Setup screen problem

[Bailing_Out]

You know before windows loads you can go to that setup screen and make changes. I can go there but since I bought this monitor 6 months ago I cannot read any of it. Its stretched out I think. Search so far has failed me, probably not wording it right. The cmos battery died and some stuff needs set right again since I replaced it.

[[WaW]CA|Melvin]

There is the BIOS screen and the Windows "boot-up" (things like boot to Safe Mode, Command, Command + Network, etc) screen. If even your BIOS screen is unreadable, you might try another monitor. Maybe you have a funky BIOS, but I don't recall a replacing a failed battery screws up the BIOS display. Damn, I'm no help. Hope you are posting at a regular PC support website, too.

[Bailing_Out]

The BIOS boot up screen was messed up for awhile, ever since I got this monitor. I hoped the monitor could be adjusted with its buttons to do 800 by 600 for long enough to adjust the setting but no the resolution cannot be changed that way, only once you get into windows can it be changed and it only lasts while windows is running.

The new PC is on the way, the motherboard (my opinion) is going out on this one. I have varying amounts of ram, sometimes 8 then 12 and then the whole 16 sometimes. Blue screen crashes happen about once a week. I read a long article on "tin whiskers" and I wonder if that might be the problem.

[[WaW]CA|Melvin]

It seems like the processes to avoid tin whiskers would be followed, but maybe not the cheaper manufacturers. Perhaps what you read about it was the problem when lead was taken out of solder and out of the plating to a component's electrical contacts. Lead was added to tin to nearly eliminate them in a regular commercial environment. In more stressful environments, conformal coating can stop any growth from advancing to cause shorts. It took some years to deal with the lead free problem. Maybe someone was cutting corners on some components in your system.

There is another issue that is sometimes confused with tin whiskers. That is called electromigration which is similar but the greatest problem with it was on a much, much smaller scale. It is within the microchips, themselves. Good design practices and material choices prevent that. My memory isn't too good on this, but there was a case, long after people had been doing design properly, where a microchip had this problem due to poor design practice. I believe it was with power devices. That could be in the power supply or the voltage regulators on the motherboard.

For years, when I built PC I always purchased my motherboards from a reliable company. A large industrial corporation which sold to Dell and other PC vendors back in the day. I couldn't overclock these motherboards, but for me quality and reliability in my computers is significantly more important than overclocking bullsh!t. And, I paid a little more to get greater capacity to support future upgrades as well a features not yet available on the general market. On the features, I only got burned once by picking EISA bus support for future addon-cards when the market selected PCI, (for the best, though). Sadly, that large industrial company dropped their motherboard line some years ago; it was Intel.

Anyway.... that's all academic. Maybe you just have a bum monitor.

Is your PC the one you describe in your thread New PC possible build?

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The new one is, I'm still on the old one now.

There is a very old thread that has this one, http://www.bfewaw.com/showthread.php...=1#post3021260 Only thing missing is the 5850 video card from the lineup I posted. Damn thing held up to most of them for a long time. I don't know how long most people keep computers but this one is nearly 10 years old. I've added more and better ram plus some hard drive but its essentially the same.

Read a few old threads looking for it, man some of the damnedest arguments we had back then. Lots of folks I miss, even Gym Bo, even Adder who thought I bought too much of a power supply but I think that is because I didn't list the video card and he didn't know of course how many hard drives I would buy.

[[WaW]CA|Melvin]

Nearly 10 years is great. I had a system I built in October 2007 for (the old) Win XP because I vowed never to use the crap OS Vista! Years later, I put Win 7 Pro 64-bit on it. This was possible because I had picked the right features for a motherboard chipset and CPU. I posted the system configuration in 2008 in this thread:
... http://www.bfewaw.com/showthread.php...=1#post2954673
In addition to upgrade to Win 7 64-bit, I put in more RAM and a new video card. Holly smokes that made it like a whole new PC. It got a big performance increase due to having 64-bit Win 7 versus the old 32-bit Win XP as well as much more RAM. Between that and the up-to-date video card I could run all of the latest games at the time of the update. We still use it about every day.

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I remember that,,,, barely. Now thats nothing just like mine. Helps my wife said "Buy it" when I told her what I told her. Which was, "this SOB lasted 10 years, whatever I get will be up gradable in less than 5 to the point that this damn thing will beat most systems bought after it". She went for it.

I WIN LOL.

[[WaW]CA|Melvin]

Congratulations!

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UPS guy came by today, I just happen to be awake, stops in front of house, I think he's coming here, no he backs up into neighbors yard and delivers something to him.

Then, just now, I get an email from cyberpower saying since my billing and shipping addresses are different, they haven't started on my order. I have to take a pic of my credit card and send it to them before they will start.