GuruNews, Volume 9 Number 12, 3-26-09

Thu Mar 26 21:21:21 EDT 2009

Welcome to GuruNews

Brought to you each week by the PC Gurus, a loose collection of volunteers from around the Kentuckiana region.

You can interact with the PC Guru team via our Web site, located at http://www.thepcgurus.com.  On our site you can post your computer questions, comments and rants on the forums, e-mail the PC Guru

team members and chat one on one in our nightly IRC chat beginning around 8:00 PM EDT.  You can also subscribe to our RSS feeds so you can get the latest news and forum updates from the PC Guru Web site directly on your computer.

If you're new to the Newsletter you can read back issues at Team member JP Durbin's website at http://www.jpdurbin.net.  There are links to all the old 84 Online issues as well as the new GuruNews missives.

The WHAS Crusade for Children provides year round support for needy children throughout the Kentuckiana region.  Visit http://www.whascrusade.org to make donations online.

USS Rover's list of streaming computer shows is now available for download in Excel, Open Office and Linux ready formats from http://sheet.zoho.com/public/ussrover/shows. 

To subscribe to this newsletter just drop by www.thepcgurus.com and sign up!

Vol. 9, No. 12                           

3-26-09

1 Introduction to the BIOS         

2 Your BIOS is showing

3 China vs. YouTube, new gaming service, Dell future

4 Faster defragmenting              

5 April Fools

6 Finding memory

A computer is a rather complex device made up of multiple pieces of electro/mechanical equipment.  This equipment all comes from different manufacturers and has different specs and performance levels.

In order for these parts to work together they must be organized and under central command.  They all connect through the motherboard but the ability to get organized and functional comes from a small part of this main communicator called the BIOS.

This Basic Input/Output System is a small program embedded on a chip on the motherboard.  It queries all the hardware connected to the board to ascertain the make, model, size, speed etc. of each device and give you access to control the features of each piece.

All of the hardware must meet a standard to allow this, but different BIOS versions have different levels access to the full set of features.

As an example, most national brands, say Dell or HP/Compaq, offer very limited access to the actual power of the hardware in the PC.  Standard motherboard manufacturers like Gigabyte and Asus offer much more flexibility.  DFI, which manufacturers high end gaming and over-clocking boards, offers probably the most access plus has more options actually available on the board.

I bring this up because we get a lot of emails describing computers that won't start or "bad monitors" that stay black and don't show anything.  Nobody ever mentions the "beeps" they hear, and often this is the best indication of the actual problem.

The next time you power up your PC listen to it.  You'll probably hear the fans and see lights on the front but keep listening.  Hear that single beep?  That's called the POST (Power On Self Test) beep and it means the PC is operational.  All the components are working at the logical level and responded when queried by the BIOS.

That doesn't say all the hardware is in full working condition, just as an obstetrician seeing ten fingers and ten toes on a newborn doesn't mean the infant is in perfect health, but it indicates that all is well on a basic level.

No beeps, or a series of beeps, indicates that there is a problem and will often indicate what the problem is.  As an example, one long beep followed by two short beeps point to a video failure.  A repeating single beep every few seconds is a classic sign of a bad memory module.  Other beep codes mean other things, obviously, but those two are common.

No beep at all means either something is unseated, which often happens during transport while moving or even hitting the PC with something like a vacuum while cleaning, or it means some sort of catastrophic failure.

Catastrophic is not necessarily all that bad when it comes to computers.  It just means something has failed completely and, if luck holds, it may just be a $20 modem or $30 RAM module.

My main point is, when asking for help for a PC that won't go into Windows the beeps are an important tool.  Count the beeps, listen for patterns, and when describing the problem in an email or when calling your local shop include that information.

Be earful out there (OUCH, that was bad)

Kevin Mefford, Editor

pcguru at microdome.net

Terry Wise

www.ratland.com

Tech News of the Week

China appears to be blocking all access to YouTube. Now, why in the
world would it do something like that?

http://tinyurl.com/d6l4qg

Imagine being able to fire up your vintage low-end Mac laptop and play
Crysis, a gorgeously high-resolution PC game that's famous for
overwhelming the GPUs of $4,000 Alienware rigs. That's the kind of
service OnLive announced Tuesday:

http://tinyurl.com/d3pj2o

As he has been doing in public speeches and interviews in the last
year, Michael Dell has again stirred up speculation about what his
company has planned in the handheld market:

http://tinyurl.com/czzrhq

Copy us on the good stuff!

Matthew Dattilo
thepcgurus at gmail.com  
www.mattstodayinhistory.com

Download of the Week

Defraggler defragments your hard drive, and it offers some features that the defragmentation utility included in Windows does not. For example, Defraggler will show you all your fragmented files. You can click one to see where on the disk its various pieces lie, or defragment just that one. It's free, fast, interesting to watch, and has useful additional features. What's not to like? Get it here:

 http://www.defraggler.com/ 

Carlita Lupino

Cards57 at gmail.com   

Threat of the Week

There's a sleeping giant lurking on the Internet in the form of a massive botnet.

The infamous Conficker-C worm has infected millions of machines (estimates range from 1 million to 15 million, with 3-4 million being most likely) but so far whoever has control of the beast hasn't utilized it.

That could change next Wednesday as researchers have found a trigger embedded in the code that will change the way the worm updates its payload.  Apparently it will switch from the currently modest 250 pre-programmed domains it has been using to a whopping 50,000.  Apparently the worm will hit an average of 500 of those per day until it finds an update, afterwards shutting down the update process and waiting for instructions.

Researchers have no idea what the update may hold or if there will even be one right away, but one thing is clear.  Come April 1st the likelihood of an Internet tsunami ramps up exponentially.

For an excellent history of the worm check:

http://countermeasures.trendmicro.eu/downadconficker-whos-the-april-fool/

Kevin Mefford

pcguru at microdome.net

Email Question of the Week

Q:  How do I determine the type of memory that is in my computer for
upgrading purposes? Have a Gateway Desktop E-6000. I think I remember
DDR but I'm not sure.

A:  You can generally find out the type of memory used in your system by
going to kingston.com or one of the other memory manufacturers and
searching using their manufacturer/model search tools.
I went thru a little bit of a gyration to find that your system uses
the following:

512MBx18, 800MHz PC800 184-Pin RIMM ECC

It appears that this is very expensive memory (generally the rule of
thumb is the older the memory type, the more expensive it is.)
Kingston doesn't even stock this product any more.  Looking at another
site, I determined your system has a total of 4 memory slots and a
capacity of 2 gb but the 512 mb chip above sells for $199 at the
Memorystore.com.  At those prices, it might be time for an upgraded
computer.

Hope that helps.

If you have any other questions, let us know.

Carmine Allocco
alioco at aol.com

Contact info and legal stuff

If you have tech support questions or ideas and/or submissions for our newsletter please submit them by visiting www.thepcgurus.com and click on the "Email the Team" icon. 

Copyright 2001-2009 The PC Gurus, all rights reserved.  Publication, rebroadcast or storage is prohibited without prior consent, however you may freely forward this publication to friends as long as A) it is forwarded in its entirety and B) no fee is charged.

Information provided in this publication is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied.  Although the information provided is known to work on most systems, it may not work on ALL systems.  Make use of any information supplied at your own risk.

The PC Gurus are a group of volunteers who provide support for the PC, Mac and Linux users in the Kentuckiana region.

To unsubscribe from this newsletter visit http://thepcgurus.com/mailman/listinfo/newsletter_thepcgurus.com or send an email to microdome at seidata.com with the words "unsubscribe newsletter" (without the quotes) at the top of the body of the message.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://thepcgurus.com/pipermail/newsletter_thepcgurus.com/attachments/20090326/58e23290/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 30430 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://thepcgurus.com/pipermail/newsletter_thepcgurus.com/attachments/20090326/58e23290/attachment.jpe>