QUICK TIPS
We x readers’ computing problems
HARDWARE BIP BIP BIP SQUEEEEEEE
My PC is straight up broke. When I turn it on, it just gives one continuous tone that never stops. The screen stays black. I’ve done all the usual turn-it-on-and-off-again, try-starting-in-Safe-Mode stuff you normally recommend, but nothing. Bin it? Anthony Bellagarde Not necessarily. Your PC may actually be so broke that it wraps all the way round again. All the standard diagnostic noises that the BIOS makes during the power-on self-test are combinations of beeps. There are error codes that will cause the motherboard to beep endlessly, but none that just give a continuous tone. So this is something even more fundamental than that. In the worst case scenario, it’s a short on the motherboard (virtually impossible to locate and fix); in the best case it’s a faulty power supply (around $90 to replace).
Since there’s no way to tell without trying, and since a spare power supply is a handy thing to have lying around for future diagnostic shenanigans, I say you should buy a cheap 600W PSU and try swapping it. But yes, if that doesn’t help, you can bin the PC. Luis Villazon
WINDOWS BOOTING MULTIPLE OSS ALONGSIDE WINDOWS 10
I have a PC with two 500GB internal hard drives connected at all time — one with Windows XP (32-bit) and one with Windows 7 (64-bit). I have this setup because a couple of my old programs will not operate under Windows 7 64-bit. I recently added a third drive with Windows 10 looking to test it out. However, I’ve now hit problems booting XP and 7; unless I physically disconnect the data cables from the latter’s disks, Windows 10 corrupts them somehow and the next time I try to load XP or 7, a message comes up saying that the disk has errors and needs to run CHKDSK. The only way I can run this system without errors is to make sure that I have disconnected the data cables from the other two drives. I have lost so much information from having to run CHKDSK that I have now totally removed the Windows 10 drive from the box. Do you know what could be causing the above problem? Ron Ronlund
This is likely a side-effect caused by Windows 10’s ‘fast startup’ feature, which is usually enabled by default. It works a bit like hibernation did in previous version of Windows, in that it doesn’t perform a regular shutdown when you power off the system. All users are logged off and programs closed, effectively returning Windows 10 to a ‘freshly booted-up state’, and this is then saved as a hibernation file on your OS drive. When you next boot up, Windows loads this hibernation file instead of booting and loading up everything again from scratch.
The problem for those dual-booting is that the above shutdown process presumes you’re going to reboot back into Windows 10. During a normal OS shutdown, hard drives will have their caches flushed and are marked as having properly powered down — things which don’t occur with fast startup enabled. So what’s happening with Ron’s system is that, on booting up Windows XP or 7 after a ‘fast shutdown’, they’re both going, “Hey, this drive wasn’t shut down properly, so I’d better thoroughly check it for errors!”
You can disable fast startup by going into Control Panel and making sure the ‘ View by’ option is set to icons, then click ‘Power Options’ and ‘Choose what the power buttons do’. Next, click ‘Change settings that are currently unavailable’ and finally uncheck the box next to ‘Turn on fast startup (recommended)’ should solve the issue
— at the price of a slower boot time for Windows 10, of course.
If you don’t see the checkbox option, close the Power Options window, press Windows-X and then run ‘Command Prompt (Admin)’. Type powercfg / hibernate on and hit Enter, then walk through the above steps again to disable fast startup. Dan Gardiner
HARDWARE ACCESSING DVDS ON A HYBRID LAPTOP?
I need to install a program from disc on my laptop, which has no disc drive. How do I do this? Claire Hunt
You could pay around $40 for an external slimline DVD drive such as the Samsung SE-208GB, but a simpler option is to convert the DVD to an ISO file on another PC using the free Infrarecorder tool, then transfer that to your laptop. Then follow these steps:
1. Download and install the latest version of Infrarecorder from www. infrarecorder.org — once done, pop your target disc into the DVD drive and close any autoplay dialogue that appears. Launch InfraRecorder from the Start menu and click ‘Read Disc’.
2. Verify your drive is selected under Source, then click ‘…’ next to ‘Image file’ to select a location and give your ISO file a suitably descriptive name. Once done, click ‘Save’ followed by ‘OK’, then wait while the ISO file is created.
3. Once complete, you’ll need to copy your ISO file to your laptop — use a shared folder on your local network or transfer the file using a device such as a USB flash drive. Copy it to a suitable folder on your laptop for easy access.
4. Once transferred to your laptop, simply double-click the ISO file — it’ll automatically be mounted as a virtual disc and will open to show the disc’s contents — simply double-click the setup file to install it to your laptop. Cat Ellis
WINDOWS ANNOYING WINDOWS BACKUP ERROR
I get an ‘0x807800c5’ error when my Dell XPS desktop uses Windows Backup, which came with Windows 10 pre-installed. From what I can gather on the Microsoft support forum, there is no definitive answer — Dell’s own factory Backup software works fine on a daily schedule, but I feel it would be good to have the Windows software working. Mick Saunders
We checked with Mick for the actual error message that accompanied the code — it occurred on any drive he attempted to select for backup and claimed the mounted backup volume was inaccessible. We then discovered that Dell’s Backup and Recovery tool isn’t normally installed on new Windows 10 PCs, but should be compatible on older, upgraded PCs with an update (which was installed on Mick’s PC). It’s possible the Dell tool is conflicting with Windows Backup, in which case, removing it might possibly help, but we were able to verify that Mick can successfully run Windows 10’s other backup tool, File History. We suggested that he pair this with Macrium Reflect Free ( www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx) going forward and he was pleased to report both are working fine. Graham Barlow
EXCEL SERIAL NUMBER KILLER
I’m driving myself crazy trying to get Excel to behave the way I want. I am building a database of long (20-digit) serial numbers, but whenever I enter them, Excel converts them to ‘scientific notation’, like 1.2345E+019. If I force the format of the column to treat the data as numbers, it replaces the last few digits with zeroes! Dean Menton
By default, Excel, or any spreadsheet, attempts to guess the correct format based on the data you enter in the cell. So if you enter just digits, it will treat the result as a number, and if the number is too large to fit in the cell, it will display it using scientific notation. This notation is actually what Excel uses internally to represent numbers with lots of significant digits, and this explains the second problem. Excel can only handle a maximum of 16 significant digits — anything after that is truncated. Some spreadsheets, such as Libre Office, will round the last digit
correctly, but Excel seems to simply truncate them.
Serial numbers aren’t really numbers; they’re just unique identifiers. Plenty of so-called serial numbers contains letters as well and that’s just fine because there aren’t any situations where you need to multiply two serial numbers together or take the square root of a serial number. So, just format the cells as text before you enter the data. Text cells can hold a lot more characters and won’t truncate. You can still sort the rows into ascending order of serial numbers if you need to.
If for some mad reason you need the serial numbers to be treated as actual numbers, you’ll need to split each one into two columns. Enter the number as text initially, then in the next two columns take LEFT(A1,10) and RIGHT(A1,10). This preserves all the significant digits and whenever you need to perform a mathematical operation on the whole serial number, you can multiply the number in column B by 10 billion and add column C to the result. But bear in mind that you’ll be subject to the same limits on significant digits as soon as you do this. Luis Villazon
HARDWARE RECYCLING PHONES
I’m very interested in the Raspberry Pi and Arduino, but it seems that, by the time you’ve invested in the board, a power supply, screen and some kind of data input hardware, you’ve already spent quite a bit. I have a kitchen drawer full of old phones, each of which has its own screen, faster processor and a lot more RAM than a Pi. What’s to stop me taking one of these to bits and interfacing to that? Peter French
Phones aren’t easy to re-use in the way you’re suggesting for a few different reasons; they use a custom circuit board with surface mounted, have machine-soldered components that will be difficult to remove, there’s no general purpose I/O pins, and documentation is very limited. It’s like the difference between buying, say, a Lego Bionicle versus dismantling a Buzz Lightyear toy so that you can reassemble it into something else.
Arduino and Raspberry Pi aren’t really designed to be powerful — they’re designed to be simple. Both are a lot cheaper than buying a phone just to cannibalise it for parts, and a lot simpler than interfacing with a phone even if you have one lying around for free. Home development kits built around phone architectures do exist — the ODROID, for example. But they aren’t any cheaper. Luis Villazon
WINDOWS I HAVE TO START WINDOWS TWICE!
I think I’ve stumbled upon the weirdest thing ever! None of the programs in my Start-up group actually run when I start Windows. But if I disable them, restart Windows, re-enable them and then restart again, they will all load normally... until the next time I restart Windows. What the heck is going on? Why is Microsoft making me jump through these hoops? Steve Proudhorn
This isn’t even the weirdest thing this week. (That trophy goes to the seagull that flew over my house with a 3m length of washing line in its beak and somehow managed to get tangled up in my TV aerial.) The apps in the Start-up section of Task Manager are usually driver configuration utilities and low-level monitors. Most of them need to run with administrator privileges, which they inherit through your own user account privileges when you log in.
But if you have hybrid shutdown enabled (and you likely do, because it’s the default in both Windows 8 and 10), then these apps can fail to elevate their running privileges correctly. Hybrid shutdown closes your user session normally, but saves the current state of the kernel session to disc. This makes it quicker to shut down, but when you start Windows the next time, the fresh user session and the old kernel session woken from hibernation can end up out of sync. Restarting Windows fixes the problem because hybrid shutdown isn’t triggered on a restart, so the kernel session starts afresh that time. Luis Villazon