Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
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Question from Milo H.: I really like your site, Rick. It’s easy to tell that you put a lot of work into it.
I’ve been following you for several months now and I always learn something every time I visit your blog.
I hope you don’t mind but I finally have a question of my own that I need to ask you.
Question from Stuart K.: I was cleaning out my closet yesterday morning and I found an old game disc with “Age Of Empires” on it.
I remember that I loved playing that game when I was a kid so I installed it on my son’s ASUS ROG gaming PC (with Windows 10).
The game played just like I remember and I didn’t notice any problems with anything else. Everything seemed to work fine so I shut the computer down.
My son used the computer for a few minutes and then shut it down when he got ready to leave for school.
This morning when he turned it on he noticed that the screen resolution was wrong and the screen was flickering really bad. He shut it down and restarted it and got the same result.
He asked me to help him get it straightened out, but so far I’m not having any luck.
Question from Telsi P.: I have a 5 year old gaming computer that came with a fairly weak video card.
About three years ago I replaced that original GPU with a MSI R9 390 GAMING 8G Graphics Card and it worked great until yesterday when it burned out on me.
And I do really mean BURNED OUT!!
This computer’s case has a see-through side panel and I literally saw the video card shooting flames.
I quickly unplugged the computer and removed the video card. One small section of the card was almost completely destroyed but there’s no damage that I can find anywhere on the motherboard.
The computer starts up fine and runs perfectly using the motherboard’s integrated video. My question is can I just replace the bad video card and everything will be ok?
I’m not all that concerned about the computer itself because I’m planning to replace it fairly soon anyway but I’d hate to burn out an expensive new video card by plugging it into a bad GPU slot.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Kenny V.: I watched a Youtube video that showed how to build a gaming PC and it really intrigued me.
I decided to build one for my son so I asked the guy at Fry’s Electronics for recommendations on the parts. This is what he recommended (and what I ended up buying):
I put everything together according to the instructions but when I turn on the computer a light on the motherboard flashes and then everything immediately shuts down. According to the manual the light that flashes is the “CPU Warning Light”.
Just to be sure it’s not a bad connection I re-seated the RAM sticks and CPU. There were no bent pins that I could see. I also disconnected and reconnected all the power cables.
Do you think I might have received a bad CPU? That’s the only thing I can think of that could possibly be wrong. I don’t want to go back to Fry’s claiming they sold me a bad CPU unless I’m sure they really did.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Travis: I’ve been wanting to build a gaming PC for a while and I’ve finally saved enough money to build one as long as I can keep the cost of the CPU and motherboard to around $400 total.
I’ve found several combos in that price range but I’m most interested in this Intel Core i5 CPU and ASUS ROG motherboard.
Do you think these will make a good gaming computer if I install 16GB of RAM and a good video card?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]