USB problems... help!!!

yer welcome, tim.

Sorry I could not help any more than I tried.

Do you feel comfortable with building your own? If so, it is cheaper that way. You can build a pc that has a market value of 1,300 dollars for less than 500 if you go to right places.

start with motherboard and buy parts that are compatable with it. memory is cheap, so not bad either.

 

Linda and I built the systems we have now using parts we bought at www.partspc.com. really reasonable prices, and they will help by recommendations here and there.

I will add that if a blind man can build a pc, you should have no problem building one also.

 

smarter than you? nah. building a pc is simple. memory goes in only one way. same with video card, sound card, cpu, etc.

don't take much to build 'em.

 

Sounding motherboardish. I have been fighting a MB problem I think but don't know for sure. About every two days I get a blue screen, reboot and all is okay. I've gone back to dates before the problem, not used programs, uninstalled others and it keeps going on. Some days I get the blue screen three or four times, one time it ran four days ???? Talk about wanting to tear your hair out - would have if I had any :laugh:

Finally got the laptop and will move the troubled one to the garage to see if I can figure it out over the months.

If you want to buy a new rig, get to the store shortly. The new models are just coming out and they are closing out the older ones. Don't bother online as they don't list all the closeouts.

Office Depot has some great laptops cheap - picked a decent one up for 499 Monday. Saw some nice desktops as well but most are about the price of notebooks.

Wife and I have gone to notebooks for our desks to save room and they do everything we need them to do.

Circuti City may have something in your area though here they have no real specials - online is a tad better.

Best Buy has a couple cheap laptops as well.

 

excentric,

yer problem may be with a cmos setting. have you over clocked it? checked for flash updates?

It may even be as simple as updating video drivers or replacing the video card only.

Run the tests at www.pcpitstop.com and see if it detects anything.

 

Pitstop passed me with flying colors.

You are probably right on the Bios thought. I've always had blue screens now and then - maybe one or two max per month and have just lived with it. Microsoft reported it was due to a mismatch between the cpu and motherboard (thank you tiger direct.com for selling me the bundle .

Among all the trial over the last couple months I installed the latest bios but did not see any noticeable effect on performance or the blue screens.

Sunday I tried a couple things and among them had the video card out. I had a terrible time to get it to work after I reinstalled it. Got it to work but thought I'd change it out and see if that might be the trouble. It has been okay since so may have found the trouble but not holding my breath.

If that doesn't work I will pull the gig ram stick I put in several months ago. Not overly worried about it since I picked up the new one.

Thanks for your suggestions.

 

Sounds like a Mobo problem to me as well.

I do agree with SFIC that building a PC is easy.
However, I prefer professionaly designed ones.

They just always seem to work better, though a few I have built really worked well.
I built one at one company I worked for and they were still using it after 5 years.
I had upgraded it some over the years and when I left the guy was using 3 monitors on it.

Of course everyone here knows I am a Mac fan.
That is THE way to go unless you just have to have windows which hardly anyone does.

My mom still uses my iMac from 2000 and it is aging but still running fine and the sound in it makes it great for iTunes.

It has not had the system reinstalled ever that I can remember. I did upgrade it about 3 years ago to what was then the latest version of Mac OS X.

OH, back to your problem, if you did fry your USB ports, and it sounds like you did, you can either buy a new computer or just get a $10 USB PCI card.

 

Tim...

in case it is a driver problem, here are some links for you:

Audio: http://tinyurl.com/2lscht

Chipset: http://tinyurl.com/ytdyuz & http://tinyurl.com/36cs4n

With your computer being a laptop, there's not a whole lot to be done with it. you can't add in a USB card and use the ports from that, as you don't have the capacity. It is possible to have the motherboard replaced in the lappy, but I would be getting a written estimate (that includes the cost of the parts) before I let anyone touch it.

If you stay with a lappy, check out Dell's Vostro line:
http://tinyurl.com/ysqx3x

The Vostros are computers without all the crapware stuck on them. Plus, you can choose XP or Vista on them. Dell also does a Vostro desktop line. Vostros are the same computers as the Dimension and Inspirion, but cheaper.

 

Sounds like either a driver conflict or your harddrive is going out. Post the first few lines of the blue screen, it should tell you why it did it...

You may also want to look in the dump logs to see what they say...

 

From the looks of it the video card may have been the culprit or it was conflicting with something. Changed it last Sunday and it has been running perfectly since. I did have to reboot for an update tuesday but it hasn't gone that long for months.

 

Glad you got it fixed for a lot less than a new rig... :thumbs:

 

Actually was so tired of problems I went out and bought a laptop Monday :laugh:

I've been fighting problems daily since november and had just plain had it. I've been putting off a new one for weeks thinking this one could be fixed. I was quite satisfied with its operation. Now not sure what I'm going to do, it is nicer than the new laptop in a lot of ways. Taking a few days more to be sure this one is going to continue on its good behavior then make a decision. My old laptop is old so the new one won't be unappreciated.

 

Did you go for the Celeron or the T5270? Either way, you will have more than you did with the old one.

You can get an external enclosure and put the hard drive from your old lappy in it so you can access all of the files you have on it with your new lappy.

 

VANTEC NexStar3 NST-260U2-RD Aluminum 2.5" USB 2.0 External Enclosure
$18.99 plus shipping.

It let's you turn your old hard drive into an external drive. Once you transfer your stuff, wipe the drive and use it as additional storage.

 

The one I linked is for a 2.5" (laptop) harddrive. It only has an IDE connector, but If your laptop was four years old, it would have to be an IDE drive. So, yes, it will work.

Newegg sells a lot of different enclosures, so if you want one that will take 3.5 and 2.5, they have it, as well as enclosures that offer both IDE and SATA connectors. If you can catch a hard drive on sale, it is actually cheaper to buy one and an enclosure than to to buy an external drive itself.