random PC tips

Finally. No more ringing in my ears! I had a really bad case of coil whine with my computer. In the end I fixed it just by tweaking the BIOS! The coil whine was at it's worst when the PC was idling or under a light load.  Coil whine is a high-pitched sound that is produced by coils resonating at a high frequency. It is really hard to sense where exactly it's coming from. This is because humans cannot sense direction for high-pitched sounds. At first I thought it was my graphics adapter. So I bought a new used one. But the ringing was still there after the upgrade. Next up, I suspected my PSU was the culprit. So I changed the power supply to a newer 80 Plus Platinum model. I hate changing the PSU. And it didn't help. So it looked like my motherboard was the cause. It's an older ASUS motherboard, P8H67-V.  After googling around a bit, I found people talking about ASUS motherboards and coil whine when power-saving features are on in the BIOS . The so-called "C-state...

I know it's hard to believe, but sometimes the restart process of your PC is too fast. If you are having a hard time getting to BIOS settings, check these tips out. In my case, I needed to enable the Intel Virtualization technology in order to use Oracle Virtualbox VM. 1) Make sure all your connected monitors are on. In my case, the BIOS image shows on my TV and not my computer monitor. So if you use multiple monitors, turn them all on! 2) Restart windows 3) Press DELETE key when you see the ASUS logo on any monitor 4) If that doesn't work, keep hitting the DELETE key during the restart even if you don't see it. 5) If even that doesn't work, try attaching the keyboard to another USB port on your computer. 6) The last option is to trying with another keyboard. Good luck!

I was bummed to find out that there was no USB boot option on my K8N motherboard BIOS. Hoping that a BIOS update would give me that option, I started to figure out what to do. I downloaded the latest BIOS version from the ASUS K8N pages . (download -> select your OS -> BIOS -> Bios version 1011). The version 1011 was released in 2006, so I figure that will be the last version they will release. Then I got the Asus Update program for Win XP, from softpedia . First, I saved the current BIOS for backup reasons. I selected "Save current BIOS to file" and clicked Next, chose a folder and saved it as "oldBIOS.rom". Then I updated the BIOS with "Update BIOS from file". I chose the new BIOS rom file "1011.rom" I downloaded earlier.   The BIOS Flash window. After a short while the BIOS flashing window appeared, with info on my current BIOS version and the one I was updating into. I figured it would be safer to clear the CMOS checksum t...