PM Computers

Coupons!

Most recently on the PM Computers show, we have spending our time doing routine computer cleanings
clients in Massachusetts. The most recent of which involved cleaning starware toolbar. The kicker was I had to go back a few days later because she couldn’t print out her coupons. I had disabled the coupon printer as being a suspicious Active X control. In the end I made sure everything was working amicably, she had her internet, and was able to print her coupons. I also adjusted a setting in her Google toolbar so her default Gmail would come up when she wanted to mail someone at Craigslist. I also helped her reset her online poker password.

Another recent issue was a friend who had installed a new graphics card. Over a period of about a month the plastic film on the top of the card melted and found it’s way into the fan on the GPU. This caused the card to overheat, and subsequently overheated his whole system. When he came to me he reported he had memory errors during POST.
I spent some time with him checking his RAM. he was running a AMD K8 64 2.6GHZ with 3GB of corsair DDR-400 with heat spreaders on them. Two of the sticks had recently been bought at Newegg. I checked his system using memtest86+ 1.70. The errors came up fast and furious. The unfortunate part is we did not have any known good RAM to try in his system. Luckily this was his spare system. He only brought his broken system. When we finished he took the system with him and decided to return the new RAM to Newegg. I did not look at the system too deeply, I just checked to make sure everything was in tight, because some of the chips felt loose, and then ran memtest. I didn’t check to see which graphics card he had. I expect however he may have a CPU problem and advised him to contact AMD.