Computer Problem For You Experts Out There.

I was having problems with my laptop and we bought Geek Squad! You should too!

Geek Squad is something through the Best Buy company. I'm sure they have best buy stores where you are.

Only problem is if they can't duplicate the problem when they have the pc for repair, then it's really quite impossible to diagnose the problem. (Which is what happened to me, ironically)

Anywho, you can research the cost and so forth by chatting with them or something. http://www.bestbuy.com/site/electronics/geek-squad/pcmcat138100050018.c?id=pcmcat138100050018&ref=30&loc=KW-4328&ksid=22a44dcb-d928-48a5-81c9-883a0ae69615&ksprof_id=21&ksaffcode=2591&ksdevice=c&gclid=CMqKrpK7htECFRWXfgodyDUKtw

If there isn't a cut and dry answer right off the bat as far as pricing and service availability, I'd be awfully surprised, but I apologize in advance for any hassle. We've been using Geek Squad for two years now. You buy into it for a year at a time.



Anyway what I really want to say is, maybe you should just get a new one. It'll be disappointing if you go to all the trouble of hiring them to look at it and they can't find what's wrong with it. Hope this helps!

 

is it an lcd or crt?
that sounds very much like a failing crt monitor.

 

It sounds like capacitors in the monitor are failing. That an emachine has lasted ten years is nothing short of phenomenal and its not worth repairing. The repair shop will want $50.oo just to look at it when all you need is a ten cent capacitor and something else is likely to fail within a year. Monitors require a lot of power on startup and that pop you hear is the capacitor shorting out. Once its fried, no more monitor on startup.

 

Faulty HDMI (DVI) cable or socket.
Too old to be worth fixing, buy new system.

 

I believe Lenovo is the remnant of IBM's foray into personal computers.
they have fairly good reviews

 

My laptop is a Lenovo. It seems alright to me, but it is having this problem with the WiFi signal at my parents house! Infuriating.. it intermittently will drop the WiFi signal, such that I must restart WiFi to continue working or whatever. This happens to it everyday more than once at least! It's frustrating but I don't blame Lenovo. It's something with the signal at this house because when I use the WiFi hotspots at restaurants or Starbucks, etc. it works fine.

 

Its the russians...


they infiltrated your computer as retalliation for your trump thread.

 

Lenovo is the new Chinese giant dominating the whole industry. The Chinese just have so many people who work dirt cheap they can create the biggest assembly lines imaginable and out-compete anyone. They're actually quite good for the money. I recommend Newegg.com and Amazon for shopping online where you can often find much better deals if you are willing to wait a few days. Newegg's personal reviews are not always trustworthy, but they provide a lot more information in general than places like Amazon.

Cheap and mainstream electronics of any kind all contain the same overpriced parts and you are actually paying for the warranty and how much of a guarantee you might have that it will actually work for at least a year. There are 3 basic tears of products with high end stuff like what Apple sells at way inflated prices such as the iphones that so many people just got literally burned on. That's what the public won't put up with, is companies selling them complete lemons. The second tear and third tear stuff are all things engineers have put together who have a clue what they are doing, the third tear is designed by some engineering student in the basement just slapping stuff together. Sometimes you get really cheap stuff that lasts forever because somebody got lucky or actually had a clue as to what they were doing.

That specific lenono is a low end machine. They gave it twice as much ram as it could possibly need for anything anyone is likely to do with the machine because people like bigger numbers and ram is cheap. The chip is a low end i5 that's not really good for gaming, but can play perhaps a dozen or two modern games fairly well at lower resolutions. Adding a graphics card is dicey because, even assuming it has a slot, these machines tend to have really horrible power supplies that can catch fire if you add anything. Power supplies have been one of the bigger rip-offs in the industry for decades because all the companies that assemble the computers care about is that they last a year until the warranty runs out and most people don't use something like a desktop every day or for long hours every day.

Building your own computer becomes more attractive when you start talking about spending roughly $700.oo. Right now, all-in-wonders are the big thing with companies building the computers right into the monitor. As the size and power needs of the chips decreases they're getting to the point where if you want to upgrade your home computer you can just slap another chip into the monitor. Next year AMD's Raven Ridge chips will come on the market which is a tiny little thing that has the muscle of a Play Station 4 and that's when cheap home desktops will finally come of age if you ask me. Enough muscle to play all the video games you might want and cheap and easy to upgrade as well.

 

If you are interested in buying used equipment, the last generation i3 and i5 chips lasted longer than the current ones do because they use a different process to manufacture them. Although power supplies have been notorious over the years for even catching fire, for the last five years or so they seem to have gotten a handle on them and the worst that will happen is plugging a cheap video card into a cheap computer will cause it to run really slow. In such cases, its best to buy a video card that has extremely modest power requirements. I recommend the Steam Hardware Forums for any information. They have all kinds of experts that don't allow idiots to spout crap for even a minute without calling them on it.

 

Home computers have burned down houses before because the industry is given a great deal of freedom to do whatever they want in the name of growth and progress and the minute you open the box to slip in a graphics card you violate the warranty. In fact, their power supplies sometimes kill complete idiots who don't have a clue as to what they are doing even though, strictly speaking, other than cost there's no reason for them to be quite so dangerous and other household appliances often have more strict safety requirements.

If you just want to play the original fallout that lenovo should do the trick and you should be able to add a low powered graphics card, but for anything more modern I'd recommend at least a better i5 processor. That computer is what's called a "multimedia" computer that's just good enough to open a lot of webpages and do a few serious number crunching jobs for a small shop or whatever. Its the kind of thing a business might buy twenty or thirty of and swap parts around in themselves to keep costs down and discourage employees from playing games.

Black Friday is the biggest sales day of the year, but most of the items going on sale are usually a bit more expensive and, for example, you can save as much as fifty bucks on a three hundred dollar item like a mainstream monitor. You can already find really good deals on a lot of things right now because the market for computers of any kind has been in a slump for the last three years. A lot of people are simply waiting for the manufactures to come out with something new that is actually a big improvement because current computers are already fast enough for most purposes. What's coming next is AI built into everything and people will pay for having the best AI available. Intel, Microsoft, and everyone else are currently racing to produce the fastest, cheapest, and most consumer friendly versions aimed at their specific markets. In fact, Intel has announced the race to produce the fastest processors is over and they have converted entirely to focusing on AI now.

As bizarre as that might sound Intel knows they can't compete against all the research out there to produce an entirely different kind of processor. MIT and others have already produced designs that are over a thousand times faster than anything on the market and the theoretical limit short of a quantum computer is about 270 terahertz or roughly a million times faster. Already they've produced an optical chip that uses 3 watts and can send optical signals down a fiber optic cable as far as six feet or more without using more power or requiring amplification. That would be particularly useful in cars and airplanes, drones or whatever. Sometime in the next five years I expect somebody to come out with a chip that makes all of our current ones dinosaurs overnight. A single chip doing a thousand times faster and using 3 watts would mean you wouldn't require a graphics card or anything. Most of the crap inside any modern computer is funky byzantine weirdness with up to five billion parts on a single chip alone added simply because it is cheap and makes the computer a little faster. In contrast, a thousand or so transistors on a single chip is enough to produce a working processor that can do anything you want.

The first real time ray tracing cellphones will be on the market soon and within three years the technology will start making dramatic leaps and bounds so fast it will make everyone's head spin and shouldn't stop for at least another twenty years. They ran into a stumbling block about fifteen years ago with silicon, but now all the technology is suddenly maturing at the same time.

 

I have an older home computer, too, like MeAgain has...It is an E-machine, also, with Windows and is about 7 years old.

Can they really burn down houses, and what causes them to?

What can I do to prevent that?

I am not into getting a laptop, either. I like the old style way of doing things on computers.

 

They really can burn down houses, although, its pretty rare or they'd insist on higher standards. Among other things, they collect dust like a vacuum cleaner you never empty and have really stupid power supplies that are often barely up to the task at hand. An emachine is a perfect example because its designed in every way imaginable just to cut corners to make a cheap machine more powerful. Like I said, if you open one up even to clean out the dust you violate the warranty and the manufacturer can't be held liable for burning your house down. Just be sure to unplug the damned thing before opening it up, but blowing the dust out is a good way to ensure it never burns your house down or throwing it away altogether within a few years which is all it was actually ever designed for. Its disposable technology that loses half its value in the first year or two.

 

You can blow the dust out with canned air...yeah, I have a can of that, and I do send it to my compuer guy every so often to clean it thoroughly.

yeah, I know e-machines was one of the cheapest. i did not need the most expensive machine out there for my needs....and my computer guy advised it was as good as any for basic needs.