Random Tech Questions you want answered.

misplacedbravado wrote:

Apple finally allows ad-blockers on iOS, so which one should I get?

We're talking about it here. I'm using Blockr right now.

I have two 1680x1050 screens right now, and want to upgrade my main display to a nice 1440p. If I do that, would I be able to still use the current screens with the different resolution screen in a 3-monitor setup? Does anyone run such a thing?

stupidhaiku wrote:

I have two 1680x1050 screens right now, and want to upgrade my main display to a nice 1440p. If I do that, would I be able to still use the current screens with the different resolution screen in a 3-monitor setup? Does anyone run such a thing?

If you mean using them for gaming, then I don't think so. But if you're talking about regular use, then yeah, that'll work just fine. Resolution isn't really a factor.

As long as your video card is capable of outputting to three monitors, of course.

There you go. Thanks, RNG.

Oh certainly I don't want to use the other monitors for gaming or any kind of surround setup -- just to put documents on or to make it easier to move between applications. Fancy whiteboards with just the center screen for gaming.

How hard is it to mount them vertically on the sides? Or is that a monitor-dependent thing?

(Assuming you're on Windows.)

Here's some keyboard shortcuts that I use quite a bit:

- Win+Left/Right Arrows: Pushing left or right while holding the Windows key will snap the active window to the left or right side of the screen. Going one step further in either direction will push the window to the closest monitor.
- Win+Shift+Left/Right Arrows: Holding shift in addition to that will instantly move the active window to your other monitors. (This is the big one, obviously.)
- Win+Up/Down Arrows: Maximizes/minimizes the active window.

Of course, you can just use the mouse, but when both hands are already on the keyboard... why move?

For anyone else interested, here's a fairly comprehensive list: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/100-key...

Great, thanks guys.

Is there a hardware solution to help windows with switching sound playback device?

I use a Logitech G930 headset. I see that this includes USB hardware and software in the troubleshooting system; which is a problem since it's motherboard related.

This is what happens:
-I have my headset setup as the primary playback device. The secondary playback device is a TV on HDMI. The tertiary playback device is the motherboard sound, connected to a stereo on my desktop. Unplug one, and it chooses the next available device.

-Games won't switch playback device. They lock into the playback device that was active when the game was started. This becomes a problem if I start a game that requires my headset, but I forgot to plug it in. I have to restart the game to get it to re-recognize the new playback device situation.

-itunes, browsers, etc will usually switch on the fly. Some browser based video or sound won't switch. I don't know what's different about the ones that won't

Would putting in a sound card, or some other hardware or software solution take control of this process? Would games likely handle it better?

I've been having an issue with SlingPlayer for a while now, since Firefox updated to 40 or whatever. I'm permanently stuck on the "Enable SlingPlayer Plug-in" page. There's supposed to be some active element on the page, but all I see is a black box. The plugin is enabled, I'm sure of it. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling, didn't help. I've tried disabling every single extension which might interfere (NoScript, uBlock, Disconnect, CookieMonster, HTTPS Everywhere), nothing seems to help. Chrome no longer supports SlingPlayer (that's what I was relying on until a major update removed the API it used ;_;), and I refuse to use IE on principle. I think others have reported similar issues on Sling's forums, but I have to create an account to view their forums, which is f*cking stupid. Anyone familiar with this issue and can offer advice?

I have what seems to be a weird conflict between my video card (GTX 970) and a powered USB 3.0 hub that I recently acquired. The powered hub is used exclusively for my HOTAS (X55) and any other gaming accessories. No USB 3.0 storage devices are attached.

I'm running Win 7, and the MoBo is almost 3 years old now, and it seemed like USB 3.0 was a cool new feature back then, so I think I have a first gen USB3.0 board.

Anyways, I just started noticing it this weekend, after upgrading nVidia drivers to the latest final. I have since reverted back to an older version, but the problem was persisting (hopefully fixed but interested in what community has to say).

While playing Elite Dangerous, at some point the screen just went black. No reboot, no artifacts, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't a heat/power problem. I hard reset the computer with the USB 3.0 hub plugged in, and I noticed on the bios boot up that it said "no keyboard detected" even though nothing was actually plugged into the hub, which I thought was odd. When it got to windows sign in, my keyboard worked fine, and I booted to windows. When I fired up Elite again, it was running at like 5 FPS. Choppy and unplayable. Thinking maybe it was an Elite problem I booted up another game (Dying Light) and that too was choppy.. and then crashed.

At that point, I unplugged the hub, rebooted, and this time it did detect the keyboard on bootup. I plugged the hub back into a USB 3.0 port and started playing Elite. Great, problem solved. After about an hour it crashed again. It didn't stay black screen this time, Elite was still running but it was as if it was minimized and I couldn't open it again. Control alt delte to kill the process worked. Rebooting with the hub in came with the "no keyboard" error, and starting a game after reboot still ran like crap. Unplugging hub, reboot, seemed to work fine.

I also used some GPU monitoring tools, and I didn't notice anything odd. The 970s run cool, but when it did tick over 63 degrees C, the fan went on as its supposed to and it maintained that temp. I didn't notice any spikes in % usage or anything.

At this point, I pulled 2 other "hubs" (my monitor has 2 USB slots and my keyboard also has a passthru), and plugged my new 3.0 hub into a 2.0 slot. I haven't had any issues since then, but I am curious if this is something typical for older MoBos and USB 3?

Hmmm. . . not sure about your x55, but I recently started playing with my x52 pro again and had similar problems with USB 3, both with and without a hub. Like you, switching to a USB 2 port fixes it. Googling came up with saitek's crappy drivers and their not supporting xHCI. I'm just leaving it in the 2 port as there doesn't seem to be a solution other than disabling xHCI in bios.

Asterith wrote:

Question for the hive mind.

Last night I was gaming on my pc and suddenly heard the audio cue that a USB device was disconnected, then the audio cue for USB device reconnected a few seconds later. Didn't think anything of it. Then, a little while later, we started smelling gunpowder. A search indicates that this is usually the smell of a circuit board with a short. It doesn't seem to be the AC since the smell was isolated to the main floor. We opened the windows, the smell dissipated and I kept playing with no issues on my pc.

Took the pc apart today, but trying to identify if that was the cause is difficult. I did notice the lingering gunpowder smell in the case when I opened it but that just may be something that was captured last night. Any suggestions on how to approach this? Do I just keep using my computer until something else happens?

Update:

I have found the culprit! I noticed my blu-ray drive wasn't powering up anymore so I went into the case to do some testing. Found what you see below. I was hoping the drive would still work but based on the damage to the connectors, I just said screw it and bought a new one. hopefully this doesn't happen again!

Spoiler:

IMAGE(http://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=0B9hMFASgdHstT0tGMnFZZVB6WlE)

IMAGE(http://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=0B9hMFASgdHstQmJ6Y1pTZ1BvY0E)

IMAGE(http://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=0B9hMFASgdHstNlhKdU56ckEwV2M)

Looks like you have mini stormtroopers in your case. They never could hit crap.

Asterith wrote:
Asterith wrote:

Question for the hive mind.

Last night I was gaming on my pc and suddenly heard the audio cue that a USB device was disconnected, then the audio cue for USB device reconnected a few seconds later. Didn't think anything of it. Then, a little while later, we started smelling gunpowder. A search indicates that this is usually the smell of a circuit board with a short. It doesn't seem to be the AC since the smell was isolated to the main floor. We opened the windows, the smell dissipated and I kept playing with no issues on my pc.

Took the pc apart today, but trying to identify if that was the cause is difficult. I did notice the lingering gunpowder smell in the case when I opened it but that just may be something that was captured last night. Any suggestions on how to approach this? Do I just keep using my computer until something else happens?

Update:

I have found the culprit! I noticed my blu-ray drive wasn't powering up anymore so I went into the case to do some testing. Found what you see below. I was hoping the drive would still work but based on the damage to the connectors, I just said screw it and bought a new one. hopefully this doesn't happen again!

Spoiler:

IMAGE(http://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=0B9hMFASgdHstT0tGMnFZZVB6WlE)

IMAGE(http://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=0B9hMFASgdHstQmJ6Y1pTZ1BvY0E)

IMAGE(http://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=0B9hMFASgdHstNlhKdU56ckEwV2M)

I could be wrong, but I'm going to make the assumption Asterith, that you didn't build this PC yourself and thus the following advice is given based on that.
After this incident, be also wary of the connector or power supply you have and how long you've had your system.
Is the connector part of an adapter from 4 pin molex to SATA 15 pin?
Is it a 15 pin directly from the power supply?
It may be that the adapter, power supply, or the drive are of less than decent quality, aka cheap.

I did actually build it myself. The power supply and the drive are good brands and well reviewed. However, I suspect the adapter (which is the 4 pin molex to SATA) may have been less than quality. I'm going to check to see if I have any other spare 15 pins directly from the power supply, but I believe I ran out. Everything else has been running fine, but I'm definitely keeping an eye on the power supply, just in case this incident may be the first sign of its death.

I'm having one of those vague hard-to-diagnose if regular user problems, that I think might be above my level of technomancer ability to remedy, but I'll post the symptoms here and see how far I can get.

Sometimes, my internet goes out and the wifi can't find any networks to connect to (despite there being a few around 24/7). I'm using a USB dongle and when this happens, the light that usually blinks away isn't on at all. It's an ASUS N53.

Unplugging the dongle and plugging it in again does nothing. I tried a couple of different USB ports, and still nothing. In the network and sharing map, the wifi device doesn't show up at all, and when I try to 'troubleshoot connections' it complains about an ethernet cable being unplugged, and won't do any other troubleshooting steps. I don't have an ethernet port on the computer any more. I tried to plug in my phone and tether it, but that wouldn't register either, although that could be due to the phone not quite being set correctly.

I've also noticed the network settings window hangs around this time too, but I'm not 100% certain that's related.

After this has happened, when I try and put my computer into sleep mode, the screen gets no signal and goes into standby, but the rest doesn't seem to shut off, and nothing I've tried will reverse the sleep action and bring the screen back up either, requiring a reset.

I'm on Win10, fresh install, I don't think this has been happening for the whole time since I upgraded though, only in the last couple of weeks. A good step would be to try a different wifi adapter, but I don't have one, so if anyone has other diagnostic suggestions that are explainable to someone that doesn't know jack about networking or super deep hardware stuff I would appreciate it.

Hey Mermaidpirate. See if you can open Event Viewer and check for any hardware or system events which are occurring at or just before the problem begins. Events are shown in chronological order and pretty easy to go through even though you may not know what some of them mean. Look for events marked as critical or error first. If those don't turn up with anything interesting then look at any warnings.

I'm hoping that events show up which help to narrow down the potential cause of your problem. Since you can't try another adapter, this is the next best thing to do.

My gut says it's likely hardware such as the adapter, your USB controller, or RAM. However, it could potentially be a software/firmware issue which could be resolved with updated drivers and firmware for the adapter or your motherboard. Make sure you have the latest drivers for everything, and the latest BIOS level for your motherboard as well.

EDIT: This driver from Mediatek supports your USB adapter and is newer than the one from ASUS. It's worth a try.

Mermaidpirate wrote:

Sometimes, my internet goes out and the wifi can't find any networks to connect to (despite there being a few around 24/7). I'm using a USB dongle and when this happens, the light that usually blinks away isn't on at all. It's an ASUS N53.

I had almost the exact same problem, and I think it was with an ASUS as well. The problem turned out to be that I'd let Windows detect and auto-install drivers for the WiFi adaptor, and it had detected it as a Broadcom adapter (if I remember correctly). This was apparently enough to make WiFi basically work, but the driver periodically crashed or something and so my WiFi would periodically go out for like 30 seconds and then come back on. I figured this out by going into the driver manager and noticing that the driver being used for my WiFi wasn't what I expected. So I manually uninstalled it then installed the driver from the supplied CD. No idea if this helps, but it was definitely one of the weirder issues I've encountered over the years, and it's at least an idea of something to check.

Quick update: I had a look at the driver and it's already a Mediatek one, I tried to unintstall it and put in the latest one from the ASUS website, but after I pointed the driver installer at the file location it was all like 'your driver is already the latest available' and had no option for 'actually,,,,,, I want to install this one'. I'm out of time for today and will try the other steps later. Perhaps uninstalling and reinstalling the driver will have flushed something out, but I'm not holding my breath.

Hm... you should be able to uninstall and upgrade the driver directly from the driver control panel. In Properties, maybe? But yeah, it doesn't sound like that's your problem.

Carlbear95 wrote:

I have what seems to be a weird conflict between my video card (GTX 970) and a powered USB 3.0 hub that I recently acquired. The powered hub is used exclusively for my HOTAS (X55) and any other gaming accessories. No USB 3.0 storage devices are attached.

Ugh.. well after I thought I licked this problem, its come back and seems worse than before. I'm wondering if this hub is doing some real harm, or if I have some other hardware problem.

These are some new facts:

- I moved the USB hub to a 2.0 slot and ran fine for the last 2 weeks. No problems whatsoever.
- Then suddenly the same problem happened again. Primary monitor goes black, game crashes, but this time I noticed an error. Something about "nvidia Kernel has stopped responding..."
- I rebooted a few times and the primary display wouldn't turn on at all. From what I can tell, the PC doesn't recognize that the card is plugged into the pcie port. I plugged the monitor into the onboard dvi slot, got to windows, did a system recovery, and it the nvidia card works fine.
- Reading online that kernel error seems to be related to later drivers so I did a full uniinstall of the drivers (using DDU) and a clean install of older drivers that most were reporting as stable. Boot, no problem. Over the weekend did a 3 hour gaming session, no problems. Whew.. ok problem solved.
- This morning, I get back to my computer and start up Rebel Galaxy.. its kind of chugging along but playable. Still doenst' look right, so I fire up another game and that game is just completely unplayable.. *sigh*. Reboot
- Again the PC doesn't seem to recognize the card. Plug into onboard video, fire up a few diagnostic tools and it can't find the card. Now I'm getting worried. Shut down completely, unplug from wall, then try booting again. Still not recognizing and the video card fan is going full blast. As you know 970s barely get hot with standard 1080p (or whatever th 16x10 resolution is), so this is worrisome. Still no picture coming from the card.
- So this time I power everything down, pull the power leads out of the video card, power on, get the error about "no power to pcie", shut down, plug the leads in, and suddenly everything is fine again.

I didn't have a chance to play after that as I had to get to work, but now I'm convinced there's a hardware issue. As for the video card, I'm pretty sure its not a heat problem. I never get artifacts, and when everything is working, it runs very smoothly, no problems, even with an extended gaming session. Could be a power problem, but I don't get the telltale signs, like rebooting. There doesn't seem to be a CPU heat problem either as I have plenty of temp monitors that aren't going off.

Here are my theories.. but I'm not sure how to test them.

1) Somehow this powered USB hub is actually sending power back into the PC that's causing issues. I read about this when I googled some theories, but that post was from like 4 years ago.. surely people would have found a way to fix this by now?! How can I check this? I supose I can just run without the hub for a bit to see what happens, but it's how I plug my HOTAS in, and I realy love playing elite that way.

2) There is something wrong with the MoBo that's causing the pcie slot to conk out.

3) something wrong with power supply. The way the 970 fan just went to max for no reason makes me think there could be a short somewhere?

Anyone have any other thoughts? Right now I still point to the powered USB hub.. but is that really a thing? Anyone have any recommended powered hubs that I may want to try?

I posted this elsewhere, but I hope this is the best place!

Anyone know why videos are taking so long to play for me? Most websites that host video content take 5-10 minutes to load a video. Youtube is fine, most others are affected, including facebook.

I've tried the fixes for Flashwave and rebooting and stuff, but so far no dice.

I am experiencing this issue in firefox and chrome, and it's most sites excluding youtube.

Check to see if a different computer or a smartphone on the same network has the same problem. The only time I've ever had that problem it's been ISP-related.

Good call, its only this machine that has issues, all other devices are fine.

What about incognito mode in Chrome or safe mode in FF? Internet explorer/edge?

stupidhaiku wrote:

What about incognito mode in Chrome or safe mode in FF? Internet explorer/edge?

Doesn't help.

Wireless? It could be that computer is defaulting to lower bandwidth wireless. Try disabling/disconnecting it.
If wired, have you tried plugging another computer into that wired port to see if it is the port or cable?
Or try plugging the slow computer into another port or cable to see if the problem migrates with the computer.
Check for viruses. Look in task manager startup to make sure there are no unneeded service running.
Also temporarily disable any realtime virus scan software. It could be scanning the youtube videos as you download or stream them.

Dakuna wrote:
stupidhaiku wrote:

What about incognito mode in Chrome or safe mode in FF? Internet explorer/edge?

Doesn't help.

try changing your DNS servers. Sometimes the ISP's default suck balls.

I shall try your wonderful suggestions upon my return to my residence. Much gratitude for the great ideas and patience!

So I've recently noticed a buzzing noise coming from my PC when "under load". I did some tests, I think it's the GPU fan (Nvidia GTX 760). It's quiet under low load, but when I play GW2 or run the 3DMark graphics tests (not the physics test), I hear the buzzing, and it stops immediately after the heavy load has passed. I don't think the fan is hitting anything, I imagine in that case the sound would be louder and noticeable even when idle. I'm not sure if it's always been doing this and I'm just now hearing it (I wear over-ear headphones and it used to sit farther away from me), or if this is a sign that the card has an issue. Thoughts, comments, suggestions welcomed and appreciated.