THE COMPUTING WOES

Well I must say something very odd had happened in the last few days and I am still pondering to the cause.

I have mentioned recently to friends, cannot remember if I mentioned it in this blog but did on my corruption blog, about deciding to build a computer and then changing my mind.

Then there was a court case by a large public body. Who had taken me to court and obtained a liability order from the court quite illegally. It turned out that courts, rather conveniently, do not keep record regarding reasons they grant orders leading me to demand to know how anyone can keep a check on them and can break the law and not be a arrange to anyone. It then turned out that the whole thing was reversed, the bailiffs called off and turns out they admitted to owing me money, yet the figure is only a fraction of a percent of what they alone owe me, ten percent if they are not to blame for freedom pass refusals! Yes I am speaking of Enfield Council and Council Tax of course.

I had decided to try somehow to build this dammed computer I not only need but have wanted to build for 7 years now!!

This back pay, though smaller than the real figure, meant this gathering of hardware would be less painful than previously thought. Only less painful and die what will be in essence a budget PC except for one single component that for me if the most wanted and most necessary in my next computer. The overall price will still be budget of that I can assure you!

Now one of the things I am going to do is to use an AMD APU in my new system. This would be a budget processor costing presently around £125 as opposed to buying an Intel Core i5 or i7 for between £200 to £600 where even the latter to me is nothing, sorry from the fact I do not have it. I am a computer specialist and there are processors that cost a couple of grand and motherboards with two or more sockets so that you can have multiple chips!

An Apple equivalent would like like the new Mac Pro with the cheapest version costing likely the grand and the mid level model costing £7,500. I think we can not bother with the top model as you get the idea.

The other thing that the AMD APU is good fur is also having a built in graphics chip, which is why they are called APUs instead of CPUs. Both sections of this cheap would be a very big leap forward on what I currently have but I'd bit the premium item I referred to. That will be a switch from a Hard Disk Drive which contains several metal platters containing your data magnetically like that of audio tape. The disks all spin and just like a stylus arm on an old record player there is one inside a hard disk. This arm shoots in and out between the separate disks to access data to load up. As you work your way from the hard disk to the processor itself you jump into different types of ever faster memory chips.

From disk it goes to buffer memory chips on the hard disk.

From the Hard Disk Buffer Memory it loads into RAM.

From RAM memory it then moves to Cache Memory.

From Cache Memory it then gets fetched to the core engines inside the processor ... for processing!

As you move down from each line to the next there us a jump in speed but for some time now hard disks have lagged, sorry for the pun, behind! I stared at university that there will come a time when the hard disk will get dumped and chips used instead. It to longer than I thought however!

A couple of years back these drives started coming out but we're tiny in memory and bloody expensive too! Plus there were issues with them and their drivers and controllers along with other things despite the speeds. Something like a 60GB SSD, add they are called standing fur Solid State Disk, cost a grand. I received a shock several days back when I spotted that even the fastest SSD drives of 250GB in size can be bought for a little over one hundred pounds!

Now currently Windows 7 plays up and I cannot figure out why. It takes around 7 minutes from start up before I can do anything too. When trying to take a day of rest I play games my laptop is barely able to run. These are Elder Scrolls Skyrim that I recently have a rest and decided to go back to Fallout New Vegas. The later hit left because stupid Valve and their stupid Steam software failed to save the saved games of Fallout and I had to start at the beginning! This engaged me no end and after I realised this I went to Skyrim, possibly buying Skyrim because of that?!

Yesterday I was playing Fallout in the afternoon and had my two companions of Veronica of the Brotherhood of Steel, who I had previously, and the eye-bot Ed-E. I had not long found out something about Veronica I did not know before, that she is GAY and I laughed and thought "bugger me even my computer girlfriend is of limits?!" when a little while later my screen went black and there was a beep!

Now this had never happened to me before. On any computer! The computer was still on and hard drive light was on along with the fan and I thought my screen has gone?! It would not do anything so I forced a shut down and rebooted. Everything was fine and worked as normal and I it it down to some freak crash in Fallout, add it does crash a hell of a lot. I fired up Fallout and ten minutes into gaming it did it again! So I turned the damn thing off and went off to do something completely unrelated to computers as what with the fecking crap phone and the issues I have with the tablet PC too I am not sure who I would like to give the hardest kick in the nuts, Steve Ballmer,  who got slagged off quite accurately by an Amazon reviewer, or Erik The Viking?! Sorry Schmidt!

Today I had my bike out ready to go out and I took so long finding things and then remembering nothing was charged up that street an hour and a half I decided it was a waste of time and out the bike back in its hiding place! Yes days really can be like that for me!

I fired up the laptop went oat the now regular message of Windows not shutting down properly to me muttering "Yeah, yeah you halfwits!" and fired up Fallout! This time everything was OK and I was relieved ... until I had been playing for about an hour and if it went again?!

Now I do not know what is going on. It had stumped me in all honesty and I will have to pay attention to the not up screen as I suspect that one of the main chips is overheating? Now because it's a game many people would probably think that it's the graphics chip but not necessarily so. The CPU can be just as stressed out in gaming as the GPU. At the end if the day what it means is that I now cannot use my laptop for gaming.

It could turn out that Ubuntu broke my laptop is it did shut down several times with a message about overheating! If you stared this to Canonical they would simply point the finger at AMD. Maybe they would be right? My system did get hot!

But at the end of the day all chips get hot and you really on the savvy and professionalism of the manufacturer building it so it does not get bloody hot! There were far more powerful laptops than this one when I bought it. It was also a PC World refurbished laptop but lied and said it was ex demo on the day. Would never have bought a refurbished laptop in a million years and now you know why. This is the forth thing to happen to this laptop since purchase and I have only ever had one thing in seven years with my last one. This one has had four in two years now.

So very weird that I have had this sudden urge to build a computer telling myself off for relying on that crappy laptop for so long and that I need a proper system, but won't be building that lol! Only to then have the laptop do something catastrophic. Now if it turns out to be the thermal paste on either of the two processors then this sitting off well become more frequent! That would be catastrophic for me in terms of both work and entertainment.

So it seems I really have no bloody choice now I will have to build this budget system. My work on all my blogs have been increasing and will continue to do so for the next four months or more. Was not the best time for it to do this!

I might run Skyrim tomorrow and see if it dues it again using that game? If not I will go back to Fallout and try again and then look to see if they're are any overheating messages? But I cannot see that because in the event if overheating the system shuts itself off but maybe it does not do this for the GPU? I can tell you that the metal casing would have burnt my hands has it been any hotter. Not felt heat like that before I must say.

If it is the GPU then this is not too bad as it had a list powered GPU in it so can still work in it. Just anything intensive in graphics would be impossibly including gaming, image editing which I do actually now do. Videos I do bit normally use and not sure, higher resolutions could be problematic if running more than thirty minutes.

Why does nothing ever work and why are these laptops made like utter crap? Eh, Hewlett Packard? Why have your laptops gone back to bring made like shit?!?!

Lmao!