Fm1 cpu – end of AM3 cpu’s
Dec 12th
AMD are finally limiting supply on the 250, 640 cpu’s and pushing the more expensive llana based products,
Our experience is go up a notch and use the Phenom’s and 3 cores – wait a while for the Llano’s to proove themselves,
Harddrive shortages
Dec 12th
Its been a couple of months now since the floods started in Thailand and hard drive prices rocketed – particularly to crazy levels by some of the leading etailers – Comparing, Scan, Ebuyer, Novatech, CCLonline, smaller retailers are now able to offer great /better pricing than the big boys, demand has slowed down sales, the hd manufacturers have switch production to higher value drives and SSD’s are coming into their own, Our recommendation is to shop around 500 GB Sata drives today can be found for £69.00 inc vat.
Windows Fixit
Dec 12th
go online to www.support.microsoft.com/fixit, it wil lresolve 99% of the niggles on a windows 7, windows vista, and most Xp installations,
Make sure you’ve got .netframework 2.0 or above installed + powershell, if not it wil ltake you through the steps to install + eventually you’ll see the good resoluts- goodbye registry optimsers etc.,
Zigmatek v GIGABYTE v Silverstone
Jul 11th
Great cases+ PSu’s
We ‘ve narrowed our selection of case to include a selection from each of these manufacturers, The Zigmatek Asgard, The gigabyte GZ-M2, are our most popular cases we recommend them for 3 reasons, well constructed, easy to fit, and when we ship mail order the case carton is strong enough to get your order to you in one piece. These cases cost a bit more but are worth it.
Llano A75 motherboards FM1 socket apu
Jul 11th
We’ve been busy re-arranging a few things- However top of our list at the moment is the new Gigabyte A75M-UD2H motherboards – We’d love to say how quick we can get them to run – but waiting for the new FM1 chips to arrive.
According to Gigabyte you can easily overclock from 2.9Ghz to around 4 Ghz, push the ram up, push the graphics up from 600 to 840 and achive high results on 3d Mark Vantage 2011.
OCZ – No more RAM, lots more SSD
Apr 2nd
With the recent withdrawal from the DRAM Market, OCZ have focussed their attention on the solid state market. What a result, the latest generation of SSD offerings released under the Vertex3 name utilises the second generation SandForce controller offering read & write speeds well over the 400Mbps mark.
Launched with a SATA3 (6gbps) interface these drives definitely set the benchmark, will be interesting to see how Intel respond!
Vista Service Pack Removal
Mar 1st
If you’ve ever had a Vista install that died on you while running the final part of the installation, this is for you.
Firstly, try starting windows in ‘Last Known Good Configuration’ to revert any changes. If this works, run chkdsk to fix filesystem errors and try again.
Secondly, if you can still get into windows, and you’re still having problems, try the following steps (courtesy of MS KB 948537)
This section is intended for advanced users. Use this method if you are running the prerelease version of a Windows Vista service pack, or if you cannot see the uninstall option for a Windows Vista service pack listed in the Program and Features window. If you cannot see the uninstall option for the Windows Vista service pack, you may still be able to uninstall the service pack at a command prompt. To do this, follow these steps:
1. Open an elevated Command Prompt window. To do this, click Start, type command in the Start Search box, right- click CommandPrompt, and then click Run as administrator.
2. Run the following command, as appropriate for the version of the Windows Vista service that you want to uninstall:
For Windows Vista Service Pack 1:
C:\temp\Windows6.0-KB936330-X86.exe /x:C:\temp
Note This command assumes that the Windows6.0-KB936330.exe folder is in the C:\Temp folder
For Windows Vista Service Pack 2:
C:\temp\Windows6.0-KB948465-NNN.exe /x:C:\temp
In this command, NNN represents x86, x64, or IA-64.Note This command assumes that the Windows6.0-KB948465-X86.exe folder is in the C:\Temp folder.
3. You have to create a sandbox environment before you can continue to step 4. This helps you safely run an untrusted program. To create a sandbox, type md sandbox.
4. To remove the Windows Vista service pack, type, or copy and paste the following command, as appropriate for the version of the Windows Vista service that you want to uninstall::
For Windows Vista Service Pack 1
start /w pkgmgr.exe /m:c:\temp\Windows6.0-KB936330-X86.cab /up /s:sandbox
For Windows Vista Service Pack 2
start /w pkgmgr.exe /m:c:\temp\Windows6.0-KB948465-NNN.cab /up /s:sandbox.
In this command, NNN represents x86, x64, or IA-64.
5. After Pkgmgr.exe finishes, you are prompted to restart the computer to complete the uninstall process.
Lastly, try a system restore, to do this you will need to boot off the original Vista disc and choose ‘Repair Computer’ from within setup.
Sandy Bridge – Update
Feb 15th
Well since it all kicked off with Intel and the Sandy Bridge recall, there has been a few developments.
Firstly, anyone who wants to know why we cannot sell you a Socket 1155 motherboard whilst companies like Scan or Overclockers can is purely because they bought stocks of the boards at release date, and they are now stuck with them.
Currently there are no boards at distribution and as a result none in the channel. Vendors such as Gigabyte & Asus have been requested by Intel to not distribute any affected boards and are to await replacement chipsets from Intel, this has caused quite a void in the market. Whilst the CPUs are in plentiful supply the bad press associated with the recall must be hurting and causing a few employees at Intel to break sweat.
Now onto the good news, Intel know what the problem is, have rectified it and have already started production of the replacement chipsets. The kind of good news is that replacement boards are on the way, if you already have a Sandy Bridge board you just need to wait to hear from the outlet you bought you’re board from. If you don’t have a board yet and are waiting to get one, the original prediction was April/May for the new-new boards, seems that distribution are anticipating new deliveries at the end of March so expect to see a lot of activity at the beginning of April.
As for the time being, as soon as we get availability of the boards we will be posting here and will have them on the online shop for sale.
Sound Blaster Live 5.1 & Windows 7
Feb 15th
For any of you that has one of the older Sound Blaster 5.1 cards, and you’ve upgraded to Windows 7 and found theres no support (even though the compatibility checker doesn’t flag it up) there is a glimmer of hope!
Having struggled with getting Windows 7 to talk to my onboard sound card, it decided that there were no 3.5mm jacks available and just an SP/DIF output. Well done Windows. In a hope of desperation just to get audio, I chucked in an old PCI Sound Blaster Live 5.1 Card, thinking there would be no issues, how wrong was I? well, very as it turned out. Bugger all support from Creative or Microsoft, however, I’ve stumbled across the “kX Project”. The short of it is that the chip on the sound card is an EMU10K2, and the guys at kX Project just happen to have written an experimental driver that supposedly runs on both 32bit and 64bit versions of Windows.
Anyways, downloaded, installed and manually updated drivers, works a treat! Link below for further reading!
EDIT : You may be fortunate to have a supported card, to confirm, check if it appears on this list
http://support.creative.com/KB/showarticle.aspx?sid=61105&h=13
Improving ADSL/ADSL2+ Connections
Feb 8th
This topic is subject to a lot of opinions, while this is just my take, these settings are tested on a both a BT ADSL line and a BT ADSL2+ line. Obvious things like swapping ADSL filters and disconnecting old or suspect devices while testing should be done before you start to focus on line troubleshooting, but these settings should push you in the right direction
ADSL
PPPoA over VC Mux
VPI = 0
VCI = 38
MTU = 1478
ADSL2+
PPPoA VC Mux
VPI = 0
VCI = 38
MTU = 1500
A Note About Ping
In most routers you can enable or disable whether the router responds to ping requests on the WAN port, now a majority of users will want to disable this as to keep themselves as hidden as possible however by disabling ping responses you can inadvertently prevent MTU Discovery from working correctly causing issues accessing some sites.
My advice is to leave the ping response enabled, testing has shown this in most cases has improved browsing speeds with Vista/Windows 7 and negates the need to play with the Auto Tuning settings in Vista/Windows 7