Computer Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread II

Yeah, I've put data cassettes in a tape player (grabbed the wrong one out of a case). I have a friend who claims you can blow up speakers if you're not careful.
 
aimeeandbeatles said:
How do you tell if a sound from your computer is the fan or hard drive without unplugging either?
Click to expand...

Boot from a live cd without mounting any hard drives.
 
Then the noise from the CD drive drowns out everything else.
 
It was the fan. I cleaned it and it stopped squeaking. :)

I just realized my speakers are backwards (left is right and right is left). I tried to switch it but the cable didnt reach. Is there a software way to change the speaker channels? Prefer not to do it within a program as I use several (Winamp, Media Player Classic, etc)
 
Dunno.

If the speakers have 2 leads swap them over.

Otherwise stand on your head while listening to music (you may need to turn the monitor upside down as well).
 
They're actually attached to each other already. And the cable wouldn't reach anyways.
 
It takes forever for my computer to start running large executables. A small executable starts quickly. But a one gigabyte executable takes 15 minutes to start, and a 3 gb takes almost an hour.
 
Strip them down to the bare essentials then. :p I can't even think of any multi-gigabyte executables

Serious answer: Is your hard drive badly fragmented? That's the first thing I'd think of. But it shouldn't give lags of that amount of time. Worth a try.

Serious question: My school offers OneNote through the MSDN Academic thing. Is it worth a try or is it bloatware? And is the format something that can be accessed in other apps? I don't like the idea of being locked into a file format, to be honest...
 
I have an audio file that's about 40 kbps. I know I cant increase that. However, is there a way in Audacity to make it sound a little cleaner?
 
You cant get what you dont have. The data is just not there, and while you can sort of interpolate, really the better option is to get a higher bitrate copy.
 
Yeah, Im still trying to track down a high-bitrate copy. Not easy.

At one hardware lab in college a student was having problems with capacitors falling off the motherboard. Is this a common occurrence and can it be fixed without replacing the motherboard? I think the textbook mentioned soldering them back on...
 
I've recently had a problem with my Logitech ClearChat Premium headset. Sound still comes through the headset, but certain sounds are much quieter than they are supposed to be. For example, whenever I play certain games, the voices of characters are barely a whisper at full volume, while music at half volume still is at least 3-4x louder.

For some reason, whenever the headset is fully plugged in, this occurs. However, when I leave it half dangling out the jack, the sound comes through fine (most of the time). Sometimes, when I squeeze the wire of the headset, the sound returns to normal for a split second. Do you have any idea what might be wrong with my headset?
 
First thing I'd suspect is some wiring problem inside the headphones -- Ive had the same thing happen to me a few times with cheap pairs. After I got a new set I opened up the old ones (just to see what was inside) and the wires were all weird.
 
I have a pal on the east coast that I want to video chat with via skype.
We want to jam together w/ our acoustic guitars.
The USB webcam I currently have is fine for just chatting but is horrible for recording an acoustic guitar.

I'm wondering if I could get some recommendations on a webcam or even a mic that would help me out. Webcams usually show their video specs (resolution, framerate, etc). But I'm not sure on how to compare one mic to another...
 
PeteAtoms said:
I have a pal on the east coast that I want to video chat with via skype.
We want to jam together w/ our acoustic guitars.
The USB webcam I currently have is fine for just chatting but is horrible for recording an acoustic guitar.

I'm wondering if I could get some recommendations on a webcam or even a mic that would help me out. Webcams usually show their video specs (resolution, framerate, etc). But I'm not sure on how to compare one mic to another...
Click to expand...

Well, I would not get a voice microphone, it doesnt work all that well for guitars (or so my friend says). Theres different types of microphones, we did a part on it in film class in high school, I think dynamic and condenser are the two main ones. Check this:
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/audio-music/question309.htm
 
How can I tell if a USB drive's gone bad?

It randomly set itself to write-protect. No write-protect switch on it. Whenever I plug it in Windows tells me to check it because it might've been unplugged. Done so and it doesn't seem to help. Tried various other things -- no luck. Can still access files on it. Doing some troubleshooting but is there a way to tell?

EDIT: Don't want to format it because Im not sure exactly whats on it.

ANOTHER EDIT: Appears some of the files are corrupted. Hmm.

STILL ANOTHER EDIT: Today I can suddenly write to it again.... on my laptop. Could it be a drive lettering issue? On my home PC it's drive letter H.
 
Will be updating my computer soon, so I have a couple of questions. Is there a particular brand that one should avoid or one that is most likly the best bang for my buck? and what is a top of the line Graphics card? My current one is a Geforce 8600GT and no clue how that stacks up to current cards. And Is there a point in getting a 6 core computer? Is there anything in the foreseeable future that would require more then 4?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Nizef
  • Sticky
TSG 271 Annoucement
Replies
15
Views
1K
Bol
B
F
My friend can't get past the continue button while running Civ 6 on a Mac (using the Heroic Games Launcher with Wine)! Other people have had this...
Replies
0
Views
200
Finn17608
F
F
My friend can't get past the continue button while running Civ 6 on a Mac (using the Heroic Games Launcher with Wine)! Other people have had this...
Replies
0
Views
1K
Finn17608
F
Mesix
Achievements difficult to trigger
Replies
18
Views
1K
Mesix
Mesix
T
  • Sticky
6otm197 AAR
Replies
3
Views
949
Gghippo
G
Back
Top Bottom