u/Cojaro

Basically title. My shifter squeaks pretty badly. It's kind of a rubber-on-rubber squeak and is easily reproducible.

I don't want to go over everything I did but the short of it is that my computer was hanging ever 10 seconds pretty consistently. No recent changes so hard to pin down. Deleted or disabled a lot of services to no avail. Swapped to a new drive (disk cloning) to no avail. Tried all the usual command line prompts to no avail (DISM, CHKDSK, SFC, etc) to no avail.

Finally gave up trying to preserve anything and tried to do a clean install of Windows 11. Made a bootable USB to do the install and during install (I was away putting the kid to bed) it stopped at the BIOS UEFI and stopped doing anything. I tried booting to Usb and to the new Windows partition on the disk and for both instances it just immediately defaults to BIOS UEFI. I'm at a loss what to do. Not even sure if I can get anything installed if something is corrupted beyond repair.

Edit: computer was built by me in 2021 with all new components and has been running flawlessly until this.

I've encountered this issue twice now (at least) and it makes me wonder if the drive is dying.

It's an NVMe drive with my Steam games on it. I have 4 total drives (3 NVME and 1 HDD) and this is the only drive affected.

Here's how it usually plays out: I try to play a game. The game gets stuck during loading. I try to verify files and it fails because, surprise surprise, the drive is somehow in read-only. It's viewable and explore-able in File Explorer, but I cannot make changes to it. At this point, CrystalDiskInfo won't recognize the drive and chkdsk says the file system is RAW. After a restart of the computer, CDI will see the drive and chkdsk says the file system is NTFS.

Is my drive dying?

Self-explanatory title.

My PSU also has a fan plug that plugs into the motherboard (440LX). Can I use that to power the fan on the CPU heatsink? The original CPU came with a fanless heatsink.

Can I swap my PII-233's fanless heatsink to my "new" PII-333 or Celeron 400 without worry re: heat dissipation?

All at 800x600, 16-bit for consistency. Running on original 15GB HDD which I assume is 5,400rpm.

P2-233 (stock)

32MB RAM (stock)

STB Velocity 128 4MB (stock)

3DMark99 - 1200/2289 CPU

3DMark00 - DNF

3DMark01 - DNF

Upgraded to 256MB RAM

3DMark99 - 1235/2318 CPU (wash)

3DMark00 - 235

3DMark01 - DNF

Upgraded to ATi Rage 128 Pro 32MB

3DMark99 - 1945/2314 CPU (improvement)

3DMark00 - 816 (improvement)

3DMark01 - 295

Next upgrade is either a Celeron 400 MHz (the fastest my Slot 1 mobo can support on current BIOS version) or a P2 333 MHz.

I have no clue if these scores are any good. The Sims seems to run smoother, as does SC3kU.

If so, where can I find them and download them safely? I've got Sims 1 on a Windows 98 retro build.

Basically the title. I have an all original Gateway G6-233. When I have the CD Drive set to Mode 2, Master, the OS and BIOS cannot see it, but it will open upon pressing the open button. However, when I switch to Mode 1, Master, the OS and BIOS do detect the drive but pressing the open button does nothing.

The CD Drive is on its own IDE bus, FWIW, so there shouldn't be any Master/Slave conflicts. Maybe I should just set it to CSEL? I'm kind of at a loss for what to do aside from finding and trying a completely different CD Drive.

Update: File>Eject will open the CD tray, it's just that the button to do that will no longer open it. Strange.

It's in perfect condition. My Win11 machine has more dust inside! It appears to be completely original, too. Not sure about the exact specs as I don't have a monitor to plug it into. GPU, 1 RAM stick, sound card, modem, and some sort of phone line card in the ISA slot. 15.3GB HDD installed. Allegedly boots fine and the caps don't have any perceptible bulging.

Any known issues? Any decent upgrade paths? The most intensive games I anticipate playing is Sims 1 or MoH: Allied Assault. Other than that, just non-3D games for me and the kiddo.