Shiff's Absence

[Eorendil]

Shiff will be gone due to technical difficulties.  His computer is having a breakdown... so, he will return once that is remedied.

He asked me to pass along the message.

[merlin34baseball]

Booooooooo!

[Eight-Bit]

What kind of technical difficulties? There's a wealth of tech-savvy people here on the forums. We can probably help!

[ycleption]

He was having some sort of display difficulties, things were appearing dark, I think... not sure if it was his monitor, or his video driver, or what was causing his problems.

[Eorendil]

His OS is pretty much hosed... he'll be getting his stuff copied off and then reimaging it I imagine.

[ShiffDrgnhrt]

Reimaged and Installing Drivers, still...  Thing is, I'm still not sure if it'll be fixed after all this.  I have a sneaking suspicion my video card -might- be damaged, or something else might be...  My Display has been causing me problems for months.  I can't keep the Brightness at full or I get a mean electric squeal and my Display shuts off and I have to lower the Brightness, close the lid and reopen it.  More recently closing the lip has caused my Display to either Blink on and off repeatedly until it gets bored and stops, or not come back on at all.  And then before I reimaged, NWN would crash because when I went to a new area, the things wouldn't load right and it would just stop working.  If anyone knows whats wrong, please gimme some help    I'll be back on the forums but IG is sketchy until I know everything works.

[Eight-Bit]

I need a bit more information. In particular, the type of monitor (sounds like a CRT? or a laptop in retrospect...), video card, and it's current driver.

[ShiffDrgnhrt]

It's either CRT or LCD, I can't tell the difference, but its a laptop so I would think LCD?  Mobility Raedon X1400 and the driver is...  Whatever you can get off the Dell Website for my PC...

EDIT:  DxDiag says it Version 6.14.0010.6618 (English), Driver ati2dvag.dll

[Falonthas]

sounds like your laptop itself just needs to be cleaned
take ti to best buy and let them open it up and clean the whole thing top to bottom
if that doesnt fix it let them look cause one thing you may pay them for it but those laptop guys know there stuff

[ShiffDrgnhrt]

If all it needs is to be cleaned >.>  

You mean physically?  Dust it out and such?

[Pibemanden]

Dusting out has actually helped me with performance on a laptop once.. I have an sort of ancient five-six year old laptop which was hardly working for me(overheating constantly just being generally not so functional), but after clearning out all the dust it worked perfectly(Or well as perfect as an old laptop can)

[ShiffDrgnhrt]

I'm gonna guess trying to do that myself would be a bad idea?

[miltonyorkcastle]

Well, if you let professionals do it, if they screw it up, they'll replace what they screwed up. If you do it and screw it up, you have to pay to replace it.

[Pibemanden]

Depends... I could do it on my own, but well... It isn't exactly safe if you don't know what you are doing( I didn't really but it worked anyhow because I was careful )... If you trust youself to do this, well then do it.. But if something goes wrong there is only one to blame and that is yourself, as long as you are cool with that it wouldn't be a bad idea to try

[ShiffDrgnhrt]

Well having seen the amount of dust my cooling Pad has blown into the thing, I think I'll try getting someone to clean it out...  But only if the cost is reasonable...

[Falonthas]

usually a laptop tune up is 40 bucks

thats open it up and clean it from head to toe and optimize your drivers and os

if they have to do anything else make sure you check teh box to call you before they do anything else

[ShiffDrgnhrt]

that sounds worth it.  I'll do that over Spring break in two weeks since ill be home and near a best buy.  How long does it usually take?

[Falonthas]

take it in the morning right when they open and maybe an hour or so if they have techs standing around