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my computer is coming tomorrow
im trying to figure out some things about upgrading it
i have googled the following quite a bit but i cant figure it out.
my comp has 3 pcixpressX1 slots and one pciexpressX16 slot
what does this mean in terms of the ability to add cards such as a video card or more usb ports
thanks
Some of those slots are already being used by components pre-installed on your PC. You need to determine how many of them are still free (if any).
Is your belief founded on solid evidence or is this emunah peshutah.
You can use the slots to add video cards and sound cards.
Usually the integrated video on a motherboard isn’t that goo. It should be good enugh for most purposes, unless you’re a ga,er, or do a lot of caf or video work.
Add-on video.cards have their own memoey, so thy won’t use a portion of the computer’s main memoy. Therenare video cards that. Can be used in tandem, they share the work and make the vido processing even faster.
You will find that this new computer will likely seem very fast compared to the old one, but one day in the distant future, or when you start using video-intensive software
You might consider adding an add-on card, to offload part of the video processing burden.
You can find a video card for either of those pci’s but its better to buy the one that uses pci-16 because its much faster.
My sources is google keyword: pci express slot video card
Pcie 16 has many times the bandwidth of the other. This is important because a lort of bits are involbed in graphics processing, particularly 3d and video.
Moderator-80-
The 16x PCI slot is what you’d use for your graphics card, since it has much faster throughput than the 1x PCI slot.
My old desktop has an ISA slot, which is a predecessor to PCI.
The graphic card specs will tell you if it’s PCI compatible; on Newegg, the following is a spec – “Interface PCI Express 2.1 x16”
What “ronrsr” says is true – you probably don’t and won’t need a graphics card.
Also, I’d be surprised if the number of USB ports isn’t enough – your new PC comes with several.
Video cards usually go into an X16 slot. Other cards that don’t use as bandwidth will go in an X8, X4, X2, or X1 slot. X8, X4, and X2 card and slots are not common on consumer PCs. If you had a card X2 or wider, you can always but it in any larger slot (in your case the X16 slot).
If you need more USB ports, you can get a USB hub which plugs into one USB port and gives you 4 or 8 more.
According to Mr. Pakistani over at Dell I’m having some registry trouble. Rather than spend the $100+ for him to fix it (including $300+ to buy a required one year warranty), I’m trying to move all my important files off my laptop to a flash drive using DOS since I can’t actually get into regular windows (or safe mode). I seem to be having trouble moving directories though. I’m using this command line:
xcopy /e “c:usersownerpictures” “f:pictures”
It will start copying some files into the flash drive and then stop and give me an I/O device error. Any idea what I can do?
Sounds to me like the hard drive is defective.
Use the /c switch —- that directs xcopy to keep copying despite errors. Could also be a full flash drive or an unreadable sector on the hard drive.
How about:
xcopy /e c:usersownerpictures*.* f:pictures*.*
The “/e” switch copies empty directories. Are you sure this is what you want and not “/s” which only copies subdirectories that have files?
With any dos command you can add “/?” to get syntax help.
If it scrolls off the screen, use the “|more” pipe, e.g.
xcopy/? |more
this will prevent the screen from scrolling until you hit a key.
An old trick from 20 or more years ago to copy all files when your copy media can’t hold everything at once is:
1) Use the “attrib” command to turn on the archive attribute for all files in the directory structure:
attrib +a pictures*.*/s
2) xcopy everything and turn off the attrib flag as it’s copied:
xcopy pictures*.* r:pictures*.*/m (“/m” is for “modify”)
This way, once your “copy to” media is filled, the xcopy command will pick up from where it left off by starting with the first file that still has its archive flag set.
Alternately, if you have the Windows disk, you can probably modify the BIOS to boot from the optical drive, and then perform the operations from within Windows.
Is it always stopping on the same file?
ronsr:
Use the /c switch —- that directs xcopy to keep copying despite errors. Could also be a full flash drive or an unreadable sector on the hard drive.
I’ll try that, although I’m not sure if it is only giving me an error on a specific picture that is corrupted or something else. The flash drive works on other computers, so it can’t be that.
ICOT:
How about:
xcopy /e c:usersownerpictures*.* f:pictures*.*
That would have the same effect as what I’m doing now. It’s weird because it does copy some of the files, it just stops in between. I tried using my brothers external HD and I didn’t even get an error message even though it still stopped in the middle.
The “/e” switch copies empty directories. Are you sure this is what you want and not “/s” which only copies subdirectories that have files?
Yes, sorry that’s what I’m actually using.
With any dos command you can add “/?” to get syntax help.
If it scrolls off the screen, use the “|more” pipe, e.g.
xcopy/? |more this will prevent the screen from scrolling until you hit a key.
The command is working fine, its the execution that I’m having trouble with. Also, /p prevents the scroll off as well.
An old trick from 20 or more years ago to copy all files when your copy media can’t hold everything at once is:
My flash drive should have plenty of room for it all. In retrospect though i am going to check again.
Alternately, if you have the Windows disk, you can probably modify the BIOS to boot from the optical drive, and then perform the operations from within Windows.
My HD is partitioned so I have the disk on the X: drive. My brother might have the disk though. I’ve never done it before though, will this allow me to access my HD from Windows?
Trying xcopy with the “/c” switch is probably the first thing to try. It is the easiest solution attempt, and also makes sense since a bad hard drive may also account for your system’s problems.
Back in the floppy disk days, when a disk was full the error message would say something to that effect, not give an I-O error message. Don’t know if that means anything here.
Since flash drives are so prevalent (and cheap), maybe borrow someone else’s and try it, just to be sure the problem isn’t with your flash drive.
My HD is partitioned so I have the disk on the X: drive. My brother might have the disk though. I’ve never done it before though, will this allow me to access my HD from Windows?
Yes, it will – unless other problems exist.
Even if none of the ideas proposed here work, there are other things that can be done to try to recover your data, such as removing your hard drive and reading it with another PC, or even sending it to a data recovery specialist. Those places can be expensive, though.
It looks like the problem is some corrupted files that aren’t transferring. After I delete the file it works fine. The problem is that I have to keep watching it to watch where it stops and then I have to go back and delete that file and start copying all over again.
I didn’t want to spend the money on a HD reader although I suspect that at the end I may have to because I have an older laptop with a broken integrated videocard so I can’t even get into that one unless I buy an external video card. I was going to just plug that HD into my brother’s computer though.
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