Blue Screen of Death

[Jackabyte]

Originally Posted by wii_willy_winker

My budget is about 400-450 had a quick look at that site and they are cheaper than what i thought.

thanks hoob / jeff!

check : Laptopshop.co.uk for new Laptops, Refurbished Laptops, Laptop Batteries and AC Adapters

Place i used to work at, they do refurbished models usually from £199 upwards and look near enough brand new
i used to work in the workshop doing them and other repairs, they are definately worth a looksy

[Flamin]

I feel for you Hoo, it seems a rather strange tradeoff, -256 MB ram for +20GB of space? good thing you still have your 2GB ram eh?

if you still have the install discs for Photoshop and Office and such it wouldn't be much of a problem to throw em in but Norton is something else entirely

[Hooblue]

Originally Posted by Flamin

I feel for you Hoo, it seems a rather strange tradeoff, -256 MB ram for +20GB of space? good thing you still have your 2GB ram eh?

if you still have the install discs for Photoshop and Office and such it wouldn't be much of a problem to throw em in but Norton is something else entirely

Cheers Flammin. Yeah I know, bit of a strange trade off. It turned out that the problem was actually with the BIOS and a failed HDD, hence the replacement. They've upgraded the BIOS too so now it does afew things that it never used to, for the better though. I also swapped back the 2GB RAM that I had and so far everything's working prefectly.

It turned out ok really as it gave me achance to get rid of all the rubbish on there I'd installed that I never used anymore and start afresh. I didn't have the Office disks anymore but my bro in law had the newest version so lent me his, although Misshoo isn't best pleased as she keeps moaning that she can't find anything in the new versions!

I also managed to dump Norton and stuck Avast on instead, together with the usual Adawre and Spybot.

[Flamin]

glad to hear it, a HDD can really mess up your computer, on my old desktop our HDD had a couple bad sectors on it so we basically were forced to upgrade to a brand new Dell. not that I'm complaining or anything! especially because this one we can actually upgrade!

[Ricksta7]

Aww glad to hear everything is all sorted now Hooey

[sherlockisback]

Originally Posted by Pvt. Michael J. Caboose

I worked at a HP laptop repair centre a while back and a couple of people told me the parts are crap Ya lucky ya have a 3 year warranty and not just 1

Really?!?! Here in the U.S., HP's are pretty good machines. I'm thinking of buying one myself. Its the Dells that have gone downhill in the past few years. That, and Compaq's have always had crap parts.

Originally Posted by ror100

What memory did you buy? If it's got a lifetime guarantee then I'd suggest getting that swapped out too, it could be that the lappy is frying memory.

I always use Corsair memory, and would advise others to also. Their warranty is extremely good.

I use Kingston stateside. Its a bit on the pricier side, but it works. I assume you don't have anything of the sort there?

Looks like things worked out pretty well in the end.

[Flamin]

Sherlock if you're looking at buying a desktop stateside just build one yourself with parts from tigerdirect.com cheapest way, and they have good guides there for building a good computer.

I recently got an EVGA Geforce 8600 graphics card for about $80 after rebate. 512 MB, DX10 compatible, a nice card overall

if you're going for a laptop there's a few choices, as it's harder to build a laptop, I've heard alot of good things about Toshibas and my brother has a Dell XPS series and it seems pretty good

[skyman747]

Originally Posted by Pvt. Michael J. Caboose

I worked at a HP laptop repair centre a while back and a couple of people told me the parts are crap Ya lucky ya have a 3 year warranty and not just 1

I have an HP laptop and nothing bad has ever happened with it. I had more crap happening on my Vaio than on this. Maybe, like sherly mentioned, it is just the region

Glad you got it sorted out Hoo

And sherly, or anyone wanting a desktop, just build them yourselves. If a 14 year old can do it, I am pretty sure you blokes could

[sherlockisback]

Originally Posted by Flamin

Sherlock if you're looking at buying a desktop stateside just build one yourself with parts from tigerdirect.com cheapest way, and they have good guides there for building a good computer.

I recently got an EVGA Geforce 8600 graphics card for about $80 after rebate. 512 MB, DX10 compatible, a nice card overall

if you're going for a laptop there's a few choices, as it's harder to build a laptop, I've heard alot of good things about Toshibas and my brother has a Dell XPS series and it seems pretty good

Thanks for the advice. Toshibas are pretty good.

I've thought about building my own computer but, frankly, I don't think I have the time to research, figure everything out, get everything ordered and in, and end up building a working machine and installing all the programs. I think there's a computer out there that works as well if not better than what I could build for about the same price.

[Flamin]

it's actually not all that hard, you just have to have a checklist and follow it, start with a Motherboard and Processor and go on from there, I looked it all up on tiger direct and I could build a top-of-the line spec PC for under $4,000 the most expensive part was the quad core extreme processor and the 2x 1GB video cards