Fixing a broken internet

I use a wireless for my gaming machine, because it’s unfeasible to get a wired connection, mainly because this isn’t my house and thus my PC (Which is in my room) is nowhere near the router. Recently I’ve been getting dropped from the internet, but still being connected to the router. I can still access the router and edit the settings if I need to, but any internet browsing gets me disconnected.

I only get dropped if I open up the internet. Steam chat works fine, Thunderbird works fine, and the last time I this happened (It fixed itself somehow…) I could browse using the in game Steam browser.

Any suggestions?

Drug Crazed

PCG: Ah… The mystery of the dropped internet. I have a laptop at home which regularly ‘breaks’ my WiFi and can only be cured by resetting the router. I’ve tried blaming interference from neighbours’ networks, bad drivers and even Windows 7, but while all are plausible, finding a cure is going to take me a lot longer than the 30 seconds it costs to restart the router. So the wisest use of my time is to leave things as they are.

In your case, though, this sounds like it relates to the specific browser you’re using, doesn’t it? Have you tried using a different web browser, like Firefox or Opera? Or reinstalling whichever one you’re using? It could be a good old fashioned bug, or it could be a piece of malware that has installed itself into your browser and is overloading your net connection with requests when it starts.

Smokin’ hot graphics

When you turn a TV on to static, you can see a horizontal line usually crawling it’s way down the screen. That’s started happening to my PC while I’m playing games. It makes texts and interface flicker, and persists until you either quit the game, or temporarily remedy it with the solution (mentioned below).

Usually the symptom is accompanied with ludicrous amounts of lag. Pausing the game, alt-tabbing, and then going back into the game usually solves temporarily, but the problem likes to persist… a lot. I also attribute it as a primary factor of why I’ve stopped playing ME2.

Mythic

PCG: In your forum post, you mentioned that you’d recently moved your PC, which leads me to think this is likely to be one of two things. Either the graphics card has come slightly adrift in its slot, and this is interference caused by bad contacts, or it’s an overheating problem. Try taking the card out of your PC and putting it back in firmly, if that doesn’t cure it, check the GPU and CPU heatsinks for dust build up. As a last resort, try removing the CPU heatsink to clean it and reapply thermal paste.

Pin head

I am using a AMD Phenom II X4 965. I was replacing the stock heatsink with an Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro 7 Rev. 2, but when I unlatched the stock heatsink and pulled it from the motherboard, the themal paste stayed on the CPU and pulled it out of the socket while the locking lever was down. I removed the CPU from the heatsink without touching the bottom and meticulously checked the pins for any defects and found none with my naked eye. I cleaned the leftover paste off the top of the CPU with rubbing alcohol, dried it, and reapplied new paste (with a pea-sized dab in the middle) and attached the new cooler. Everything seems to be working fine.

Is there anything I can do to see if the CPU was damaged in some way? The CPU is new so I am not too familiar with how it should be acting normally. Any methods I can use in the future to make sure this doesn’t happen again?

EC

PCG: As stupid as it sounds, I’ve had exactly the same problem with AMD chips being torn out of their sockets several times in the past. At first I thought I hadn’t fitted it properly, but when it happened a second time I just got more careful. It is possible for pins to break off when this happens, but unless you can one see one sticking out of the socket, then you should be fine. While the hatred I feel towards AMD’s overly delicate design is real, the chips themselves are ludicrously tough. I’ve repaired many bent Athlon and Phenom pins following workshop accidents over the years using nothing more sophisticated than a ball point pen.

UAC: good or bad?

I was having an argument about the benefits of UAC in Windows Vista/7, I am of the opinion that it does a good job and anyone turning it off is asking for trouble. I compared not using it to logging in as root on Linux for everyday use. Could you clear this up please.

jon_hill987

PCG: Like most people, I’ve come full circle on this one. When Vista launched, UAC was a good idea poorly executed. It prevents programs from installing or altering system files without explicit approval from the user and helps to stop you accidentally installing malware on your system, so it’s a good thing. But because it popped up so many times and needed so many clicks to clear, turning it off and relying on firewalls and AV for security was enough for me.

Under Windows 7, it’s far less intrusive so I leave it on all the time. But it still bounces up more often than, say, Ubuntu’s root prompt. Why? Because Windows doesn’t make the same strong distinctions between user and root space as Linux. For example, logic says an app like Core Temp which reads CPU sensors shouldn’t need to access UAC protected areas every time it’s run. But because of the way Windows is constructed, it does. On the other hand, there are a good many Linux apps which are buggy because they don’t have root access – if you want to use the GUI to change a graphics driver setting, for example. So there’s no perfect solution just yet.

Why don’t graphics chips cook?

My question isn’t really anything serious, more of a curiosity. I was wondering why a GPU’s thermal rating is always so much higher than a CPU? For instance, Nvidia’s new Fermi cards will safely run at temps above 90C without breaking a sweat! Nvidia even lists the maximum temp at 105C on their website.While at the same time, even the most adventurous overclocker won’t push a CPU’s temps much above 70C under load. Why is that? It just seems like there shouldn’t be that large of a discrepancy.

Makius

PCG: Good question. There are differences in the way that the two types of processor are manufactured which affect performance at temperature, but I put the fundamental part of the question to Lars Weinand, Senior Technical Marketing Manager at NVIDIA.

“A CPU is much more error critical than a GPU running graphics,” he explained, “For example, if the CPU gives a wrong value when running something as ‘simple’ as Excel, then the whole OS can crash whereas a slightly wrong pixel colour when a GPU is pushing out millions upon millions of pixels at once does not cause a game to crash. This is simplifying things, but the end result is that a GPU has a much higher thermal range. Also, half of the die space on the CPU is dedicated to cache and its few cores have long pipelines which creates hotspots where heat builds up. On a GPU the heat is shared over a larger die area hence GPUs having a higher heat threshold.”

Giving it the boot

At reboot, or normal boot-up, I come to a black and white screen with roughly the words “Boot error, please insert disc and hit Enter.” So essentially, it again does not bring me to the “which OS do you want screen”, just this new screen. So, I put in the Win 7 disc, and did a hard reboot. As expected, after reboot, the next words to come up were “Hit any key to boot from CD or DVD…”, but to test things, I hit NO KEY. I let it pass. Guess what? The two choices screen came up! “Earlier version of Windows, or Windows 7″. Very perplexed, I chose Win 7, and it boots up no problem. So, to test it out again, I took out the 7 DVD, and rebooted. Wham, same problem black and white screen: “Boot error, please insert disc and hit Enter”. So I did, but this time I DID hit a key, went into 7 setup, and tried the “Win 7 repair startup” option, and rebooted w/out the disc and tried it again; again, SAME “boot error” message! But when I put the Win 7 disc in, hard reboot, let it come back up, display the “Hit any key to boot from DVD” and I SKIP THIS (hitting no key), it then goes to the “correct” screen of offering me two choices. I hit Win 7 every time, and it boots up fine.

The_Terminator

PCG: The_Terminator’s question comes from our excellent new tech forum which is well worth checking out as a first point of call for your problems. There’s some more background to the issue and some excellent advice for repairing damage to the Master Boot Record (MBR) of a damaged Windows installation. I think there may be a simpler solution, though. It sounds as if the hard drive order got swapped around during a BIOS flash. Even though nothing has changed physically, if your XP hard drive has been set ahead of the Windows 7 one in the Boot Order, it would account for nearly all the problems you describe here.

Every Tuesday, our hardware expert Adam Oxford is on hand to answer your hardware and software gripes. If you’ve got a question, ask below in the comments, or in the tech folder in our forum.

Enough Cooling?

My question regards the PC Gamer Rig. I’ll be building it in about a month and was wondering about the cooling for the system. Should I invest in another couple of fans to put into the case? Similarly, should I consider a different heatsink to the stock Intel version or does that keep temperatures down all right by itself?
Elliot Metson

PCG: Putting together the Rig as it appears in the UK magazine will give you all the cooling you need, but you might want to upgrade the CPU and case fans (or even the case) to deal with noise. We’ve had no problems running even overclocked processors on stock cooling, but our ears have suffered a bit, if we’re honest. For your CPU, Arctic Cooling’s excellent Freezer 7 costs less than £18 and yet is barely audible and super-chilly, while the biggest improvement you can make to the Coolermaster Elite case we use is to fit a throttle to the existing fan, rather than replace it.

Seriously. How much is enough?

I do my PC gaming at a desk at home, with my PC tower inside a reasonably ventilated large drawer space. My current tower is 19 inches long, 8 inches wide and 16.5 inches deep and fits with just adequate air flow around it. The PSU needs to be at the top of the case too. When I look into building a PC of my own for the first time, what current mid size chassis/case would you recommend for my gaming PC & how many fans?
H2o

PCG: Your current tower is a standard size for what’s often called a ‘midi’ ATX case. It’s identical, in fact, to the Coolermaster Elite mentioned in the question above. When it comes to cooling, the general rule is that the bigger your case is, the better you can manage airflow inside (and the more fans you can fit). If that’s the biggest space you have to play with, though, there are still some options for silent gaming. The Lian-Li PC-8FIB is a stunning enclosure, but costs the Earth, otherwise you could try the Antec 300 as a cheap alternative, but which is quite noisy.

In terms of number of fans, unless you’re planning on overclocking, so long as you keep them clean and the inside of your case dust free, one at the front and one at the back should suffice. Top and side fans can often be disconnected if your system is running stably and you want a little less noise.

Beyond Native Resolutions

I see that most monitors seem to be 1920×1080, but for a higher cost I can get some higher resolutions. I see a lot of game benchmarks listed in much higher resolutions to stress the power of a video card. My question is, what does a game look like on a 1920×1080 monitor if you select a higher resolution in game? Do you see a loss of picture quality or what happens? Is there a reason to buy a super high resolution monitor for gaming? or is the 1080p versions enough for most gamers?
Fox91

PCG: Unlike old-school CRT monitors, you can’t actually run an LCD monitor at a resolution higher than its ‘native’ one. In other words, if there are 1920×1080 pixels on the screen, there simply won’t be an option to game at 2560×1600 in your settings.

Gaming at native resolution means each pixel your graphics card is outputting correlates exactly to one pixel on screen, and so long as the pixel pitch isn’t too high – in other words the pixels aren’t too far apart – it’s the best picture you can get. Run at a lower than native resolution and you’ll find a lot of artefacts and blur on screen as the monitor struggles to interpolate missing pixel data.

The good news is that anything up to a 24inch screen looks pretty sharp at the HD-standard 1920×1080 resolution, and any half decent PC can run games at that setting in its sleep. Instead of increasing the resolution, you’ll have plenty of processing headroom to ramp up image quality settings.

Dead motherboard

A few weeks ago I tried to power up my PC and was met with a black screen. I tried the usual things, including checking cables, connections, unplugging external devices etc… I was starting to think that the graphics card had gone, but eventually realised that the motherboard wasn’t getting to POST – no reassuring “beep” of success to let me know everything was working. I tried a few things, resetting the BIOS, replacing the battery on the motherboard, unplugging all hard drives and eventually stripped everything down so I just have the motherboard, PSU, processor and 1 stick of RAM connected – it still won’t post. My question is really: is there anything else I can try to see what is wrong before I spend money on something that isn’t the problem? And, if I do have to spend money, what should I replace first motherboard or PSD – I suspect one of these is the culprit but which is more likely?

Andy Pearson

PCG Bad news I’m afraid. Short of trying everything again in the stripped down PC, there’s not a lot more you can do for this one. I have seen similar motherboards rise from the dead, though, so as a last ditch attempt I’d suggest resetting the BIOS again now that everything is out, and re-seating the CPU too – together with applying new thermal paste for the heat-sink. You could also look for a recovery BIOS on the motherboard manufacturer’s website, to see if there’s a way of flashing your board back to life.

Normally, though, I’d suspect the PSU before the motherboard – unless you’re overclocking there’s little reason a healthy motherboard should suddenly give up like that. You didn’t mention your motherboard model, but some have contact points built in for attaching a multimeter to check the PSU’s health. If it’s not supplying power, you know what to replace.

What Wattage?

How important is it to get the right wattage from a PSU? How do I know what I need? Is there any danger in having too much?

BJRose

PCG The only thing that’s endangered by feeding your PC too many Watts is your wallet. After 600W or so, the price of decent, reliable power supplies gets painful – and it’s an unnecessary expense. Totalling up the power requirements of your PC is like that scene in Apollo 13 where Ed Harris is trying to get Tom Hanks back to Earth on batteries. You tot up what each component needs (for example, 150W for the CPU, 200W for the GPU, etc) and then add 50-100W for good luck. If your PC needs 500W to run flat out, that’s what it will use regardless of the size of your supply.

Unless you’re running dual graphics or a large number of hard-drives, you should be OK with a power supply rated 600-650W.

More important is the efficiency of the PSU. This tells you how much energy is lost in the conversion from mains power to the DC supply your PC needs. An efficiency of 80% or more is good, anything less means you’re spending a lot of money warming up your case.

Should I liquid cool?

I want to change to liquid cooling for my graphics card and processor. Are there any tips you can give me or am I changing to much?

Kris

PCG Personally I’m not convinced by water cooling unless you’re overclocking, as there are plenty of cheap air coolers for CPUs which outperform most liquid units and run quieter too – particularly if you have a big case with plenty of room for airflow. I find the biggest problems with noise tend to be graphics cards and power supplies.

Liquid cooling can help with graphics card noise, but changing the cooler on a graphics card can be a real pain to do and you mentioned this is your first PC build. My advice would be to build the PC using the standard coolers first, and once it’s up and running look at adding water cooling if you need it when you’ve got the experience of a full build under your belt.