Month: September 2018

Asus ROG G751JY

About three years ago my laptop was not functioning well with the gaming I was doing and I decided if I was going to keep up with my grandsons – gaming with them online – I was going to have to invest in a better computer. After doing fairly extensive research on the options available, I selected the highly recommended Asus ROG model G751JY. I had intended to buy it from Asus directly, but found a much better price on Amazon and so bought it there.

I was very pleased with it and enjoyed using it, especially for gaming. It served me well in Minecraft, Civ V, World of Tanks, World of Warships, along with some other Steam games.

There was just one nagging issue – the internal Intel Wi-Fi adapter. It would just out of the blue drop connection. Through experimentation, I found two things that helped. One was to use the 2.4 instead of 5.0 connection to my network. Apparently my normal location of use of the laptop was just far enough away from the router that it did not always get a full-power signal. That was a minor adjustment, though I wished I had the faster connection. The second thing was it seemed to require nearly continuous driver updates, so I regularly checked and updated. Even so, it was very inconsistent. It was frustrating enough that I finally bought a USB Wi-Fi adapter (Linksys WUSB6300) and that worked very well, although sometimes the 5.0 connection still did not have full power.

Overall, for the time I had it, I liked it. The saga of its demise will be detailed in future posts.

 

Odd Coincidence

The day I brought home the desktop with the new Windows key, when setting the computer up again, I had some trouble with the keyboard connector, but eventually got it connected. Unfortunately, everything else worked fine, but the keyboard was unresponsive. I tried disconnecting and reconnecting. I tried rebooting, all to no avail. Result: a trip to the local Staples store to buy a new, cheapest they had, keyboard.

Over all the years of using computers (since the early 1980s) this is the first time a keyboard has failed. Weird coincidence of it malfunctioning then, but I’m glad to now have a USB connected keyboard and it works fine for our purposes.

Most Recent Challenge

The most recent problem had to do with the Windows 10 license. The desktop suddenly started to report the license was about to expire. Interestingly, this is the second time this message showed up on this computer. The first time was several years ago, not long after I upgraded from Windows 7 to 10 taking advantage of the free upgrade Microsoft offered when it was first released. I won’t go into detail right now about the disaster I created soon after upgrading that totally crashed the operating system, but I had to have the shop do a complete reinstall because the reset option did not work for me. A few months later, the license message started to appear so I ended up having to take it in again to get that fixed. I do not know what they did to fix it, but presume they had communication with the Microsoft license folks to get it corrected.

Just a few weeks ago now, when the message appeared again, I called the shop and took it in again. The odd part about it this time was I noticed that it now showed I had Windows 10 Pro when I only had the Home version before. It also said the Pro was installed in early May and I know I did not do that. The guys at the shop were baffled by how that could happen also. After they did what they could to find the original license or product key unsuccessfully, they told me it was actually the Enterprise Pro version. How that got installed is a complete mystery to me. The only solution this time was to buy a completely new key, so I had them do that and activate it. Since then it is now functioning normally again.

What I have learned through this process is there is a difference between a product key and digital license. I asked the shop to give me the new key so I would have it if needed. They did so and they called it the Windows 10 Key. In the Windows 10 Settings it says the product was activated with a digital license. I am hoping never to have to use the key again, but given the strange happenings of late, I’m not betting on that.

Unusual Number of Problems

The last six months or so have been more eventful with regard to computers than the previous couple of years – or any similar time span in the past I can remember, for that matter.

(Just as general background for context, in the past ten years or so I’ve generally had two computers active in the household – a desktop and a laptop.)

Earlier this year the problems started with a motherboard fan problem on the desktop. On boot up, it kept showing an error message reporting a malfunctioning motherboard fan. Not ever having encountered this problem before, I was not sure what to do about it, so I went online to see what that error might mean and possible solutions. There were several options for solutions, but because of the age of the computer I jumped to a conclusion (listed as one of the solutions) and suspected the fan had burned out and needed to be replaced, so called the local computer repair shop I have come to trust (and rely on) and they said to bring it in. Later that same day I checked in with them to see if the fan had been replaced and, to my embarrassment, they said the only problem was dust had accumulated on the fan. It was working fine after they simply cleaned out all the dust inside the computer box. Had I just opened up the box and cleaned out the dust I would easily have solved the problem myself, but I didn’t even think to do that first (even though it was one of the solutions suggested online!). The good news in this case – the shop has a policy of not charging anything for cleaning out computers, so it cost me nothing but my time and some inconvenience of not having the primary computer available for a day or two.

Lesson learned: failure to do the obvious can cost time and anxiety, if not money.

Unrelated lesson learned: While talking with shop guys about the fan issues, I also complained that I was not able to get my relatively new LCD monitor to work with a MIDI connection, it only worked with the standard connection. They said that it should work because there was nothing incompatible. Later when reconnecting the computer to get it up and running again at home, I discovered I had been plugging the MIDI monitor connector to the sound card instead of the video card! I had previously not noticed there were two MIDI slots on the back of the computer. Anyway, the monitor now works fine with the best resolution via MIDI connection. Once again lesson learned was haste means missing obvious things.

In the next few posts, I intend to talk about the other recent problems I alluded to above.