The Breakroom > The Water Cooler

Lightning strike

<< < (3/3)

hermetic:
I have been building and repairing computers for a looong time, although I don't do it commercially any more. One of the things we used to often see in lightning damaged modem cards, was a tiny pinhole in one or more of the chips where they had literally blown out. From the electrical point of view, voltage surge can be induced into nearby power and telephone lines, especially overhead lines, without a direct strike, and all methods of surge protection only work some of the time! Having your computer equipment plugged into a good quality surge protected power bank will help, and cetainly the adsl routers do not seem to be as sensitive, or at least are better protected (maybe) from phone line surges. Our shop used to fill up with "no internet" computers after every thunder storm.
Phil

naffsharpe (Nathan):
Hello to all, today I took delivery of the Dell OptiPlex . It looks o/k on unboxing but I've yet to run it into a monitor . I have no doubt or worries about it's abilities but would like some help with upgrading it's memory from 4Gb to 16Gb. I've never worked on a Dell PC before and have had my previous Dell laptop upgraded by a third party . This machine has 4 memory slots, each has one white and one black tagged slot, so operating in pairs . The current memory has one 2Gb stick in each of the white tagged slots . If I buy 4 Gb sticks do they need to be matched pairs and do I fit them as currently fitted memory ie , one of each matched pair into "White" and each of the other matched pair into "Black" or do I not need to worry about matched pairs ? Nathan.

russ57:
I'd be fairly happy not to worry about matched pairs.



Russ

naffsharpe (Nathan):
Hello all, from a very windy and wet North Wales ! Today has not been an" outside" day so I finally got to grips with this replacement PC. It obviously works as I'm posting this from it and I have to say I'm very pleased with it. For the first time in many years I have an uncluttered computer ! I've resisted (so far) putting too much on it but I'm sure that will change. Memory has been brought up to 16Gb to make the most of a 64bit O/S . As Russ suggested , matching of modules was not required although I did fit 4 x 4 Gb from the same manufacturer. I pulled out 2 x 2Gb from differing manufacturers , 1 Samsung and 1 HP , so were do Dell PC's gain a reputation for being "fussy" about  RAM ? Anyway it's working well and I'm happy . To aid with future protection against lightning strikes I'm looking at "blitzortung.org" on a regular basis, surge protection has been added to the phone socket (thanks to a fellow forum member on Model Engineer ) and we are in the habit of unplugging at night, so hopefully kit will last longer. I'm very happy to tout Morgan Computers to any UK member. As they had accepted my order for a win 10  64 bit machine before realising they'd run out , they , at their cost had a win 7 64 bit upgraded for me. I gain a larger HDD and a newer machine as checked using Dell's service tag and for the same price , their memory was a bit pricy so I ordered that from elsewhere. My next job is to find a decent low latency external sound card and a slimline PCI soundcard. If I have those in stock then I've covered my options for audio should I lose onboard sound and I'll still have the option of fitting a PCI ethernet card. All in all I'm a happy bunny tonight . I'm staying indoors tonight incase any bunny hunters are around!! Nathan.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page