Pav

I dropped my my laptop a while ago, and it got stuck in a loop of preparing automatic repair. After trying to use it as a boot drive in a different computer (one that I know works), I determined that the drive is currently incapable of booting. I then tried a working hard drive as a boot drive for my 'broken' laptop. After these steps, I have determined that it is the hard drive that is broken, and my laptop is otherwise fine. Should I just completely format the whole thing and reinstall windows? if that's the case, how will I reinstall windows with a legit license? Will I have to pay for a new one or should I call microsoft? The laptop came with a copy of windows 8 installed, so I don't have a key. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated as my laptop has been down for a week, and I'll need it for college in mid September. Thanks!

There's nothing else it could realistically be? I'm still able to open it and view files through a SATA to USB adapter

Firstly, I'm really hoping that this is the right place for me to be posting this, but sorry if I'm in the wrong area of the site. So I dropped my acer aspire laptop late last week. It wasn't from a particularly great height, maybe 1.3m? (about 4 foot) After the drop (I was using it at the time) the screen froze, a buzzing noise was emitted, and it shut off abruptly. I then tried to power it on to get the message 'preparing automatic repair'. At this point, it would display this message, then show a black screen and nothing else would happen. After a few more hours of this, it started displaying the same message, but then turning off and doing the same thing over and over again. I left it in this state for several more hours and came back to find the windows 10 advanced boot options screen. Once I was into the advanced boot options, I tried restoring it to factory settings several times. Each time it failed for some reason. I was able to get into the bios, but could not see any way to rectify the problem from within the bios After several attempts, I took out the battery, reseated the ram, plugged my HDD into my desktop pc and scanned it for errors and repaired it again and again until it stopped showing that errors had been found on the disk. This is where I am at as of right now. I can power it on, and it will display the acer logo for ~35 seconds and power off, then power back on with no input from me and repeat the cycle. Is there anything anyone can do to help me? As of right now I'm out of ideas. Thanks

That was all I needed to know, thanks!

Hi guys, Bit of a noob, never built a pc before. I was looking at the UK and US versions of pcpartpicker, and I realised that the price difference between the two sites for the rig I want to build is over £200 (yes I did convert £ to $ and vice versa) This got me thinking, if it's so much cheaper to buy US parts, why don't I do exactly that? (I know that postage could be expensive, so this only applies to smaller parts) So my question is, other than the PSU (due to different sockets), are most US components compatible with the mains power in the UK? If so is there anything I need to watch out for? Thanks in advance

Having done my IT GCSE in year 10/11, I say go for it, there's very little you'll struggle with, you can get a teacher to give you feedback on how it's going, feedback etc. Most of it is done in MS Word and Excel, and anything you haven't done before is fairly easy to learn. I say go for it. At age 12, you can always retake over the next few years if it goes badly, but in all honesty, is was the GCSE I found easiest. I did no revision for it whatsoever, I wasn't even taught any theory until a month before the exam and I got an A. If you're watching Linus' videos, you're infinitely more prepared for the theory than I was. Good luck!

Thanks to all 3 of you, I've looked at everything you've suggested so far, and I like several things you've suggested, my only question is about the legitimacy of G2A.com? I've heard of it before, but why is it so cheap?

Hi, I'm hoping that somebody here will help me out with building a PC rig for gaming. I tend to play a lot of FPS games eg battlefield 4 and I want to upgrade from my Acer Aspire laptop. Although it runs BF4 well most of the time, I very rarely get to above 30FPS on medium settings. After about 6 months Iv'e decided it's time for an upgrade. My budget is around £925, and I have come up with a rig, but I was wondering if somebody could help me tweak it/check compatibility etc. I will most likely be running 1 or 2 1080p monitors. Mouse and keyboard are not included in the cost as I have already decided which ones I will be purchasing and will be getting those before I start my build, however a monitor is included in this price, so any suggestions as to a replacement for the one I have selected would be appreciated. I would also be interested in potentially adding a 2nd video card at some point in the future. Parts are as follows: CPU: Intel Core i5-4690k - £167.50 Motherboard: Asus Z97-K - £94.41 Memory: Corsair Vengeance 8GB - £65.00 Storage: Western Digital 1 TB - Black - £54.99 Storage: Samsung 840 Evo 120 GB SSD - £55.00 Video Card: Asus Nvidia Geforce GTX 760 2 GB - £158.99 Sound Card: Asus Xonar DGX 5.1 - £22.99 WiFi adapter: TP-Link TL-WDN3800 N600 - £25.98 PSU: Corsair Builder series CX750M - £64.98 Case: Zalman Z11 plus - £49.99 Monitor: Acer G246HL 24" - £124.07 OS: Windows 8.1 Pro Student - £49.99 Total cost: £903.89 As I said, please let me know if anything I have specified would be too overpowered eg power supply, and if there is another option with similar but cheaper/better and similarly priced, and also if any of this is even going to work together. Future upgrades are likely to include an extra 8 GB of RAM and a second video card, along with a second, larger monitor (likely 27"). Thanks in advance Pav