Monday 26 March 2012

The Latest Creation to Emerge from the PC Solutions Gaming Lab

We have just finished off the physical build of a brand new gaming system for a customer of ours. Its a fantastic system with the new AMD FX-8120 which is a eight core processor.

This build is done in a slightly different case than what we would usually use, yet it is still a great case for gaming , it is called the Fractal Design Core 300


The next major component that is essential to a gaming computer is the graphics card. In this build we used a Nvidia GeForce GTX560Ti (MSI Twin Frozr II) which is a great card, not only is it powerful but the style of it is really cool. It has the dual fans on it also which help with the cooling of the card.


Thursday 8 March 2012

A Nearly New Gaming Beast

We are passionate gamers and computer engineers which is a very dangerous combination.

Pushing the technical envelope is one of our favourite past times and we have been working on overclocking BUT getting it stable and usable.

At the same time our Boss, gave us a challenge of building a best value gaming monster rig using 'normal' or readily available parts.

So after a quick hunt around our shop, warehouse and workshop we built this Gaming Beast:

Nice Red Fans Give it a Cool Look!

Nice Antec Gaming Case


Note the water cooling, its got 8 GB DDR 3RAM, 1 TB storage and an overclocked quad core Intel processor!!

Just to give it a nice touch, we added a BlueRay optical drive.

The operating system is Windows Home Premium 64 and it goes like a rocket!!

We had great fun testing this gaming rig but alas is now up for sale in our web store

Wednesday 7 March 2012

Cooling High End Gaming PC Systems

Gaming computers generate a lot of heat by virtue of the fact that they are 'driven' hard by the nature of their use not to mention the powerful graphics cards etc

Traditional air cooling by fans can result in a lot of back ground noise which when the gaming desktop is running at full speed can be very loud.

In order to keep the gaming rig as cool and as quiet as possible, we use the  Corsair Cooler Hydro Series H40 CPU Cooler in our mid to  top end gaming systems.


Corsair Air Cooling for Gaming PC's

Viruses Hiding in Plain Sight

A client brought an Acer desktop into our computer repairs facility with the complaint that the system was crashing and blue screening at random.

When diagnosing a computer fault, one of the keys is to identify a pattern. Once we can replicate the issue on a regular basis then we can trouble shot the actual cause and through a process of elimination, we can cure the computer fault much quicker.

This particular desktop would as the user had stated, crash at random. Our computer engineers spent some time checking various items including the Norton Internet Security which reported all was well.

On a hunch, we removed Norton, and ran a virus check. The first pass removed 3 infections. On closer inspection, the viruses were hiding in the Norton installation so hiding in plain sight if you will. A rather clever way to camouflage unauthorised activity.

In all we removed over 200 viruses from this desktop. Once the machine was stable ie all the virus infections were removed, we we able to repair the damage to Windows and the computer is now running perfectly.

Remember:

No internet security product can or will give you 100% protection

Just because you have internet security installed does not mean that your computer does not have a virus infection.

Other users of your computer might not be so selective about their on-line activities.

BTW We use Bullgard Internet Security.


Tuesday 6 March 2012

Laptop Range

Our computer repairs side has been really busy for the last two weeks or so but by pulling out all of the stops, we have managed to get our stock back up despite selling good numbers over the last couple of week:

Laptops from just £129.99

Friday 2 March 2012

Windows 8 Consumer Preview

We have been running the Windows 8 Developer Preview build on a couple of desktops and more recently on a laptop with some good experiences.

Although our computer repairs workshop is busy, we have created time to upgrade the test Windows 8 laptop to the Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

It's a new installation procedure in that you download a small .exe and run it on the intended host. The Windows 8 app check for compatibility with the hardware and the currently installed OS which in this case is the Windows 8 Developer Preview.

Said Windows 8 installer cheerfully reported that the hardware should works and that 8 of the current Apps would work with the new version of Windows 8.

The only slight concern is that the only Apps on the laptop are Windows 8!!

The installation is working as a download :( which means our broadband connection is being thrashed and despite it being a 10 meg connection, the installation is citing 1hr 25 to complete!!

We'll update this post as things hopefully progress but in the meantime we are going to get back to repairing all these sick computers and laptops.

Well the new installation finally completed some 4 hrs later and the test laptop seems to be stable enough.

If you are interested or even mildly curious, pop into our computer repair shop in Perth and give Windows 8 Consumer Preview a go!