#hardware-failure

Solution: Is it bad to defragment a USB Flash Drive? #fix #programming #computers

Is it bad to defragment a USB Flash Drive?

If I defragment my 8 GB Kingston flash drive, will it decrease its lifetime?

Answer [by Zds]: Is it bad to defragment a USB Flash Drive?

If you have not yet done it, the answer is, “yes it does, don’t do that”. However, most likely one defragmentation cycle consumes just 1-5% of the lifespan of the USB stick, so you’re hard pressed to notice. The exact…

How-to: How can I determine which RAM module is failing Memtest86? #fix #programming #development

How can I determine which RAM module is failing Memtest86?

One or many of the memory cards out of total 4GB (4x1GB) are failing. The following is memtest progress screenshot. It is always pointing to memory at 19xx MB and 50xx MB. Error bits are always 04000000. How can I determine which of those 4 cards are failing? The strange thing is that if I test them individually they are not failing. I’ve…

Fixed: My computer freezes irregularly #answer #fix #it

My computer freezes irregularly

My computer started to freeze at irregular times for 3 weeks now.

Please note that this question change with each things that i try. (For additional details)

What happens

My computer freezes, the video stops. (No graphic glitches, it just stops)

Sounds stops too.

Sometimes, randomly, the screen on my G-15 keyboard flickers and I see characters not at the right…

Fix: Can some software physically damage hardware? #programming #solution #answer

Can some software physically damage hardware?

I know a question similar to this one has been asked before however it was about installing a 32bit OS on a 64bit laptop. My question is more about damaging the hardware.

I was wondering if there was a way of interfacing with hardware from the OS or Terminal layer in a way to damage it beyond repair (actual physical damage, not just faulty hardware).

Solution: What is the safe temperature limit for a consumer SATA hard drive? #computers #it #development

What is the safe temperature limit for a consumer SATA hard drive?

Background

My personal desktop system at home has 5 SATA drives racked up inside. Recently my system started failing in odd ways like random kernel panics and I eventually traced it to random degrades on the RAID array. Sometimes I could boot, other times I couldn’t and so on. After chasing software issues for a while I finally…

Fix: How to diagnose computer lockups and freezes? #dev #computers #fix

How to diagnose computer lockups and freezes?

I built a desktop computer a couple years back with the following specs:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 Yorkfield 2.5GHz 6 MB L2 Cache LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor BX80580Q9300

Motherboard: EVGA 122-CK-NF68-T1 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard

Video Card: Two EVGA 256-P2-N758-TRGeForce 8600GT SCC 256 MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express…