Meuchel Computer Services & Office Supplies

We have recently acquired the video & tanning salon in town and have named it DisKonnect.  The name was derived from a play-on-words.  Disk, as in DVDs, games and music and disconnect as you would disconnect from everything as you enjoy your entertainment or a relaxing tanning session.  We will be opening a walkway between Meuchel Computer Services and DisKonnect shortly for your convenience.  Thank you as always for your patients as we transition.

More information on DisKonnect can be found at www.DisKonnect.com

Our Latest Build:

• Antec Nine Hundred Two case
• Thermaltake Toughpower 1000watt power supply
• MSI 790FX motherboard
• Dual ATI HD5750 graphics cards
• AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black edition processor
• 8GB OCZ DDR3 1600mHz RAM
• 300 GB WD Raptor 10K SATA Drive
• Plextor All-Write SATA DVD Burner

This baby HAULS.

Windows experience rateing of a 5.9 due to the hard drive not being a solid state (they are over-rated and over-priced anyway), otherwise we would have been at a 7.2 over all rating.

PassMark PerfomanceTest 7 rated it an overall 1333, makeing this by far the best build to come through Meuchel Computer Services.

We are looking for customers who would like to take it to the extreme so if you think you have what it takes to handle this beast come on in.

Sorry for not having time to blog lately.  We just added a new member to our family and things have just been hectic.  Meuchel Computer Services is in full swing and now offers a line of electronics in our store location.  We have Blu-ray players, DVRs, LCD TV’s and much more.  Please come in and check it out.

Well folks, here it comes.  Windows Vista is going to the wayside and in comes Windows 7.  Looks like Microsoft will be releasing Windows 7 on October 22, 2009.  So remember what that means for Windows XP.  Look what happened to Windows 2000 when Vista came out, it went out of support life cycle. According to this link http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-xp/future.aspx XP will stop being supported in April of 2014.  Microsoft has already stopped manufacturing of Windows XP licenses.  So anything that is still stocked will be sold out and discontinued. 

If your looking for that Christmas Computer with the latest and greatest…expect to get it with Windows 7 installed or at least ready with an upgrade offer.

Go into the registry and look for the registry key…

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\StartMenuInternet\IEXPLORE.EXE\DefaultIcon

I’ll bet yours looks as mine did and has…

C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe,-7.

What it should be is…

C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe,-32528

Reboot. Problem solved.

I am running windows Vista Business with Internet Explorer 7.  I did a Google Search for how many tabs can be open at once.  Nothing came up off the top so I decided to do an experiment.  I started opening tabs and got to 150 and it wouldn’t open any more.  So I checked my memory and it seemed to have about 99% full but I had a remote desktop application running.  So I shut that down and was back to 96% full memory.  It still wouldn’t let me open another tab.  So apparently you can only open 150 tabs in IE 7 under Vista.  I even opened another browser to type this blog entry and it worked.

Most computer manufacturers now are trying to boast 4+ Gigabytes of memory with super huge hard drives and Dual or Quad Core processors.  In the computer world those numbers usually mean everything.  Here is the problem.  Windows XP and Vista, as most people know them, run on what’s called a 32-bit platform.  Most games, software, and hardware drivers are programmed for that platform.  The 32-bit platform only supports a total of 4 GB memory.  This includes video and processor memory.  So, in essence, only about 3.5 GB of total system memory can actually be used or even seen.

Enter 64-bit.  Now most programs are not coded for 64-bit Operating Systems yet.  But there is a compatibility feature that will allow 32-bit programs to run on 64-bit systems.  Here is the tricky thing.  Hardware has to have a 64-bit driver to run on a 64-bit operating system.  This is why when people unaware of this situation buy a 64-bit computer, they cannot get older hardware to work on it such as printers, scanners, cameras and such.

So the key is to watch for the amount of memory.  If it has 4+ GB it is most likely 64-bit.

          Fraudulent Antivirus programs alert.

Recently there have been some evolving antivirus programs that trap you into buying their shoddy services and report inaccurately that you have a virus on your system.  The primary of these is Antivirus 2009 aka; Antivirus XP, Antivirus 2008 and Antivirus 2010.  Please be very cautious about installing anything that does not look trustworthy on your system.

          Good Free Antivirus Programs.

AVG antivirus is a nice small antivirus to run to keep your system protected.  It can be downloaded from free.grisoft.com.

Avast antivirus is another.  It can be downloaded from www.avast.com.

A nice open source package is Spyware Terminator.  This bundle includes Clam antivirus which was designed for use on Linux machines and is very capable on windows machines.  Plus since it is open source it is okay to license on your business computers. Download from www.spywareterminator.com.

Here recently I came across a Compaq/HP computer that had a PCI-e add in slot in it.  Anybody who has ever built a new system within the last little while knows that if you want a decent graphics card for gaming or development it will come in the form of a PCI-express card which is the current replacement to the AGP standard.  The motherboard in said system had on-board video and it did not perform well enough to run the CAD application that the system was used for.  So we decided to upgrade the video card to either a GeForce 8400 or 8800 GS series card.  These are good entry level cards and work with most systems.  Unfortunately for us, not this system.  I shut the computer off and opened the case and inserted the card.  Which was fairly straight forward.  Then I booted the system with the monitor plugged into the analog port on the new GeForce card.  Low and behold the system booted up with no post errors and continued to load with no video.  Thinking okay maybe it is using the DVI port as the default output, I decided to plug the DVI to Analog adapter in and plug the monitor into that.  Still no video.  So shut the computer down with the power button soft off, unplugged the monitor from the add in card and plugged it into the on-board video port again.  I left the GeForce card in the slot just to see what would happen and turned the computer back on.  This time the card’s fan spun as before but I had video.  In a normal situation with an add-in card the motherboard will shut down the on-board video and feed the video output through the add-in card.  So I start tapping the key sequence to get to the BIOS setup but wait.  I got a message on the screen saying this system only supports SVDO/ADD2 cards in the X16 slot.  What?  So I get to digging and I find this.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document…

Cool.  So basically what this tells me is that the only card that will fit this slot and do anything is a $20-$30 card that only has a DVI or S-Video port and actually runs off of and extends the on-board video.  In other words this slot is USLESS!  Good job Intel.  Not your best idea.  Needless to say that new GeForce card will either have to be sent back or used in another system.  As for what we will have to do to the CAD system?  Can anyone say replacement?

The other day I wrote about cleaning your computer.  We cleaned an E-machine system of viruses today and I snapped some shots of the inside to show what to watch for with dirt build-up inside your case.