Technical Support (jannies please move or delete if inappropriate)

glass_houses

glass_houses

open your food tract, mammal
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kiwifarms.net
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Jul 22, 2015
Hello, hello. I’m having trouble with my cheapshit Dell laptop and I was hoping you fine people can help me as it is out of warranty and I am computer illiterate.

About two weeks ago it started shutting down Firefox randomly, then stalling. It’s been very slow and buggy, and now all programs are shutting down, including Chrome, Microsoft programs, or third party software. It will randomly disconnect itself from our wifi and I have to restart the computer to get the connection back. Initially the stalling and shutdowns where when I had multiple tabs open in Firefox, to all programs shutting down if I have multiple programs running, and finally it’s just crashing for shits and giggles. It seems especially prone to this if I’m on some kind of internet browser, but that might just be confirmation bias since 85% I’m on my computer I’m on the net in some fashion.

The harddrive in this thing is fucking tiny at 250GB, and was nearly full, so I deleted some files and programs. I now have 45GB of free space on the drive. It’s not improved matters any.

I have also:

Ran CCleaner, both the main program and the registry cleaner.

Defraged the harddrive and scanned it for errors.

Updated and ran Malwarebytes; it found sixteen PUPs since I’ve been forgetting to run a virus scan like the idiot I am, but after cleaning them and repeating the CCleaner, register clean and defrag it hasn’t made any difference.

I’ve checked every component via the Device Manager; every single component says that it is working correctly.

I’ve updated all software and drivers.

I started to wonder if there was a problem with the CPU temperature. I downloaded HWiNFO64. The CPU temperature is hovering around 54C. All other readouts are in green and black, although I’ll confess I’m not too clear on what most of them mean. In the past couple hours, HWiNFO64 is starting to close itself down with little to no warning and no browsers are working. I’m on my phone right now.

I’m in the process of moving house and money is extremely tight, so taking my beastie to a technician is not possible right now. I’d really appreciate some insight and advice.

Computer specifications:

Processor AMD Athlon Silver 3050U with Radeon Graphics 2.30 GHz

Installed RAM 8.00 GB (5.89 GB usable)

Device ID 177A7117-A7EB-4E0A-8A2D-E06BB488F231

Product ID 00356-02278-03396-AAOEM

System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
 
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First of all uninstall CCcleaner and Malwarebytes. Both are absurdly resource intensive bloatware that cause more problems than they fix.

Once that is done run a complete offline scan via Windows defender and reboot

Open command prompt and run sfc/scannow command and reboot once the scan has completed.

Uninstaller Google Chrome, it's shit and unnecessarily resource intensive for a browser.

Reset the network connection in network settings and run the ipconfig /flushdns command and reboot.

Also for the love of God if you're not tech savvy don't go poking around in the registry. That's intermediate shit and you could brick your machine.

Try all this shit first.
 
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If you have a spare USB drive, move all important files to that USB drive.
Go to your settings and do a clean install of Windows.
procexp will give you a more detailed version of task manager which can be helpful for finding any bad programs. General pc tip, always run programs through virustotal.
After you have a clean install, download procexp, ConfigureDefender (Easier way to configure the basic Windows Defender settings), and practice general internet security, don't download weird programs and keep your system clean. Hope this helps.
 
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Is it 54C in idle? What is it under load? You might run into thermal limiting. Cheap machines with inferior cooling love to just rely on thermal throttling for things not breaking. Setting a different, lower cTDP target might help, if possible.

Also you can reserve as little RAM as you can get away with things still running for your internal graphics. Running out of "VRAM" when it comes to iGPU has basically no speed hit.

There's no point in defragging a flash-based harddrive. It's just wearing it down. It has absolutely no relevance or speed impact how data is ordered on a flash-based device. Frankly, I'm surprised windows still lets people do that. I'm assuming it's flash based as the APU is relatively recent.

Otherwise, Windows is just kind of a bloated piece of shit and a RAM hog at this point. I had a direct comparsion between lower end systems in performance and basically Linux always won out, and not by a small margin either. I'm not gonna say install gentoo but if that's your email/browsing machine you really might have a better experience with one of the more user-friendly distributions. Emphasis on might. YMMV.
 
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1) Check for and clean any dust bunnies from the heatsink and fan, also reseat the RAM.
2) Boot into the BIOS there may be a hardware diagnostics utility to check the RAM, hard drive etc.
3) Boot from and use a live Linux distro such as Ubuntu, if it runs without any problems it rules out hardware malfunctions (except for the internal SSD or HD).
 
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RACISM said:
Someone was a stupid nigger and didn't uncheck their Downloads folder before running it, right?
Click to expand...
Lmfao I’m sure someone was. Usually I don’t trust “cleaner” programs because they’re invasive and have the ability to delete whatever they want. Windows has built in cleaner software so they’re pretty pointless.

Mainly said that because people have had instances of backup files and system restores being removed.
 
swordfish5838 said:
Mainly said that because people have had instances of backup files and system restores being removed.
Click to expand...
Both things which CCleaner allow you to uncheck before running. A user being a dumb nigger doesn't make a program dangerous as you stated. It just makes you a dumb nigger.
 
RACISM said:
Both things which CCleaner allow you to uncheck before running. A user being a dumb nigger doesn't make a program dangerous as you stated. It just makes you a dumb nigger.
Click to expand...
Not wrong about people just being dumb with how they run the program, still would just use the built in Windows tools though since they serve the exact same purpose without a third party necessary.
 
swordfish5838 said:
Not wrong about people just being dumb with how they run the program, still would just use the built in Windows tools though since they serve the exact same purpose without a third party necessary.
Click to expand...
It's a decent tool that if used properly does a lot of things at once that require opening different utilities. As long as the end user isn't a nigger, there is no danger. You saying it is unsafe software is unfair and wrong.
 
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RACISM said:
It's a decent tool that if used properly does a lot of things at once that require opening different utilities. As long as the end user isn't a nigger, there is no danger. You saying it is unsafe software is unfair and wrong.
Click to expand...
I’ll agree with that and double down, was going off what i’ve heard in the past about that software. Thanks for letting me know more about it.
 
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Easiest path is to clean install Windows (ignore the Linux stuff, you don't know how to troubleshoot, so it's reasonable to assume you'll have a bad time with Linux). Same version as the PC came with. Backup to external drive first.
Clean install means delete partitions/format.
You also need recent drivers for everything in the laptop. Will take some searching.
If it's still having issues, you can do some troubleshooting, chkdsk with surface test to see if bad sectors have developed, and you'll also need to stress test to see if the CPU/RAM are unstable.
Since it's a laptop and old, I assume it's super dirty, and you will have to clean things, or it will heat up during the stress test.
I wouldn't bother with the troubleshooting within your old Windows install. It's probably super dirty, maybe infected, registry corruption and hell knows what else. Windows is not something you update for a decade and install/uninstall crap on without going to shit.
If you're super unsure of all these things and feel overwhelmed, get someone on TeamViewer to help instead.
 
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