computers
Re: computers
hi ive got another packard bell tower computer its running windows xp & will not accept a modern lcd screen..as the manufacturer are not being very helpfull & dont seem to recognise the machine my mate has suggested a forced download to the bios. what is the likely outcome of this?? from what i understand it either works or i end up with another knackered computer.. ive tried to locate an old style crt screen for it but im not having any luck.. a shoulder to cry on would be useful if nothing else
Re: computers
pssst, rich, there is no difference between the connection used on LCD (flat) and CRT (not flat) screens.
they both use this:
There are lots of other possible variations but that one has been in standard use for about 17 million years.
Can you send a pic of the video output from your PC and I will tell you what it is and what adapter you need to use it.
For the record, Microsoft stop providing updates for XP in 5 days so from that point I would strongly recommend against using it on the web or for any financial transaction.
they both use this:
There are lots of other possible variations but that one has been in standard use for about 17 million years.
Can you send a pic of the video output from your PC and I will tell you what it is and what adapter you need to use it.
For the record, Microsoft stop providing updates for XP in 5 days so from that point I would strongly recommend against using it on the web or for any financial transaction.
Understeer: when you hit the wall with the front of the car.
Oversteer: when you hit the wall with the back of the car.
Horsepower: how fast you hit the wall.
Torque: how far you take the wall with you.
Oversteer: when you hit the wall with the back of the car.
Horsepower: how fast you hit the wall.
Torque: how far you take the wall with you.
Re: computers
Me too. Shame really, the talking paper clip used to be quite fun.TerryG wrote:I would strongly recommend against using it
Rich, don't flash the bios. If you do, and it goes wrong, then your pc will function like one of these:
J
"Home is where you park it", so the saying goes. That may yet come true..
"Home is where you park it", so the saying goes. That may yet come true..
Re: computers
Plus as I assume it was in use until recently, it must be at least 5 years old and has survived all that time on the factory bios so there is no need / point in flashing it at all.
If you must keep the PC running then PM John / myself and I'm sure he will recommend some flavours of Linux that will run perfectly adequately on your hardware as I can if you would like.
Alternatively, if you are going to be in England any time soon and would like a laptop which is running Windows 7, you are quite welcome to pop over and collect one. The issue with them is they are worth less than the postage to France so aren't worth couriering over.
If you must keep the PC running then PM John / myself and I'm sure he will recommend some flavours of Linux that will run perfectly adequately on your hardware as I can if you would like.
Alternatively, if you are going to be in England any time soon and would like a laptop which is running Windows 7, you are quite welcome to pop over and collect one. The issue with them is they are worth less than the postage to France so aren't worth couriering over.
Understeer: when you hit the wall with the front of the car.
Oversteer: when you hit the wall with the back of the car.
Horsepower: how fast you hit the wall.
Torque: how far you take the wall with you.
Oversteer: when you hit the wall with the back of the car.
Horsepower: how fast you hit the wall.
Torque: how far you take the wall with you.
Re: computers
thanks terry! its the driver for the screen it will only run a crt screen & not an lcd.. its my mums old computer & it hasnt had a lot of use.. 
-
tractorman
- Posts: 1399
- Joined: Mon Feb 21, 2011 11:22 am
- Location: Wigton, Cumbria
Re: computers
I suspect there may be more wrong than just the driver - all three of my desktop PCs had LED monitors with XP and had no problems. Perhaps there's a problem with the Packard-Bell's version of Windows (knowing PB's methods of inflicting pain) rather than a monitor driver.
If the PC is powerful enough (ie has plenty of memory, disk space and a reasonably quick processor), try getting a cheap copy of Windows 7 (some OEM copies actually work and are a lot cheaper than the full versions). Failing that Win 8.1 is allegedly quicker (once you get to the desktop!). My newer notebook has a fairly slow "Centrino" processor and 2Gb RAM, but is happy with Win7 (and would probably work with Win 8.1 too).
OTOH, the old notebook has a 750Mhz Celeron with 256Mb ram and is incredibly slow with Win 98! It's here for a reason though!!
If the PC is powerful enough (ie has plenty of memory, disk space and a reasonably quick processor), try getting a cheap copy of Windows 7 (some OEM copies actually work and are a lot cheaper than the full versions). Failing that Win 8.1 is allegedly quicker (once you get to the desktop!). My newer notebook has a fairly slow "Centrino" processor and 2Gb RAM, but is happy with Win7 (and would probably work with Win 8.1 too).
OTOH, the old notebook has a 750Mhz Celeron with 256Mb ram and is incredibly slow with Win 98! It's here for a reason though!!
Re: computers
You don't need a specific driver for the screen itself. Even if you did, there is no difference in how you drive a CRT and (analogue) LCD display.
You do need drivers for the graphics card / chipset but even without those loaded the computer will display the POST and startup images, Windows will happily display a 800x600 high colour picture on the screen.
Do you get any image at all with an LCD display attached? if not then either the screen itself or computer is faulty.
A box that has had little use is always better than one that has been hammered but in this instance that is not the problem. Windows XP will have no further security updates from Microsoft from the 8th so using it after that is a VERY bad idea. The longer you run it, the greater the risk. If you have no alternative but to use it and must get on the net then do not use ebay / paypal / internet banking / anything that requires any form of security at all or you are asking for trouble. Now Microsoft have stopped providing updates it won't be long before the a/v companies follow along with providers of web browsers. IE8 in XP is already off the supported list for most larger companies so you will need to use chrome / firefox / opera / safari / something else to surf the net properly.
If the box is a reasonable spec then upgrade it to W7, if not then Linux is the best way to keep it alive for a bit longer.
2gb of RAM is the minimum spec for Windows 7, processor wise it will walk on anything from a p4 1.4 upwards but likes multi-core processors best. You can get flavours of Linux that will run on more or less anything so assuming the pc isn't physically dead, you can keep on running with that for as long as you like.
You do need drivers for the graphics card / chipset but even without those loaded the computer will display the POST and startup images, Windows will happily display a 800x600 high colour picture on the screen.
Do you get any image at all with an LCD display attached? if not then either the screen itself or computer is faulty.
A box that has had little use is always better than one that has been hammered but in this instance that is not the problem. Windows XP will have no further security updates from Microsoft from the 8th so using it after that is a VERY bad idea. The longer you run it, the greater the risk. If you have no alternative but to use it and must get on the net then do not use ebay / paypal / internet banking / anything that requires any form of security at all or you are asking for trouble. Now Microsoft have stopped providing updates it won't be long before the a/v companies follow along with providers of web browsers. IE8 in XP is already off the supported list for most larger companies so you will need to use chrome / firefox / opera / safari / something else to surf the net properly.
If the box is a reasonable spec then upgrade it to W7, if not then Linux is the best way to keep it alive for a bit longer.
2gb of RAM is the minimum spec for Windows 7, processor wise it will walk on anything from a p4 1.4 upwards but likes multi-core processors best. You can get flavours of Linux that will run on more or less anything so assuming the pc isn't physically dead, you can keep on running with that for as long as you like.
Understeer: when you hit the wall with the front of the car.
Oversteer: when you hit the wall with the back of the car.
Horsepower: how fast you hit the wall.
Torque: how far you take the wall with you.
Oversteer: when you hit the wall with the back of the car.
Horsepower: how fast you hit the wall.
Torque: how far you take the wall with you.
Re: computers
Rich, in case this talk of Linux puts you off, don't worry, it's dead easy to install, use and adapt to most distributions or "distros" as the various flavours of Linux are known.
My Dad is well into his 80s now, used a computer for the first time in 2005 - a laptop at the skill centre in the village where the folks live. Then a few years later the skill centre closed down and he was offered the laptop, complete with a high quality case, a printer and all of the blank media he was able to carry home, for a tenner by way of compensation from the Parish Council. But, once he realised how labour intensive Windows was in terms of the necessary housekeeping, immediately decided that he and Windows weren't going to get along without the security of the village network to hide behind and was all set to turn the machine into a bird table or whatever when I suggested to him that we try Ubuntu, which I installed on that old Acer laptop for him. It worked, he liked that such mind numbingly tedious tasks as regular defragmentation were no longer needed, he liked that the only security he required was a decent firewall and better; he wasn't on the phone every few days to ask me to go all the way up there to sort out whatever virus he'd managed to pick up with the machine as it used to be!
FF a few more years and he's using Ubuntu like the old pro. He's discovered the command line and that BBC iplayer content can not only be downloaded far more easily in Ubuntu (sudo get_iplayer --pid [url of show here]) but that downloads don't expire as they would in Windows. The he discovered that he could view his F1 live timing without having to open a browser (live-f1), that Office Libre is both much quicker than yet fully compatible with Micro$oft Office and that in fact, he was able to get software to cover every single task he'd ever needed when he was still a Windoze victim. There are one or two things that Ubuntu doesn't do natively, but WINE (a Windows compatibility tool) takes care of all of that apart from device drivers and for those, there's VirtualBox which allows you to use Windows within Ubuntu from a desktop icon though I only ever use it nowadays to try out new Linux distros.
Other user friendly distros include Debian, which is very similar both technically and aesthetically to Ubuntu but runs faster again since it's devoid of Ubuntu's blingy bits and also more true to Linux' origins in that it remains non-commercial. Mint is nice and is also Ubuntu based but not great on an older machine with less than 4GB of RAM and my current favourite second distro (after the Ubuntu 14.04 that this fairly lively Dell laptop runs) is LMDE which has all of the quality of Mint, but is based around Debian rather than Ubuntu. I have that on my Google test pilot's CR-48 which never was the fastest of machines, other than in terms of its eight second boot in its original form as a Chromebook. With LMDE running on that machine, it's almost as quick as the Dell in most areas apart from graphics and the Dell has 12GB of RAM, is now on a quad core, 2.8GHz processor and would run any distro without a single glitch and I've tried a good many of them along the way!
Another distro that you could consider is Open Suse, but that's a bugger to install from USB for a beginner so best suited to a machine with an optical drive that takes DVDs. (Open) Suse is in use by roughly as many official bodies as Ubuntu these days and has more built-in compatibility with the Windows but is slower than 7 Pro on anything with less than 8GB of RAM and ideally a good quad core CPU too.
Give it a hurl, Rich. If Dad can take to Linux like a duck to water then anyone can. His background is in aeronautical engineering and he was part of the Vulcan project back in medieval times but, when you look at how few of those are still airworthy........
My Dad is well into his 80s now, used a computer for the first time in 2005 - a laptop at the skill centre in the village where the folks live. Then a few years later the skill centre closed down and he was offered the laptop, complete with a high quality case, a printer and all of the blank media he was able to carry home, for a tenner by way of compensation from the Parish Council. But, once he realised how labour intensive Windows was in terms of the necessary housekeeping, immediately decided that he and Windows weren't going to get along without the security of the village network to hide behind and was all set to turn the machine into a bird table or whatever when I suggested to him that we try Ubuntu, which I installed on that old Acer laptop for him. It worked, he liked that such mind numbingly tedious tasks as regular defragmentation were no longer needed, he liked that the only security he required was a decent firewall and better; he wasn't on the phone every few days to ask me to go all the way up there to sort out whatever virus he'd managed to pick up with the machine as it used to be!
FF a few more years and he's using Ubuntu like the old pro. He's discovered the command line and that BBC iplayer content can not only be downloaded far more easily in Ubuntu (sudo get_iplayer --pid [url of show here]) but that downloads don't expire as they would in Windows. The he discovered that he could view his F1 live timing without having to open a browser (live-f1), that Office Libre is both much quicker than yet fully compatible with Micro$oft Office and that in fact, he was able to get software to cover every single task he'd ever needed when he was still a Windoze victim. There are one or two things that Ubuntu doesn't do natively, but WINE (a Windows compatibility tool) takes care of all of that apart from device drivers and for those, there's VirtualBox which allows you to use Windows within Ubuntu from a desktop icon though I only ever use it nowadays to try out new Linux distros.
Other user friendly distros include Debian, which is very similar both technically and aesthetically to Ubuntu but runs faster again since it's devoid of Ubuntu's blingy bits and also more true to Linux' origins in that it remains non-commercial. Mint is nice and is also Ubuntu based but not great on an older machine with less than 4GB of RAM and my current favourite second distro (after the Ubuntu 14.04 that this fairly lively Dell laptop runs) is LMDE which has all of the quality of Mint, but is based around Debian rather than Ubuntu. I have that on my Google test pilot's CR-48 which never was the fastest of machines, other than in terms of its eight second boot in its original form as a Chromebook. With LMDE running on that machine, it's almost as quick as the Dell in most areas apart from graphics and the Dell has 12GB of RAM, is now on a quad core, 2.8GHz processor and would run any distro without a single glitch and I've tried a good many of them along the way!
Another distro that you could consider is Open Suse, but that's a bugger to install from USB for a beginner so best suited to a machine with an optical drive that takes DVDs. (Open) Suse is in use by roughly as many official bodies as Ubuntu these days and has more built-in compatibility with the Windows but is slower than 7 Pro on anything with less than 8GB of RAM and ideally a good quad core CPU too.
Give it a hurl, Rich. If Dad can take to Linux like a duck to water then anyone can. His background is in aeronautical engineering and he was part of the Vulcan project back in medieval times but, when you look at how few of those are still airworthy........
J
"Home is where you park it", so the saying goes. That may yet come true..
"Home is where you park it", so the saying goes. That may yet come true..
Re: computers
thanks for that chaps, ill not force the update & try & locate an old style crt.. the monitor i have was very nice but when i set the machine up with 800/600 resolution it was out of focus.... i reset it to 1400/something & that was better but everything i needed was off the screen..
Re: computers
Ahh, that explains it.
LCD screens work best at their maximum resolution. anything other than that and they will look blocky / fuzzy depending on the technology of the screen.
Connect it up, drag the slider all the way to max and it should behave.
LCD screens work best at their maximum resolution. anything other than that and they will look blocky / fuzzy depending on the technology of the screen.
Connect it up, drag the slider all the way to max and it should behave.
Understeer: when you hit the wall with the front of the car.
Oversteer: when you hit the wall with the back of the car.
Horsepower: how fast you hit the wall.
Torque: how far you take the wall with you.
Oversteer: when you hit the wall with the back of the car.
Horsepower: how fast you hit the wall.
Torque: how far you take the wall with you.