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Old games, no online functionality. How do we feel? Howdy folks, as a part of a university project, I'm writing about current industry practices regarding the Maintenance and Preservation of older video game titles. At a certain point, I'm writing about the slew of older games that have since lost their online functionality (example: World at War) and the fact that the game is still listed for sale on Steam for £19.99, the same price as when the game first released in 2008. Steam does not explain that the online functionality is broken, and Activision alongside other companies often outright refuse to allow third parties to create servers and maitain them for these titles, and any who do are often slapped with the heavy side of a legal sledgehammer (im looking at you, nintendo). Also, in regards to these games, is it okay for companies to shut this functionality down even though at the time, you relied on the boxart of a game to choose if it was for you, most of these boxes praising their online functionality. How do we feel about this? Any suggestions for ways to fix the issue for both developers and consumers?

I've got an Acer Aspire a315-g42-r5yr Laptop from a friend for basic maintenance. After cleaning everything, changing bios battery, i went to reinstall windows, i successfully booted the installer, installed windows, and then: no bootable device found. I've tried all over again, and again, then i started troubleshooting. I went trough every posibble setting in bios, least 3 times and if windows is installed, i get no bootable device error. But if ubuntu is installed, everything is working fine. Any ideas why is this happening?

I was recently cleaning and doing some maintenance on my motherboard. I put some acrylic conformal coating that came in the form of a pen (like a liquid eraser pen). The problem is this: I forgot to clean the surface before applying the coating. It was to cover two scratches (you can notice the copper when observing with a flashlight) near the x16 and x8 ports (made by my GPU). Should I worry about it? Will it cause corrosion o something else related? It looked mostly clean with some specks of dust but those specks I don't know if they can cause trouble or not.

Specs: X79A-GD45 Plus MSI Motherboard Intel i7-3820 @ 3.60GHz 16.00GB of DDR3 GTX650 Windows 10 x64 Im trying to figure out how to, 1. Make my graphics card run better than it currently is, as it should be able to run games such as BeamNG Drive but crashes unless I have AI "Traffic" on the map. 2. Make the pc in general run better, I currently dont have heating problems or anything of the sort. Ive gone through Disk Cleanup and file cleaning, As well as updating my drivers. I have run into the issue of Windows not updating from 10.0.18362 but Ill come to that later. Any tips other than a full rebuild?

Just my annual PSA in advance of this years folding month. Please take the time to go over your rig. Clean out the dust filters to start the event fresh. Power down the system and check the power cord at both ends for signs of arcing. You shouldn't run a rig off an extension cord for long periods but if you must make sure it is a "beefy" one with 14awg wire.

So I cleaned my pc today, and now there is no display signal. I have reseated the ram and gpu. I've tried different ports, hdmi and dp. I've turned it off and on a few times. Still nothing. Am I missing something? any thoughts?

The ROG forums have been down for weeks now, showing up this message: Does anyone know what is going on? Are they coming back or not?

Hi, can anyone suggest some good online literature for RAID technology and maintenance? I need it for my seminar paper.

So I own a G-Skill MX780 mice and the rubber surface became sticky (I think it was the alcohol or disinfectant wipes I used to clean it). Is there a way to restore it to its original state, or do I have to remove the rubberized surface? In either case, what tools would I need?

Is 50% achohal rub better or 91%? I use microfiber with it so I just wanted to know.

whats the difference between red and green coolant? I have also heard there is blue and purple engine coolant are they all the same or are are they quite different?

Hello, everyone. I have a question to ask. How often do everyone of you clean your PC's from dust? i noticed after 2 months that there's a small dust build up in my PC. and i think i should clean it Can i use canned air for this? can i use a cloth? I will unplug it before, of course. Thanks in advance

Hi Guys, Do any of you audio lovers own a set of headphone stands? At first I didn't really see a point in getting them because I used to just put my headphones on my monitor. Over time, I completely got lazy and stopped doing that because often, I found myself enjoying my headphones too much ...to the point I'd leave my computer last minute and just leave my headphones on the desk. Well, turns out I'm now going to be selling my headphones for cheap (I don't know where yet) and will be getting a new pair of headphones. I'd like to learn how to treat them slightly better so I thought maybe a headphone stand would be a good start. That being said though, my old and currently still using pair of headphones aren't broken or anything but there's just a minor paint scratch on the side that I usually leave the headphones on the table. Hopefully looking for a decent stand that doesn't take up too much room on my desk. Preferably not wall-mounted either because drilling holes in the wall would mean the death of me. On the side however, how do you guys take care of your headphones?

Gentlemen! Ladies! People who identify as "other"! I've recently run in to some algae problems in my water cooling loop. This is my first loop, and until this it was without incident. It's an alphacool/xspc affair with a ddc t pump.(I mounted the pump to the xspc photon 270 res/pump top) I'm using distilled water and a silver kill coil, but swamp thing got me any way. The gpu water block has some nasty buildup, and the soft tubing has a film as well. I haven't checked the cpu block yet. My questions are: short of tearing everything apart, is there a way to remove all the nasty? Is the tubing toast (or slime, as it were). Also, can I use aquarium algaecide? I picked up some API Algaefix. It's polyethylene mix. I appreciate any help. You guys have given me more help than you know so far, and I really am thankful

These days unibody ultra-thin laptops are pretty popular, but one question continues to bother me, which is how to perform maintenance on them. Sure, these laptops are generally not powerful, so they don't require large amount of airflow to cool themselves, as a result dust may build up a lot slower than in gaming laptops (maybe, I've no idea). However what about thermal paste in these machines? I've heard that thermal compounds do not stay potent forever and need to be redone once in a while, which is admittedly easy to do in gaming laptops, but these so called 'ultrabooks' are often sealed and not capable of been taken apart (is that how you say it? I'm not native English speaker so...). So how do we change thermal pastes in them? I own a surface book, which is one of these unibody laptops. As it's one year old now, this question is increasingly disturbing to me...

Okay, so I'm putting an SSD in my laptop to replace the HDD and I also want to remove a bunch of bloatware because with only an i3-5010, I want as little happening in the background as possible. My question is, if I remove the bloatware like Asus EZ Fast Charge and the touch pad control center software, will Windows be able to auto grab drivers for the touchpad. And if the smart charge software is gone, will there be a negative effect on my charge times. Edit: it's an Asus F555L-A incase anyone was curious.

So I decided to clean out my PC today and reapply some fresh thermal paste on both the CPU and GPU, and I decided to do some stress testing and bench marking before and after the maintenance to show just what kind of benefits you can see from properly maintaining your PC So the PC hasn't had its dust blown out in about 9 months, and the Thermal Grizzly Kyronaut both in use on both the CPU and GPU has been there for about 18 months. The system is a Ryzen 5 1600X paired with a MSI Twin Frozer GTX 980 and 16GB RAM. For more details, my build is listed in my profile. I did my best to eliminate all possible variables in testing. The system was reinstalled right back into its usual spot after cleaning, and the room has its own dedicated air conditioning set to 68F during both tests. All OC setting, fan curve settings, and all other settings remain the same in each and every test. I also used the same Thermal Grizzly Kyronaut from the same tube that has been in its resealable package for 18 months. NOTE: Unfortunately I forgot to take CPU temps before cleaning so this will be strictly a GPU showing BEFORE CLEANING (Max Boost Clock Achieved VIA Small Resolution Stress Test, value does not change due to maintenance) (Max GPU Temp after 30 minutes of stress testing) (During TimeSpy Stress Test, loop #10) (TimeSpy BenchMark Results) AFTER CLEANING (Max GPU Temp after 30 minutes of stress testing) (During TimeSpy Stress Test, loop #10) (TimeSpy BenchMark Results) RESULTS Well, it should be fairly obvious that yes, cleaning and application of fresh thermal paste will help your system's thermals. What is surprising to me is just how much of a difference it makes. Im actually seeing slightly improved scores and gaming performance. I believe this is due to the cooler temperatures because lower temps means a more stable overclock. Im VERY surprised at just how much affect this has had on the MSI GTX 980. 5 deg C is actually a fairly massive change for just maintenance. You may be wondering about why TimeSpy stress testing only dropped 2 deg C and at first I wondered the same, but then I realized it was because of my custom fan curve. I have it set to ramp up from 75% fan speed to 100% fan speed at 70 deg C, so not only did the clean lower the temps, but it actually improved temps so much that the GPU didn't even have to ramp its fans up to 100% for the entire TimeSpy Stress Test, unlike before.

I am planning to buy Cooler Master MasterLiquid ML240L [RGB 1.0] CPU liquid cooler for my gaming PC but I don't know anything about the durability or the lifespan compared to Air Cooler which is of a big ass in size. So my Questions are 1. What is the lifespan of any AIO liquid cooler?? 2. Is it high maintenance ??? 3. Is it safe ??? {probability of leakage and ruining the whole pc} 4. I will be playing 5 hours daily so when do I change it ??? 5. Compared to Air cooler which is safer ??? 6. Is Air cooler as good as liquid ??? Is there a very big margin between both that here where I live the temperature in summer can go as high as 52 Degrees Celsius... I need your help here guys

Not sure what catagory this question goes in, and surprisingly I haven’t found a lot of info on it, but is this specific brand of compressed air ok for dusting things out such as my graphics card/motherboard/any other internal part of of my pc? It said it had bitterant, which is something I’ve never seen on any other brands.

After the very strong summer in the Netherlands, I noticed the colour has mostly drained from my Acid Green EK Cryofuel. Additionally it seems the pump is vibrating a lot more. Before, I also asked about an issue with mineral oil leaks from O-ring seals, specifically in my monoblock. Honestly, I'm just concerned. Should I clean out this liquid and get new one in? Is it safe as it is?

I have some questions regarding the maintenance I'm going to have to do soon, since I put the loop together more than a year ago so it's long overdue: I'm doing a block teardown, including the Z170S monoblock and the 1080Strix GPU block. What do I need to do the reassembly? Do I need to get O-rings? Do I need to get thermal pads? Can I reuse the EKWB compression fittings? How do I flush the radiators and clean the blocks? Its a copper/nickel loop. I'm planning on using the EKWB Monarch RAM modules without the actual watercooling part, just as a heatsink. I heard it's enough, I just wanted to make sure. I'll be posting the process since it's going to be a pretty spicy mod so expect a post in 2 weeks or so and many thanks in advance for taking time to respond to the questions!

So I've had this keyboard for like 5 or more years, and to say it was getting a bit gross I think is an understatement. So with Luke's video called "Reviving my favorite mechanical keyboard" in my heart, I just cracked it open and cleaned it out. It survived it and looks much better, so thanks Luke!!

i don't like the idea of using alcohol but can i use a can of air and some kind of wipes for cleaning my rig, also where can i get said product's in the UK would PC world have the items or argos.

It's been 16 months since we built the desk PC... And it's been running nonstop ever since. What horrors await Linus when he cleans it? Buy PC water cooling on Amazon: http://geni.us/SjY0lg Buy a toothbrush on Amazon: http://geni.us/OYVcWD

How often do you shut down your pc for maintenance? In the days of old mechanical hdds we had to preserve their life hence we would shut our computers down when we don't need them on most of the time. Nowadays, however, in a world ruled by ssds that's not really a problem since there's only fans spinning as far as mechanical parts go and everything else is electronic... So, how often do you let your computers rest? Are there any benefits to scheduling it or just turning it off once in a while does the same job? I personally switch off my laptop a few times a month. Looking forward to see what you guys do.