a), but first try cleaning the fan of dust and fluff.

thanks all will try that....
Presumably fans easy to come by...
and not too expensive

A can of pressurised air from PC World might help. The trouble is with that though, is the cost! 11.99 + 4.95 Delivery

A typical Akasa Fan for a PC is only about 3-4 BUT, you will need to take the lid off to get the old one out and swap it. Don't forget to look at the mounting fixing holes to see the new one lines up the same.

whats the size of fans,and how many have you got,
if changing a fan might as well change them all,
something like these
they do them in 80 92 and 120mm,

Keep coming up with this one, but in the old days of photocopiers, dust from the fan was a real problem, dirtying the optics.
The answer was very simple in the end.
Use a small piece of very fine stocking as a "gauze" over the air intake mesh. This almost eradicates dust while reducing airflow by less than 1%.
It can also have beneficial side effects if the missus thinks you've started to take an interest in her more elaborate undies..........................;-)

To save messing about, you could cover the whole PC in a pair of her tights too.

:-)

If it was my missus, it could be PC World...............What an arse. ;-)

once again thanks....

so fun weekend ahead with a

pressurised air can

some ladies tights....can hardly wait...

oh and maybe a nice amber fan or two...

I am having a problem with moneyam trades list.As soon as I go trades I get a message saying java is loading. It would take over a minute before the trades comes on the screen. I dont have a problem when I go to charts or stockwatch. Is there something I have got on my laptop that is causeing the delay. could somebody help. thanks.

I'm going to swop my laptop for a proper tower PC - for a variety of reasons.

ExecLine is very pro Computer Doctors and they sell this brand.

Exec, have you tried them yourself?

And does anyone else have a view about their reliability and value for money?

I want (don't we all) something that is fast and reliable.

TP

some good deals from MESH here
or DELL here
if you pick a dell i'll get my IT man to see what he can get it for,he is in Chingford
i would go for intel quad core,depends on your budget,

scussy,

Do you reckon the spec on that Viper is not as good as those others then?

I am really out of my depth here.

TP

if you want a fast PC, a quad is the way to go,
specs is based on cost,how much do you want to spend,
what programes will be open,will you have 2 screens,(much better for a lot of windows open)
any gaming or photo touch ups,
whats the PC going to be used for,i would allways go above the spec for future use,

TP

I was going to say that my machine was a lot higher spec' than the one they are currently selling. But, as it was bought in Feb 2007, I'm not any longer sure about that from a processor viewpoint.

A bit of reading tells you the Computer Doctors are currently using an E2180 Intel Pentium Dual Core Processor. From the spec sheet, this has a 2GHz speed.

All of their NVidia video cards (Home PCs) available are only for a one monitor setup.

If you are happy with that, then I would recommend them as supplier and I think they could vary the spec' for you up from that if you want. They will provide the bare minimum of software for you if that's what you want too. I chose XP instead of Vista and I put my own graphics card into my own machine. I probably invalidated the warranty by doing that but I reckoned they would still have been supportive to me even though I had taken the lid off to do it.

The feet on my Viper are very soft and the machine is a bit too wobbly. I also didn't rate some of the methodology behind the spec' of the rear connections. The back plate is a bit too low spec' for me in that it is a bit 'tinny'.

But the PC works and is reliable (*). And I know for sure CD are here to stay and will fix it if it goes wrong - and at a fair cost too. And do the work sympathetically and promptly.

(*) I 'housekeep' it a few times a week, so it damn well should do just for that reason. :-)

if you need a keyboard and mouse,22" screen and better mem and graphics you get the following
The Computer Doctors - Online Shop

Item Name Quantity Price Total
Viper CS Workstation (remove) 351.33
Reserve and Collect (remove) 0.00 0.00
Windows XP Pro (remove) 0.00 0.00
Open Office (remove) 0.00 0.00
12 Months Collect/Return Warranty (remove) 0.00 0.00
2Gb DDR-2 RAM (remove) 39.00
PCI-Express 512Mb 8500GT Graphics Card (remove) 79.95
22inch TFT Widescreen Monitor (remove) 224.95
Logitech Cordless Desktop (Keyboard & Mouse) (remove) 29.00
No Power Protection (remove) 0.00 0.00

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Subtotal 724.23
Current shipping is UK Post or CourierReserve, Collect & Pay at Shop Shipping 25.00
vat (included) 111.59

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Currency is British Pound Total 749.23


for the same sort of money from MESH you get this



Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 Quad Core Processor(2.5GHz,6MB Cache,1333MHz)
Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium Edition with SP 1
New MESH Midi-TowerATX Case + 550W PSU
PCI-Express Mainboard - Core2Duo/Quad Core/Penryn ATX
4GB DDR2 800MHz Memory (2x 2GB)
500GB Serial ATA Hard Drive with 16MB Buffer
Blu-ray ROM Player Dual layer DVD Writer 24 x CD Writer
512MB nVIDIA GeForce 9600GT - Dual DVI, HDTV, TV Out
22" Widescreen LCD TFT Digital Display (DVI, 5ms)
5.1 High Definition onboard sound card - 6 Channel Cinema sound
Logitech S220 - 2.1 Speakers with Subwoofer
Logitech Cordless Keyboard & Cordless Optical Mouse
Free Microsoft Works 8.5 + Limited Microsoft Office Trial
Free Cyberlink Video Editing Suite - 7 titles (oem)
Assassin's Creed - Ubisoft, PC, DVD-ROM Game
Multi-format Memory Card Reader (ATX)
1 Year Hardware Warranty - Back to Base (UK Mainland only)

Mesh link

i know what i would choose

getting back to the basic tower for 329 you get from MESH



Intel Core 2 Duo E4600 Dual Core Processor(2.4GHz,2MB Cache,800MHz)
Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium Edition with SP 1
New MESH Mini-Tower Micro ATX Case +250W PSU
PCI-Express Nvidia Geforce Mainboard Intel Core 2 Duo/Quad Core MATX
2GB DDR2 667MHz Memory - (2x 1GB)
500GB Serial ATA Hard Drive with 16MB Buffer
Super Format 20x Dual Layer DVD Writer +R/-R/RW/RAM
128MB Integrated On-board Graphics (SMA)
5.1 High Definition onboard sound card - 6 Channel Cinema sound
Free Microsoft Works 8.5 + Limited Microsoft Office Trial
Free Cyberlink Video Editing Suite - 7 titles (oem)
Multi-format Memory Card Reader (matx)
1 Year Hardware Warranty - Back to Base (UK Mainland only)

LINK for basic

Thanks Guys,

What is the machine being used for?

Well I actually want two! Both will replace machines that belong to the company I sold a year ago and which I said I'd return in the fullness of time.

Currently I have a laptop on my desk in my flat. I use it for my daily web browsing and e:mailing. I store my MP3 files on it and transmit them through the flat with a little add-on FM transmitter. I upload pictures to my web server. I do a bit of tinkering on the stock market. I never play games.

I used to take the laptop around with me on hols, etc but now I have a Samsung Ultra Portable the laptop never leaves my desk. It is permanently fed into a 19" flat screen. And it has this problem with lack of plug and play that I was trying to sort out a couple of months ago.

It is often running for twelve hours a day.

It is actually a silly machine to have on a desk so I have decided to replace it with a tower PC.

I need a second tower to replace the one I already have in my photographic studio. That machine is used to store photos and for picture editing. For that work I'll never have enough internal hard disk storeage so I keep the work that I use regularly on the internal hard disk and work accessed less frequently on external hard drives.

It seemed sensible to buy two identical towers so that if either the desk machine or the studio machine died I could swop in the good one whilst getting the dead one sorted. Neither need a monitor. The one replacing my laptop needs a keyboard.

What appealed to me about Computer Doctors is that it sounded like a good solid British business that was not too flashy and more concerned about quality than the ultimate in speed/capacity. Also they offered very little choice - and for me less confusion.

Mesh sounded much more 'trendy' - but is that a bad thing?

In fact, as I live in SW6, Mesh are far more accessible than CD in Northampton so I could easily get to their showroom - and even more importantly return anything that went wrong. So it does seem that if Mesh are really reliable it might be better for me, as a Londoner, to go down that route.

Scussy mentioned Dell - but I'd rather deal with someone more personal.

Thanks to both of you for your input. Ask me anything about cameras and you'll get sound advice - but PC's are a frightening world to me.

TP

TP

If you have such a large storeage requirement, I suggest that you split that you split the storeage from the workstation.

Get a decent spec NAS unit with RAID 5. The entry level units will have four disks, with the data spead accross three of them and the fourth acting as a hot spare. If one disk fails, the unit will carry on working at reduced speed while it rebuilds the lost data on the spare. If you use a 1GB network you will probabley have faster disk access than from your local disk.

For the workstation, as many Intel Quad core processors and as much memory as you can afford. Install a 64bit OS which should be able to use at least 8GB RAM.

Use a couple of very small hard drives in a mirrored RAID, which is not nearly as good as RAID 5 but the smaller drives will enable a quicker recovery of the OS in the event of a problem.

With any fault tolerant disk system, check how long the rebuild time will take as this can vary significantly.

Opt,

To a degree I already have split the data from the workstation in that I only hold my current image files internally and the old stuff is on external hard drive(s).

So I only need a bit more than 100 gig to work on on an every day basis. The rest I only call on once every few weeks.

We had RAID at my old company. For me it seems the problem would be that if I left that big storeage in my studio I'd have no back-up in another location.

I feel that having, say, 250 gig in the workstation and external hard drives that I can back up is safer.

However, the idea of having a way of recovering the OS does appeal. In particular I am of the opinion that every OS gets slower as MS keep forcing us to install Service Packs. It would be lovely to push a clean OS on to the machine without the need to lose all the other third party software and data. Is that not an integral way of keeping the speed?

Is that what you are suggesting with your two small hard drives and mirrored RAID?

Rebuild time is not critical to me. An overnight rebuild would be no hardship if it put back the speed.

TP

TP

You are correct that a RAID drive is not a replacement for a good backup strategy. But a RAID 5 setup will at least give you (almost) seamless recovery in the event of a single disc failure.

If you're serious about having an almost failsafe backup then you should have at least two sets of three external hard disks and keep them in separate locations. As you are backing up a lot of data try to get disks with a firewire connection. Also, invest in some flight cases for when you drop them.

A pair of mirrored disks on the workstation will allow you to recover from a single disc failure but will not help you reinstall a clean system. I've also heard of some cheaper systems where an overnight rebuild could be somewhat optimistic.

If you want to be able to reinstall a clean system, use a disk imaging package to create a copy of your entire disk when the OS is fairly new. But of course you will then have to apply all the latest patches that slow it down again. Some of the better external hard drives also claim to have backup software that can make a good job of a system restore.

Opt,

"Some of the better external hard drives also claim to have backup software that can make a good job of a system restore."

This Maxtor seems to have an add-on bit of software that helps this.

I'd planned to have this as my overflow hard drive. The one that I do not need fast access to - simply to have it available. And when it gets full I'll add another one.

"But of course you will then have to apply all the latest patches that slow it down again. "

Which I guess is now a fact of progress. We get some nice new offering from MS that gets slower each patch - and thus sucks us into the next release.

"A pair of mirrored disks on the workstation will allow you to recover from a single disc failure but will not help you reinstall a clean system."

As long as I am not relying on that internal disk as my sole source of my software and images I'm coming to the conclusion that it ought to last long enough for a generation of MS operating system - if not I reload from the Maxtor and do all the upgrades.

"As you are backing up a lot of data try to get disks with a firewire connection."

I use Replicator so most of the time I am only copying updates to my library.

Thanks again for the ideas. I'm learning a lot.

TP