The please Help me, I am an idiot and know nothing about tech! Thread

Okay this site is a really good place to ask tech question as people are very friendly and some of you seem to know a lot.  Still there are those of us who are complete morons and only know the very basic about drivers or how our Bluray players work and that has led to a lot of threads that ask tech related questions popping up in this section.

I decided to start an all purpose tech questions and answers thread, so if you have a question about your tech or maybe you have found a fix for something post it here.

I 'll start with a question.

Hey I have a PC that has a Geforce GT 610 with the latest drivers and it works great for pretty much everything except two games and those are the original Mass Effect and Mass Effect 3. Strangely enough it has no problems with Mass Effect 2.

The problem with Mass Effect is that some times, characters will disappear, the game will lock up and crash my whole system, sometimes my characters will be nothing but big black shadows(How ever this problem seems to fix it's self whenever I start a new mission), early on in the game when you are looking at the Citedal and talking about how big it is the game will crash in mid conversation, and worst of all on missions where Theaser Mawls attack the Mako the Mawls will always be invisible.

On Mass Effect 3 the problem is that some times characters will vanish and it will sometimes not let me hit buttons so I can interact with objects or talk to people that I need to in order to continue the mission. I will be standing right beside them and it will just not show the object or person as having the option to interact with it.

I have checked out everything else on my computer and it seems to be fine, the games have the latest patches and I have all the latest drivers. It seems to be a problem with the graphics card. I don't know if it is the drivers or what but something is screwy here and I have never had any problems with either of these games on my old computers.

If anyone here has come across this problem before and knows how to fix it I would be grateful if you would tell me how you did it.

Thank you for your time.

Oh and if windows 7 is running slow for you check out this video I made, it fixed the problem for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQIyvP--l2o

Do you want to mod your Mass Effect saves on the 360?  Here is how you do that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzIDwNm8_fA

Hope this helps someone:)

Sorry, I didn't know there was a movie with that title.

Sorry for the confusion.

I think it's best if you go sit in the corner for a while until you've learned your lesson.

Well I changed the thread title, does that count for anything?

NO.  Think about what you've done!  The lives you've hurt, the feelings you've caused, the pain you've dealt!  Only then can you atone.

Ouch, I guess I never thought about it like that.

I am a very bad person.

We all make mistakes, I can think of at least 2 worse people who have, at one point, existed.

That could have been asked in The New Thread Thread before making the thread.

Okay my computer has started doing something really weird and I can't find any answers on tech support sites so this is my last hope.

I have a bluray burner drive on my windows seven computer and it has always worked fine but lately something weird is happening.  It burns CDs and dvds just fine and it still reads Bluray discs without a problem but for some reason no matter what program I use it refuses to burn data to bluray discs.  

Now normally I would think the burning lazer died or something but what is happening is that it is burning data to the discs and when I take them out I can see where they have been burnt but for some reason the computer is just giving up and refusing to burn the final step onto the discs so they can be read by a computer.  It just gives up and says an error happened as soon as it tries to close the discs and leave me with a disc that has data on it but it can't be read by anything.

As I said this happens no matter what program or type of disc I use, I have tried three different types of discs that have never given me problems before and none of them work.

I have tried reinstalling the drive, updating the drivers, updating windows 7, and reinstalling all my burning software but nothing works.  Even using the data burning program that is built into windows and never lets me down doesn't work.

This has been going on for more then a month and I am out of ideas and it is a big problem for me since my computer is my DVR and most of my blank discs are bluray discs and I don't have the money to buy new discs or a USB hard drive right now.  My hard drive is starting to fill up because I have no way to get video files off of it.

If anyone has any idea what is going on and can help me I would be very grateful.

Thank you for your time.

It's an Asus 12x BDR DL drive.  I have tried three different brands and my firmware is up today according to their website.  I even tried installing old drivers on it.

I have used both windows built in burner and all of my software and I get the same message.  The disc burns to the point where windows tells me "Finishing disc" and on the programs it says "Writing lead out" and then I always get the message "Unable to burn disc" and the drive just stops.

To tell the truth after doing some more research I think that it may just be that the burning lazer has died on my drive and I just have to save up for another one.  this drive has served me for four years or so without a problem so it's not the drive's fault if that is the case, I just have to save up for a new drive.

I just find it strange that it doesn't fail until writing the lead out.  Then again I am not an expert so maybe the drive has to do something different when burning that that is what is failing.

Any way I am going to try hooking it up to my dad's computer tomorrow and that should tell me if it is the drive or windows.  I feel kind of stupid for not thinking of that a month ago.

Thanks for the help.

"Laser."

After spending a month doing everything I could think of to fix this problem including unpluging and replugging the drive and all sorts of other things today I was taking the drive out in order to plug it into my dad's computer tonight and test it there when it slipped out of my hands and fell on the floor.

So I decided to plug the drive back in to see if it had been damaged and right away it started working good as new, I have no idea why.  I have plugged it into the same cables several times but that didn't fix the problem before so I can only conclude that dropping the drive on the floor somehow fixed it???!

I have no idea why it is working now but I will take it.

Thanks for all of your help.

Davnes007 said:

It's possible that the 'eye' wasn't able to move far enough to burn the entire disc properly, and dropping it somehow moved something back into the right place (or out of the wrong place).

:)

 I'll take that, it makes about as much sense as anything else.

I didn't think of building a time machine and having the Fonz try to fix it, but I really should have.

Actually I just had a similar experience with my record player.  It wasn't sending any audio out of the right channel at all.  It's a nice record player with fantastic sound so I decided it was worth getting fixed.  So I drove to an audio repair shop that was over an hour from where I live to get it repaired.  I soon received a call with them saying that there was nothing wrong with it and that it was fine.  I didn't believe them, but when I got it home lo and behold it worked.  I guess something about riding in the car for bumped something back in place or something.  I wish I would have known that was all it took I would have only driven around the block and not put down a 30 dollar deposit at the shop!

Ouch!

Yeah at least I am not out any money.

Tech is weird.

Well it looks like I spoke too soon when I said that I had fixed my Bluray drive, now it is not even reading Bluray discs let alone writing to them. I guess I am going to have to replace the drive. The strange thing is Windows is now displaying an icon on top of my drive in My Computer that I have never seen before. If anyone can fill me in on what this icon means it would be a big help. My bluray drive on my computer stopped working and the only information Windows will give me on what has gone wrong is this icon. I am pretty sure i will have to replace the drive but I would love to know what the picture of a photo in front of the name of the drive is supposed to tell me. I have looked all over for a guide to icons in windows 7 online but have come up with nothing. It would just be nice to knw what has gone wrong this time is all.

I clean mine ever couple of months but I will give it a go at this point.  I am pretty sure the drive is dead.

Still I would love to know what that icon of a photo means, the strange thing is Microsoft tech support doesn't even seem to be able to tell me what it is supposed to mean.

Windows, so confusing even the people who built it don't understand it! :)