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Contact 5belowzero for computer advice

12/06/10
Quite a few cases of noisy computers recently, mainly desktop/towers but also some notebooks.  The customer refers to  "loud whooshing noise"!   I thought it odd but when I investigated, what they meant was the CPU cooling fan was starting up and running loudly on boot up, but instead of quietening down, it just keeps running loudly and "whooshing for ages".  The culprit is plain and ordinary "dust"!

The fan draws air through the fins of a heat sink to cool the processor but over time with dust, carpet fibres and pet hair, this can lead to the heat sink becoming clogged and the fan having to work mighty hard to get an air flow to cool things down.

DON'T USE A VACUUM CLEANER TO CLEAN THIS PLEASE!  There's bound to be static electricity built up on the plastic crevice tool of your vacuum when in use and if you touch the motherboard or other components with it you will risk permanent damage to your computer!

Best get yourself a tin of compressed air or air-duster as it's called, disconnect the computer and take it outside the house, take the side off and carefully use the air-duster to blast the crud out.

Read the instructions on the tin please, as these air-dusters can be potentially a hazard in themselves.

If you'd rather not tackle this, please give us a call and we'll carry out this and a bit of spring cleaning of your system whilst we're with you...give us a call on
01279 724192
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25/01/09
We've had a few calls this last week regarding printers that won't print although these were working OK the day before.  In all cases it's been "a printer queue problem" where an earlier print job has failed for some reason (a paper jam is the most frequent occurrence) and the customer requests another print which then stacks up behind the earlier failed print.

If you do keep clicking "print" without clearing the queue, well, all you end up with is a very very long list of print items and no prints!

What you need to do is either double-click the printer icon in the task bar (bottom right) or go to printers in control panel and double click the relevant printer icon, to open the printer queue.  Click to highlight the last entry and then click "delete".  Repeat the process "UP" the list each item in turn.  This should then get you to the initial entry that is "stuck".  Click to highlight and click delete.  After a short while this should clear and your printer will print yet again!

If you have this occur on your pc, please try the above, but in some cases it may need the print spooler to be restarted, so if you'd like our assistance or further advice in sorting this out for you,
please give us a call on
01279 724192
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18/01/09
With XBox360, Wii and similar gaming consoles being connectable with wireless/WiFi we do get asked to hook these up in to customers home networks.  This is straight forward for customers providing you can follow the auto setup provided, but doing it manually can be testing.  However this item is not about connectivity as such but rather can you actually "play a XBox game on XBox360?
The answer is yes and no unfortunately.

Microsoft have a list of compatible games which is still being added to click here but if it's on the list, you will still need however a hard disk drive (HDD) accessory on your Xbox 360 console to obtain Original Xbox game support.   There are three ways to obtain updates for your Xbox 360 console:

  • Update through Xbox LiveŽ.

  • Burn a DVD or CD.

  • Order a disc by mail from Xbox.com

So if you'd like our assistance or advice in sorting this out for you,
please give us a call on
01279 724192
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11/01/09
Here we are in the New Year, and yet more mystery...we've had three separate calls in the last week for assistance on the very same subject.  "My screen has rotated and how do I get it back again?"  Now I've seen this before and the fix is pretty simple for most machines, but why three occurrences of it in one single week?  What is even stranger is that all the PC's concerned are Toshiba laptops!

Now I put this down to coincidence to be honest, but hey it is odd I'm sure you'll agree. 

Ctrl+Alt+Arrow Up will rotate your screen up
Ctrl+Alt+Arrow Down will rotate your screen down
Ctrl+Alt+Arrow Right will rotate your screen right
Ctrl+Alt+Arrow Left will rotate your screen left 

If you have this occur on your pc, please try the above, but note some pc's with certain video cards, and I'm advised some HP laptops in the TX series won't recognised these keyboard shortcuts.  So if you'd like our assistance in sorting this out for you, please give us a call on
01279 724192
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Previous articles: 06/08 | 12/08
 

Loud whooshing noise
Printer queue problem
Play a XBox game on XBox360
My screen has rotated