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• Check VGA/DVI-I monitor cable to MAKE certain that no pins are bend or broken.

• Ensure the video connection into the computer CASE is tight and secure.

• Degauss the monitor using the On Screen Display (OSD)menu using the navigation buttons on the monitor casing

• Verify no magnetic devices which could cause distortion are close to the monitor.

• Ensure the video card is properly seated, removing it and reseating it if in doubt. Take precautionary measures against Electro Static Discharge.
  

• Install monitor drivers to be able to unlock (or select) the optimal refresh rate for each resolution available to your monitor. Monitor drivers can be obtained from the manufacturer.

• Connector ports rotated 90 degrees (PS/2, COM, LPT-1)
• 20 or 24 PIN power connector

• Turn off any download accelerators

• While installing drivers, turn OFF ALL antivirus and Antispyware software

Are you looking for a backup UPS...in case you have power interruptions and need time to be able to save your work and shut down safely?

Are you looking for battery replacements for an existing APC UPS?

How about a surge protector? Cables? Notebook REPLACEMENT batteries?

The following links will help you choose the right product(s) based on the information you supply.

Simply give the Selectors the information and they will RETURN various recommendations, along with specs and images about the product that would best fit your needs.

There are no links to other websites...and you can use the information you OBTAIN to do a search for the product you found...finding the best possible price for that item...on your own.

I feel these selectors can be very useful tools...and I hope you do as well.

Here are the links:

UPS Selector
UPS Battery Selector
Surge PROTECTION Selector
Notebook Battery Replacements
Cables



Enjoy!

The list below COVERS most makes of hard DRIVE DIAGNOSTIC software to test the harddrive.....

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm
http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/products/index.htm
http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp
http://www.fcpa.fujitsu.com/support/hard-drives/software_utilities.html
http://www.fcpa.fujitsu.com/download/hard-drives/#diagnostic
http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm#DFT
http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/index.html
http://www.samsungelectronics.com/hdd/support/utilities/utilities_index.html
http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/su/su_sc_home.jsp

Or this one:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?testdisk.html

If you're looking for tools to see how fast your system really is - either for diagnostics purposes, deciding what to upgrade next, or just for bragging rights - look no further! I've separated these out into categories and will update this as time permits, I hope you find the information useful! If you have any queries about anything in this FAQ, whether related to the specific tools or not, please create a new thread in the appropriate section - probably Hardware - and we'll assist. I'm also happy to take feedback on this thread via PM, if you know of a useful tool that isn't here or spot an error.

General system performance

PCMark - one of the oldest and most well-known general benchmarking tools, PCMark by Futuremark is now on version 8. There's a free version available to download from their website, or there are several paid options. The usual paid option is known as "Advanced Edition" and is available to buy on Steam rather than from Futuremark's website - the "Professional Edition" is really for benchmarking websites or large organisations, it's very expensive at just under $1500 and is basically overkill for any home user. The differences between the free Basic version and the paid Advanced version are detailed at the bottom of the main page linked above, but essentially the paid version gives you access to 5 TEST suites instead of 3 (the additional two test suites are storage which is very useful, and applications which uses MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite if you have it installed), lets you run the battery life test, lets you run individual tests from each suite, gives you some pretty graphs to look at, and finally lets you save your results offline. PCMark is fairly real-world in its testing as it uses actual applications such as LibreOffice and a web browser to test performance doing a set of scripted tasks such as loading web pages and creating documents. There are some basic 3D tests in there as well, nothing overly demanding. Overall it's a good test suite IMO, with the main downsides being that one of the most useful tests is not free, the long run-time for each suite of tests (expect 20 minutes for the shortest), and the hefty download size - it's nearly 3GB.

3D performance/gaming

3DMark - also by Futuremark, this is probably the most well-known synthetic 3D benchmark suite. There's a free version available to download from the website, or again as with PCMark there's a "Professional Edition" aimed mainly at reviewers, and an "Advanced Edition" available to buy on Steam or from Futuremark's website which gives you graphs, some more tests, much more customizability on each available suite, and the ability to loop the benchmarks for stability testing.

Unigine Heaven - this is a few years old but still relevant today as it uses DX11's tesselation features to really push your GRAPHICS card's performance on higher settings. There are several ways to run the Heaven benchmark - it can either continuously run, showing your FPS and other stats, or there's a benchmark MODE to give you a score for your system. The free version does both of these MODES and also lets you customize the settings, e.g. the detail, resolution and how much tesselation to use - whereas the paid Advanced version includes the ability to loop the benchmark mode, automate Heaven from the command line and produce reports in CSV format. There's also a Pro edition which is unnecessary for most users. Heaven is useful as a stress-testing tool if you suspect your graphics card may have an issue, as well as for comparing benchmark results against similar cards to make sure your card is performing properly.

Unigine Valley - from the same company as Heaven, Valley is a newer benchmark which isn't focussed on tesselation, instead it's set outside so you have volumetric lighting, ambient occlusion, dynamic weather, and procedural object placement. The Basic/Advanced/Pro editions are the same as Heaven in terms of what features they give you, so for most uses the Basic version gives you everything you need as you can run the test continuously or perform benchmark runs.

CPU/RAM

I've grouped CPU and RAM benchmarks together because often the performance of one will affect results from the other.

Asus/ROG Realbench - this does have an element of GPU performance too, but it's mainly CPU and RAM-bound. Realbench uses open source applications bundled with the benchmark to give you real-world performance result. The benchmark generally takes around 15 minutes to run, and will stop if you move the mouse or press a button on the keyboard whilst it's running, this is to prevent alterations or tinkering. It's 100% free and you can loop the benchmark to use as a stability test. The leaderboard section lets you compare your scores to others, the only slight issue is that by ROG's nature, most results are from fairly high-end systems, so sometimes it's difficult to find a system that compares to yours unless you too have a recent-ish high-end system. Realbench is also 64-bit only, because...well, from their FAQ "We made the conscious choice to focus on a 64-bit version only. We believe everyone should be running a 64-bit OS these days considering modern GPU/DDR3 memory capacities. Equally, we’ve not tested it on antiquated XP-64, and since less than 1% of our site visitors use Vista, we’ve solely focused on Win 7 and Win 8/8.1."

Superpi - a very simple, single-threaded benchmark that just calculates Pi to the number of digits specified. It's useless for comparing multi-core performance, obviously, and not that great for most stability testing, but it can be a useful tool nontheless.

Y-Cruncher - this is a multi-threaded tool which can be used for benchmarking and/or stress testing. It calculates Pi and other constants, some of the larger calculations will require a lot of RAM and therefore there's even a "swap mode" to enable usage of one or several storage devices as swap space. Thanks to DaveLembke for the recommendation.

wPrime - another simple tool which calculates square roots. This is multithreaded so it can be a good indicator of raw CPU/RAM performance as well as a simple stability test.

MaxxMem2 - this is a very small and simple memory benchmark which gives you scores for copy, read, write, and latency. I sometimes get an error on launching this, not sure if it's because I have more RAM than it's expecting, or that I'm on Windows 10 which isn't officially supported, but it works fine the second time I launch it - worth mentioning in case anyone else runs into this.

MaxxMem2 Multi - very similar to the above but it seems to use multiple channels.

AIDA64 - formerly Lavalys Everest, this is a shareware product that gives you a whole lot of information about your PC - specs, hardware monitoring, sofwtare and so forth - but also has a great benchmark utility under Tools - Cache and Memory Benchmark. Some readings aren't available in the trial version but it's still a very useful benchmark.

Storage

CrystalDiskMark - one of my favourite disk benchmarks, before I go on I'll strongly advise downloading the portable edition (zip) and extracting the files to run from there - the full installer version has at some points contained other programs bundled with it, this isn't true for all versions but the portable edition avoids any risk of this. CrystalDiskMark is a good test for any kind of storage, whether it's a HDD, SSD, SSHD, or even a flash drive. There are options to run each test 1-9 times, with data of 50MB-32GB - the default option of 5 passes with 1GB of data should be fine for most uses, but if you're benchmarking slower flash drives or HDDs you may want to reduce this to say, 3 x 500MB, as the test won't take as long.

ATTO - often used by manufacturers along with IOMeter to get their advertised read/write speeds, I've linked to Techpowerup! rather than the ATTO website because I can't actually get a download link from there. Techpowerup is a safe site to get this from at the time of writing (I download tools from there regularly) but as always please exercise caution as it's not direct from the developer's website. ATTO's interface isn't the prettiest as it's quite an old tool, but the results are still very useful.

Anvil Storage Utilities - anoither great benchmark especially for SSDs, unfortunately there's no manufacturer's download link and a lot of versions across the web have expiry dates and/or are older versions. As above, please exercise caution when downloading, I trust Gugu3D to be a reputable provider but I can't guarantee this.

AS-SSD - another great utility, the website is in German and you may have to change the language when you open AS-SSD for the first time. Download link is right at the bottom of the linked page.

HD TUNE - this is basically just for HDDs, I would not recommend running this on an SSD. HD Tune pro is paid software and still being developed, however the older 2.55 version is free on their download page. There's a benchmark with a graph (very useful for diagnostics too, if you see a very spiky graph it's usually an indicator that soemthing's wrong) and an error scanner too, to check for bad sectors. HD Tune also displays SMART info which can be useful for diagnostics.

Thought it might be a great reference to have all Professor MESSERS' TROUBLESHOOTING links in the one place.......

Troubleshooting Basics

Troubleshooting Motherboards

Troubleshooting CPUs

Troubleshooting Memory

Troubleshooting Bios

Troubleshooting Computer Power

Troubleshooting Adapter Cards

Troubleshooting Cooling Systems

Troubleshooting Printers and Scanners


Troubleshooting Laptops and Portable Devices

Troubleshooting Network Connections


Troubleshooting Security Systems


The video regarding Computer Power may have to be deleted from the list for safety purposes as it does instruct how to test the PSU using a multimeter....I'll leave that up to Nathan or the moderators.



Yeay, Prof Messer, top bloke!

• Power the system down. This is of utmost importance. Removing components with the power on WILL destroy your motherboard, if you're lucky only that. Guaranteed.
  
  
• Keep the system plugged in. Off, but plugged in. Electro-Static Discharge (ESD) is static electricity, and we accumulate this every day. However, this is murder to machines. Touching the case when opened will cause ESD to discharge. However, plugging it in with the power off will ground the machine, and the ESD will go safely into the wall.
  
  
• Touch the inside of the CHASSIS before working. Anywhere inside the PC where there is bare sheet metal will do. This will ground the chassis before you do any work, and prevent ESD problems. Another good method of putting you in the clear is anti-static gloves - they're cheap ($5 USD near where I live) and almost any PC store should carry them.
  
  
• Do not HOLD hardware with connecter pins by the pins with your bare HAND. This includes video cards, network adapters, memory and other items with gold-colored pins arrayed in a straight line. Touching them with bare hands can destroy the hardware. However, you should be OK if you brought the hardware over to the machine safely, ground yourself by touching the chassis again, and then handling it with your bare hands. After all, how else are you going to get it in there?
  
  
• Look for screws when removing hardware. NEVER rip a chip or board out of a PC; most of them are screwed in, and the ones that aren't are memory chips held in by tabs (or CPU colling units, which appear to be held on by God's grace alone but are similar to "snap-on" connections). This may seem LIKE a no-brainer, but many people have done just that: rip a board right out (destroying it, of course).
  
  
• If it doesn't fit, DO NOT "make it" fit. Sometimes a memory chip is a tight fit, and some PCI cards are very resistant, but if you are not sure that this is the case, stop work immediately. You will never force a AGP video card into a PCI slot. You cannot force a memory chip into anything but the memory slot. If it doesn't fit, it doesn't go there. Again, may seem like a no-brainer, but some of the things I've seen people do frighten me...
  
  
• If you are trying to troubleshoot, change out only one item at a time. This way, you will know immediately if something is wrong. Test memory one chip at a time. Don't change the memory and the motherboard at the same time; if one is faulty, you won't know which one unless you keep your patience and test one item at a time.
  
  
• On difficult problems, keep aspirin nearby. This may not seem like a necessity, but it is. Frustrating problems will give you a migraine, and it's good to keep that Tylenol at hand.

Error:

An unexpected error occurred while running the Flash application.
Please reboot and try again.

If the error continues, please contact TECHNICAL help.

Application Error Return: 0x00000610
Windows Error Return: 0x00000002

Solution:
The following information is from:
http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=insp_bios&thread.id=42558
by " Dan David"
Quote

Click the Start button, and then click Run.
The Run window appears.
In the text box type regedit, then press the <Enter> key.
The Registry Editor window appears.

NOTE: The User Account Control window may appear. If so, click Continue.


Double-click the folder HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE to expand its contents.
Double-click the folder SYSTEM to expand its contents.
Double-click the folder ControlSet001 to expand its contents.
Double-click the folder Services to expand its contents.
Right-click the DELLBIOS folder and select Delete.
Close all windows and restart the computer for the changes to take effect.
Run the BIOS installer to flash the BIOS.

OK I thought since I have done this myself many times before I would explain to PEOPLE from my own personal point of view on how it's done .........


Introduction: Make sure you have everything you need, starting with anti-static-wrist STRAP, some Philips non-magnetic screwdrivers, and your graphics card .

Step 1 : Before you install the card you have to know where it goes, now because most people in this day and age have PCI-E cards I will focus on them.... look carefully at image 1 , you will notice i have highlighted a part in green , that part is the port you will be installing your graphics card today

Once you have carefully looked at the image 1, you should then open up your computer now, depending on what brand your computer is, it should be fairly simple, at the back of your computer, you should notice some screws or a catch of some kind, unscrew the screws, or flick the catch and gently slide off the side panel , NOTE: Always be sure that your computer is unplugged from the mains the slightest shock could hurt you and your computer.

Now you have looked at the image carefully, it's time to get a good look at your graphics card. I find studying it before you insert it will achieve optimal results without messing anything up, now I have labelled the card for good measure, you will see I have labelled what inserts into the PCI-E bus , and the main power connector insert as well as the power cable head itself, take a while to familiarize yourself with this image.



Now you have looked and studied both IMAGES, you are ready to insert the card into your computer.

Now make sure you have your anti-static wrist strap on and make sure you're grounded, take the card out of the box, and gently insert into your PCI-Express slot, now be careful not to touch any other components in your computer, there is a part at the end of the card that should hook in first, then you should hear a click to know it's in nice and firm, now find the 4 pin power connector show in the 2nd image, and plug it into the power socket also shown in the 2nd image. Once you have done that, screw the card in look at the image i have shown you, this person is screwing in his card, do the same thing.



Now once you have done that shut your CASE back up, plug your computer back into the mains, plug your TV out socket in and you're set to go, as soon as you have installed it, insert the disc and install your drivers there should be a CD that came with the card.

Thanks for reading , I did take my time to write this all up myself and I also uploaded all the images myself , so I hope this helps.

Tony

• Turn off any download accelerators

• While installing drivers turn off all Antivirus and Antispyware software