(Part 3) Top products from r/24hoursupport

Apologies for the "hind sight is 20/20" style of answer but compressed air into the exhausts are all you should ever need on a laptop for dust. I see maybe 2-3 laptops a month with overheating issues due to dust accumulation and a blast from the duster linked below will clear the issue every time, no need to disassemble.

My best advice moving forward would be to try and find a teardown video or any youtube videos of people disassembling your same model and see if you can spot anything you may not have put back. Despite best intentions and being very careful it's very easy to miss one thing when reassembling a laptop. It's also easy to forget which screws go where and a long screw where a short screw should be could cause major issues depending on placement.

Did you make sure to disconnect the battery before doing anything else "under the hood"? My first guess would be something not connected, second guess would be a possible short on the board. You can also try with no ram and see if you get any beep codes. Best of luck. Hope it's something simple.

I also don't know your level of comfort/care with taking apart reassembling laptops so please don't take offense if any of my advice seems basic.

https://www.amazon.com/Metro-ED500-DataVac-500-Watt-Electric/dp/B001J4ZOAW

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B002LM0U2S/ref=mp_s_a_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1498745874&sr=8-7&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=usb+sound+card+dual+mic&dpPl=1&dpID=41vusjGecFL&ref=plSrch

Here's the one I use, I got it for around 20 though, and it only has 2 inputs. Alternatively, you could buy two of these,

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00IRVQ0F8/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1498746083&sr=8-3&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=usb+sound+card&dpPl=1&dpID=51FLiQuh7EL&ref=plSrch

and use them in conjunction with your computer's microphone Jack, provided you have enough usb ports.

My recommendation is to shop around, your problem should be easily solved with under 20 bucks. Good luck :)

I think you'll need to use a mixer. They make tiny ones that are pretty much perfect for your use case.

This one is only 50 bucks on Amazon.

well - you can get the cable that you want

I have personally run into the HDCP issue several times. I have run into the power issue once. The HDCP issue comes up often with active converters who don't respond correctly to the HDCP requests.

Both of these issues that I described are very hardware dependent - different manufactures approach standards differently. I have seen HDCP issues where the display never came on, or would come on for 10 seconds and then shut off. Also, HDCP should only be active when you are trying to display protected content, but I have run into instances where it was active at all times.

The power issue, I ran into that with a large monitor wall solution - the company provided a computer that could drive 24 displays at once, but couldn't handle active HDMI repeaters.

I have been a television engineer for a long time - making different displays work with different sources is a lot of what I do. Personally, I would try and address the problem that the DVI to VGA is having, because that is how this is supposed to work.

From your post I think you are going to get out of your league fairly quickly here. You are going to be able to set up 4 hard drives "somewhat" easily. The "somewhat" part is that you are going to have to set 2 of the drives as master and 2 as slaves. You will also have to designate them as primary or secondary depending on which IDE cable they are on.
Each hard drive has a different pin setting to set the drive as a master/slave. You will need to either look on the HD and hope that the pin settings are listed or go to the manufacturers web site to look up the model for the pin settings. As for the 5th drive you will need to install a pci ide hard drive card. You will also need to use another IDE cable.

StarTech.com 2 Port PCI IDE Controller Adapter Card PCIIDE2

As far as the RAM is concerned, no you do not need drivers for it. Once again you are going to need to make sure that the RAM you have is appropriate for the motherboard. A quick google of the serial/model number off the RAM chip should tell you what type/speed it is. Then you will need to google the motherboard serial/part# to find out what type of Ram it takes.
The ethernet card will also require a google to find the drivers.
Don't get me wrong if you are interested in learning how to custom build computers this will be a good learning exercise but be aware there are quite a few pitfalls up ahead.

So basically if you are not familiar with building pc's and discerning part #/serial#'s etc. you are going to get underwater very quickly.

tl;dr Building pc's is harder than it appears with legacy hardware.

All the cable splitter that you linked to does is split the source of the cable wire so you could plug it into two devices such as hooking up a cable box and a cable modem at the same time. however that will NOT allow you to hook up two devices to one port on your tv. If I were you I would do the following.

1. You have the cable box properly connected to the cable source coming from outside. So now you need to connect the cable box to the tv. The easiest way if you don't have an HDMI cable or the cable box doesn't work with HDMI would be to take one of the RYW cables like this and that should take the audio and video feed from the cable box and display it on the AV input on your tv.
   
   
2. Now to hook up your antenna just simply screw it in as normal and this will show up under the regular cable or antenna input on the tv. so now instead of screwing and unscrewing wires you just change the input selection on the tv.
   
   I have a Vizio and it would display something like this:
   
   AV input = Cable box;
   TV input = Antenna

Audio out of the PC is easy:

The Cheap Way using internal sound card

Or using an external DAC

For the 360 it will output audio and HDMI at the same time, there is just a plastic shield over the hdmi port when the component cable is plugged in. Options are:

you can break it off the plastic tab so both the component cable and hdmi cable can be plugged in at the same time or

Get an xbox vga cable

I didn't think the wii had hdmi out so I have no idea what you are doing there.

The router is a dual channel router so it outputs G and N at the same time. I have not changed it. The other devises can connect to either one. The XP machine is using a G PCI wireless card.

http://www.amazon.com/Cisco-Linksys-WMP54GS-Wireless-G-Card-SpeedBooster/dp/tech-data/B0001D3K3A

I think something like this might work: http://www.amazon.com/Behringer-MX400-BEHRINGER-MICROMIX/dp/B000KGYAYQ

Except don't get that because the output is mono, not meant for stero headphones.

See where it says av out? If you want to test using headphones you need to buy this adapter http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B000I23TTE/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?qid=1397524631&sr=8-3&pi=SX200_QL40

Perhaps instead of looking for a typical business style phone maybe one of the more modern DECT cordless style phones would work, such as:

http://www.amazon.com/VTech-DS6321-3-Cordless-Silver-Handsets/dp/B002JH1C5Y

You store the names in the phone book, then perhaps the receptionist can hit flash, nav to the phonebook, pick who to transfer to & then connect the call into a 3-way, then hang-up. Could be kind of clumsy & definitely no guarantee it'll work proper.

There might also be softphone software that could do similar things using a VOIP provider, no physical phone would be needed just a headset hooked to the computer.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bipra-SATA-Adapter-Power-Drive/dp/B001A5SK56/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1374780076&sr=8-1&keywords=usb+ide+adapter

Fairly cheap, depending on the drive you have they should have a USB conversion for it - http://www.amazon.com/Vantec-CB-ISATAU2-Supports-2-5-Inch-5-25-Inch/dp/B000J01I1G/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1348530263&sr=8-1&keywords=harddrive+to+usb

Sorry, you'll have to buy another adapter like this.

Assuming your hard drive is SATA, borrow or buy an external USB enclosure like the one here:

http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-Black-External-Drive-Enclosure/dp/B0012VRBGM

(Shop around as prices will vary)

Hook the drive in question up to it, plug the USB cord into another desktop or laptop. Once Windows recognizes the external device, find out the drive letter it was assigned. For the sake of argument we'll say D: Bring up a command prompt and run the command CHKDSK D: /R /F

If there are problems with the file system this will correct and repair them. I get a lot of computers here at the shop where a buggy driver corrupted the file system, and this has worked for me quite often.

If that doesn't do the trick I would read up on the FIXMBR command and attempt that via the external recommendation.

You can PM me if you wish too.

try disconnecting all external devices first.

you can't access bios, is that correct? if so, last resort would be taking it apart and resetting the bios if possible, or take out the hdd and connect it to another machine via this

and remember: back things up regularly, so your boss doesn't kill you. solely relying on old machines is a bad idea.

Is that different than this?


Or the switch in the OP?


Actually my problem is a little more: I want to record OTA programs on my stand alone DVR while watching cable or OTA, or record a cable program while watching OTA, without connecting and disconnecting cables.

Is that too much to ask?

Get a thumb drive, and try plugging it into each port. If it only doesn't come up in the suspect port, then the suspect port is dead. I wouldn't worry about trying to fix it - with laptops you're liking looking at a big pain in the ass coupled with a chance to break other stuff. If you need more USB ports, go buy a hub of some sort - http://www.amazon.com/Belkin-USB-2-0-4-Port-Ultra-Mini/dp/B000Q8UAWY - for example.