732e637878 41a" and I'm finding diddly squat on the net, this is not good...

I put it in to a hex to ASCII converter, and the "6672732e637878" part converts to "frs.cxx", which might be the name of a C++ source file, but also leads to dead ends.

Mermaidpirate wrote:

I was just at the hairdresser where I was offered 'thinners' put in (or used on? I didn't get it clear) the back of my hair. Does anyone know what that is? I couldn't grasp the meaning of what it was from what the hairdresser said and it was so noisy and I just wanted to get it cut and get out of there that I didn't ask.

Thinning shears cut hair at different levels at the same time and only cut part of the lock of hair so it doesn't shorten the whole thing, just parts of it. At least, that's my understanding. I have very thick, very fine hair so get it done all the time. It's great for short hair in the summertime, really helps keeping things vented and cool because it takes out all that extra insulating hair.

Eleima wrote:
strangederby wrote:

Who cares less? Someone who could care less or someone who couldn't care less?

Someone who could not care less. The person who could care less, well.. that person CAN care less, and therefore has not achieved maximum "not caring."
Yeah. That made sense, right?

This is true assuming that every person has exactly the same minimum amount that they can care. If you assume that every person is capable of caring all the way down to 0 iotas, then someone who "could not care less" cares 0 iotas and someone who "could care less" cares > 0 iotas. On the other hand, say that person A is super-sensitive and cares at least 5 iotas about everything, but person B doesn't and can go down to 0. Something that person B cares 3 iotas about but A cares 5 iotas about is something that B could care less about, but A couldn't, but B still cares less than A.

Generally speaking I tend to assume the former (everyone is capable of caring 0 iotas). At the very least, you know that the person who "could care less" isn't trying hard enough to not care.

Also, I might overthink things sometimes.

I like the way you overthink, Keldar.

Reason I ask is the new Weird Al song about bad grammer has caused a lot of people to come online and defend the use of "could care less". This irks me.

strangederby wrote:

Reason I ask is the new Weird Al song about bad grammer has caused a lot of people to come online and defend the use of bad grammar.

This irked me.

Oh I'm under no illusions. My own spelling and grammar have always been bad. There's just something about could care less, decimate and literally that I find annoying.

IMAGE(http://thefrustratedoptimist.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/caring.png)

manta173 wrote:

6 Universal Serial Bus (USB) Controller doesn't have a driver Not fixed Not Fixed

It looks to me like it's not a printer driver that you need but a driver for the USB controller. Try going here (the Asus page) and select your OS, then download and run the USB driver and see if that helps.

Samsung Galaxy S5 or HTC One M8? The specs on the Samsung are (marginally) better, but the M8 is just so pretty. Opinions?

Rallick wrote:

Samsung Galaxy S5 or HTC One M8? The specs on the Samsung are (marginally) better, but the M8 is just so pretty. Opinions?

If audio quality is a factor go with the HTC One.

sr_malo wrote:
Rallick wrote:

Samsung Galaxy S5 or HTC One M8? The specs on the Samsung are (marginally) better, but the M8 is just so pretty. Opinions?

If audio quality is a factor go with the HTC One.

Do you mean call quality or media? I do use my phone a metric f*ckton (as opposed to imperial f*cktons) for listening to podcasts and music.

Rallick wrote:

Samsung Galaxy S5 or HTC One M8? The specs on the Samsung are (marginally) better, but the M8 is just so pretty. Opinions?

I decided on an LG G3, so sorry, I'm no help to you.

BadKen wrote:
Rallick wrote:

Samsung Galaxy S5 or HTC One M8? The specs on the Samsung are (marginally) better, but the M8 is just so pretty. Opinions?

I decided on an LG G3, so sorry, I'm no help to you. :)

*exaggerated huff, throws arms up in the air and storms out of the room*

Rallick wrote:

Samsung Galaxy S5 or HTC One M8? The specs on the Samsung are (marginally) better, but the M8 is just so pretty. Opinions?

I went with the HTC One M8. The deciding factor, for me, was the memory, with Samsung at 16 gig and the HTC at 32. The HTC One's cameras aren't as good, but they're good enough for me for the most part. It takes very fast pictures (and video @ 60 fps), at least. The HTC also felt a lot sturdier to me, with its gorgeous aluminum 1-piece casing.

Eleima wrote:

Do we have a "Help Me Troubleshoot my PC" thread, or should I just ask here? Or in the "Help Me Build my PC" thread?

manta173 wrote:

Speaking of computer problems...

We do have a whole Tech & Help forum.

strangederby wrote:

Reason I ask is the new Weird Al song about bad grammer has caused a lot of people to come online and defend the use of "could care less". This irks me.

I hope they aren't trying to defend it on syntactic grounds, because there's no ground to stand on for them there. As far as trying to defend it in terms of usage and descriptivism, I think it's fairly clear where it came from and that the morph from "couldn't" is a clear error, and I don't think that "could care less" is sufficiently dominant in any culture or region to qualify as a colloquialism.

I guess what I'm saying is that I am prepared to fight this.

IMAGE(http://www.quickmeme.com/img/9c/9c4b24cc1cb6bc910e517e0b1fcb0671acf8bbcbf69bbda0e5d723455374bfd7.jpg)