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I'm still up to me neck in strangeness. As I can not get my new rig to play nicely an have not managed to sort out the travelling pc which is going to my sister at some point (it should have been her christmas present) I took a detour. The local freecycle site offered for free a Dell 4700 which apparently only need a hard drive. As it was only up the road from me an just round corner I thought that would do as a decent backup. Off I went to pick it up. Nice looking thing not too big and it has a Pentium 3.0 Ghz and a vga connector. Great I thought just perfect as a backup as I have a spare 120 GB ssd an IO couild make two partitions and have a stable backup os and room for a playing and fiddling os. Gave the thing a decent blow put with me trusty fire extinguisher compressed air tool, man was it full of dust, cough cough choke choke. Then I tried to install the clone I had made of Makulu which had reported as being a good copy when I made it with Clonezilla. Well Clonezilla would not work as the cd I had was for 64 bit pc's, made a 32 bit Clonezilla cd and tried to install the clone. now clever folk will have spotted already that if I gad a 64 bit Clonzilla the chances were that a clone I had made would be 64 bit. Well clever old you. Me I was really surprised that the clone would not work and that the pc seemed to have got a mind of its own as it not only reported a failure it also attempted to do a repair of the clone. this involved rapidly scrolling text on the screen which then turned into a real Matrix like screen that ran for ten minutes. I let it run as I was fascinated by this event. finally a message appeared telling me that the clone was not usable. Hmm.. what to do next. Well the first thing I did was to remember that the lady had told me that she had taken the coms battery out and she had given it to me and I had put it in my pocket. Then I noticed that the frnt panel button wiring was not properly seated in its slot. hmm maybe that was why the start button seemed dodgy, yup it certainly was the reason. Hmm..what to do next. I decided to get a copy of Robolinux 32 bit. Now I have a very useful copy of Robolinux 64 bit which I had tried to install to the Dell, before I realised that it was a 32 bit jobby, and the Robolinux 64 had startted to boot and then a message flashed up saying I had the wrong architecture. So I knew Robolinux would boot or I thought I knew. As the 32 bit Robolinux would not boot, all I could get was a black screen with a flashing cursor at top left of the screen. Tried the cd in my other pc and whoopee it boots so there is nothing wrong with the burn but it will not boot in the Dell.Hmm...what to do next. Oh look I already have a Arch dual .iso I'll try that. Burnt the cd and away I go. The thing would not boot, only got to a black screen with a flashing cursor. It is not a bad burn of the cd as it boots just fine in my other pc. Hmmm.... what to do. I'll try my Slax usb traveller. Darn it, it boots to a screen saying wrong architecture. I download a 32 bit version and whoopee it boots and runs from a cd. Sort of useful but no persistence on a cd so I need to put it on a usb stick and at least I will have a working backup. Computers don't you just love em. Is the Dell 4700 picky as to what it will boot ???? or am I infested with gremlins ???

So recently I picked up a gently used Dell Venue 8 Pro tablet running Windows 8.1. Even though I love and frequently use my Nexus 7, I figured I would like to see what another OS on a tablet could do. This is my first exposure to Windows 8. It's also the first time I've used Windows on anything but a traditional desktop and laptop. I haven't had much of a chance to play with it yet. Before I break something, anyone have some advice? Some parts of it seem somewhat traditional while other parts are really odd.

Greetings. I have a bad monitor and a friend who's good with electronics and circuitry who's interested in trying to fix it. So I was wondering if anyone would have some idea what the problem is with this monitor and what to look at once we get it opened up. The monitor turns on just fine. The problem is when it it connected to a computer. Once I plug in the VGA cable, the computer desktop shows for a few seconds then the monitor just goes blank and that's it. When tested, the computer still detects that another monitor is been connected, but the monitor itself shows no image after a few seconds. It's a standard 15 inch LCD Dell monitor, VGA input. It's just an old monitor and if it can work again, that would be great. If not, no big deal.

http://tinyurl.com/cuwhh4y