total disaster today, but sorted now (wallet a lot lighter)

[oldpink]

major drama today
running some solar AVI's during a clear spell, all of a sudden I get a network error
laptop not available, thought my wifi had failed so went out to to find the laptop was dead 

brought it in and spent an hour removing the battery checking the memory etc
it was just dead no matter what I tried

as its a 4 year old laptop I wasn't too annoyed, so online to PC world
click & collect a new ASUS i5 with 8gb and 1tb disk drive

picked it up at 5:30 after issues with my card (helps when you use one that has funds to cover the purchase )
90 minutes later I had removed Win8 and installed Win7 and had a working machine

an hour later I had installed all the drivers, and astro software, and an hour to get  EQMod to talk to the mount

20 minutes to get the camera's installed and working

by 9:30 I had a working system and the new PHD sorted and tracking

during this time when I was installing the software my old laptop decided to reboot and come back to life
so I put it out on the rig and went for the moon
got about 45 minuets then it up and died again, looks like a recurrent fault so can't be trusted

so to sum up it cost me £450 to get a new astro laptop setup

but can't complain as the new system is performing better than before and my tracking is a lot better
just a pity the forecast says great but I have loads of whispy cloud spoiling my fun

happy with the upgrade apart from the hole in my CCD camera fund that today's drama cost me

 

 
 

[PhotoGav]

Ouch, ouch, ouch. But great to have a beefy new machine to up the anti!

[Grotemobile]

My desktop just died.It kept shutting down

for no reason,& then shut down for good.

Motherboard gone.Lucky enough i had another

old desktop,so it was a case of making one good

one out of the two.Good old XP.It is using a Athlon

2600 CPU. 2 Gig of ram.Up & running again now.

Desktops are so cheap now days.Will have to

look round for something a bit more up to date.

Cost was nothing.    

Steve

[D4N]

If it died when it was outside it could have overheated in the sun.

Once overheated what can happen is the thermal compound between the CPU and heat shrink becomes brittle and cracks, this then causes localised overheating around the cracks. I've seen this a couple of times, the cure is to remove the heat sink, clean off the old thermal compound (usually a sticky pad on mass produced machines) then replace this with some artic silver.

However it is possible for it to be the GPU that overheated, solution is the same though.

Desktops are cheap... Not really useful for a grab and go setup though!

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[Thalestris24]

major drama today

running some solar AVI's during a clear spell, all of a sudden I get a network error

laptop not available, thought my wifi had failed so went out to to find the laptop was dead 

brought it in and spent an hour removing the battery checking the memory etc

it was just dead no matter what I tried

as its a 4 year old laptop I wasn't too annoyed, so online to PC world

click & collect a new ASUS i5 with 8gb and 1tb disk drive

picked it up at 5:30 after issues with my card (helps when you use one that has funds to cover the purchase )

90 minutes later I had removed Win8 and installed Win7 and had a working machine

an hour later I had installed all the drivers, and astro software, and an hour to get  EQMod to talk to the mount

20 minutes to get the camera's installed and working

by 9:30 I had a working system and the new PHD sorted and tracking

during this time when I was installing the software my old laptop decided to reboot and come back to life

so I put it out on the rig and went for the moon

got about 45 minuets then it up and died again, looks like a recurrent fault so can't be trusted

so to sum up it cost me £450 to get a new astro laptop setup

but can't complain as the new system is performing better than before and my tracking is a lot better

just a pity the forecast says great but I have loads of whispy cloud spoiling my fun

happy with the upgrade apart from the hole in my CCD camera fund that today's drama cost me

Oh dear!

I have to get a laptop so that I can start imaging outside. Have been looking at a Toshiba Satellite but not made a final decision yet. Laptops seem to be designed to fail after a few years... I suppose eventually the battery will die anyway and on their own aren't cheap to replace. I've only ever had PCs before and have got used to good reliability... But I must get out and try imaging al fresco!

Hope your new laptop serves you well!

Louise

[oldpink]

If it died when it was outside it could have overheated in the sun.

wasn't the heat, where it sits is in a shaded area

its working now but the power light is has changed to to an off orange colour from its normal blue

and as its nearly 4 years old and had very heavy use I can't complain

A new laptop was on the cards anyway as I need one for each scope / mount but didn't plan in purchasing it this soon

I also need to upgrade my PC as well, but I'll buy the parts over a few weeks then build it

good thing is I can claim back on Expenses as I work in IT so my PC & laptop are considered "tools of the trade"