I've recently set up an SSD booting computer with HDD storage, which was pretty fun, but it took a long time considering I've never fucked with computers before. What other interesting shit can I do?
I've been thinking of maybe upgrading my graphics card, motherboard and CPU, probably installing more RAM, but I don't really have the money right now and can't figure out what is compatible with what. Even finding which is the most recent products of the various manufacturers is confusing. Besides ,I find I'm becoming bored of browsing the internet all day every day. Are there any cool things I could do with computers that doesn't revolve around increasing performance of games/internet? What can I use this computing power for?
Making a blind system for my window with a light detector that opens them in the morning would be pretty cool but I think that's more in the field of circuitry than computing.
So without further ado; Noob tier computer projects. What would you recommend?
Nothing on the hardware side of computers is really a "project" these days to be honest lad. Unless you want to start faffing around putting in a custom watercooling loop, it's all very straightforward and modular. PCs these days, even high end monster rigs, take less than an hour to assemble even for an amateur (not counting, that is, all the time spent watching instructional YouTube videos).
You'll probably get more mileage out of software tinkering. Mod your Windows installation with a snazzy customised GUI. Change all the icons to glossy white, find a nice custom theme, set up Rainmeter, make a personalised rocketdock with stack docklets, all that jazz.
I once spent more or less a whole weekend making my old Windows 7 machine into a sci-fi looking minimalist masterpiece, while still having everything I use accessible within one or two clicks. That's real satisfaction, if you spend a lot of time actually using your pc.
Learn to program. It's great fun, it's surprisingly easy to get into and it could lead to a new career.
If you like the idea of mucking about with robotics or electronics, you can get an Arduino starter kit for under £20 and a big bundle of sensors for under £10. There are tutorials and projects all over the interwebs.
>>26127 I, also, love Banggood - they are ridiculously cheap for lots of things and many of their warehouses are actually in Europe/UK so delivery is quick.
I can recommend renting a VPS/Dedicated server and experiment with setting up a web server, VPN, cloud storage and WordPress in Linux. I can recommend OVH as a hosting provider.
My Toshiba laptop won't turn on. Maybe it is a battery issue, but it is one of those internal batteries, and undoing those screws to replace it is off putting right now. Maybe it isn't even the battery.
When I plug the charger in, the charging light comes on, but it will not turn on at all. Pressing the power button does nothing, holding it, tapping it - nothing seems to work.
Any ideas? I bought it about two years ago for £800 and I'm sure it might be out of warranty although I haven't looked for all the papers yet.
Have you tried leaving it on charge for ages? If the battery got super-flat, it might need a day or two of trickle charging to get it back into a chargeable state.
But yeah, check any warranty stuff.
>>26194 Sounds like an issue with the power board, possibly the connection to the power button. If the battery is drained it should still turn on when supplied with external power. I'd be opening it up personally, but I don't see any harm in giving >>26195's suggestion a go; lithium batteries will die if fully drained, circuitry is designed to prevent this failure but doesn't always work, and sometimes they can be revived with a trickle charge.
Definitely check the warranty and even if you're out by a few months or more, give it a go - for an £800 customer, you may find that they're surprisingly lenient. Saying that, Toshiba are in rough times at the moment, so good luck (by all rights they should be dead and buried, but the Japanese government/investors like to keep their big names alive, to combat China/Korea, so many "zombie" firms are being propped up rather than being allowed to fail - Toshiba is one of them).
>>26194 I work in IT support, and come across this sort of thing all the time. The likelihood is there's a problem with the motherboard or power circuitry like >>26196 said.
Still, I would recommend unplugging the battery, holding the power switch down to flush the capacitors (does this actually work?), then reconnect the battery. In my experience, there's usually a cable to connect the battery to motherboard - it will have a plastic multi-pin female connector. See if you can find it.
>>26198 Shit we have an IT guy here? Help me out. My Windows 8.1 box keeps turning itself back on randomly after shut down. I've gotten into the habit of physically pressing the O button on the PSU, so it doesn't start whirring in the dark while I'm trying to sleep and scare the shit out of me. What could it be? I'll admit just now I found my mouse and keyboard were both set to wake the computer in Device Manager but I imagine that's because that resets itself after I keep having to unplug them and plug them back into other USB ports after they randomly stop working. Christ this PC is full of demons, I guess that's what comes of building it yourself. Anyway apart from the mouse and keyboard is there anything else it could be?
>I'll admit just now I found my mouse and keyboard were both set to wake the computer in Device Manager
You're probably done. I'd also check the BIOS to see if there's anything in there that's set to turn the PC on. This isn't what comes of building it yourself, by the way. These are not default settings, so at some point you've installed something that changed them.
I'd also chuck Win8 for 7 or 10 (depending on how deluded you are about the disparity of Microsoft's intrusion of your privacy on either).
