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[Rose]

I went down to their distribution center / showroom today and just asked. They told me that when you buy a new computer from them, the first time you start Windows, you can choose your language. The guy was confident that the version of windows they ship everything with comes with all the standard European languages, though you can only choose once and then you can't change it later. If I get it home and that turns out not to be the case, I can return it, no questions asked.

That's actually wrong.

Unless their windows is drastically different from my copy of windows 8, you can add as many languages you want, and switch between them with just a restart.

At least, I was able to change my windows to hindi for a test.

[ancistrus]

I have posted about this before; long story short, laptop crashes with weird graphical issues when playing videogames. I thought this was all about graphics, but since then I was able to reduce the crashes by disabling hardware 3D sound acceleration in said games.
The thing is, this was accomplished purely by trial/error method and I had no idea what I was doing. Can someone actually tell me if it at least makes some sense? Hardware is really not my area.

[Rose]

Most likely borked graphics card. Once the ram starts to fail in a card, you get things like giant spikes on things, textures covered in rainbow confetti, etc. Also crashes.
And since Windows uses the card for everything, it effects the desktop too.

[Sensei]

Sounds like your graphics card alright. I don't suppose you're under warranty?

[Gamerlord]

Okay guys, I could really use some help here; it's the damn d3dx9_41.dll error. However, for some reason the dxwebsetup DirectX End-User Runtime Web Installer that Microsoft says will fix this doesn't work. It doesn't even install right. So if any of you have some idea of how to remedy this, please let me know!

[Thief^]

We need more information. What do you mean by "Doesn't install right"?

[Gamerlord]

Basically I run it, it does the 'give permission thing' (FYI this is... Windows 7 I think), I agree to the software license and then it goes to 'Installing Components' 'Initialising' and then a pop up occurs that says

Setup could not download the file. Please retry later or check network connection.

It then closes and the installer says 'Installation End' 'Installation Failed' and that's it.

[Thief^]

Do you have a 3rd-party firewall installed?

[Gamerlord]

Not sure, don't think so.

[Thief^]

On the page: http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=35
Under: "Additional information"
There's this:

The DirectX End-User Runtimes installer contains all of the components installed by the Web Installer in a single package and is recommended for those users that do not have an Internet connection during installation."

Given that it's having trouble connecting to the internet during the install, could you try this "offline" version?

[Gamerlord]

Okay, giving it a shot now, thanks.

EDIT: Where do I install the files? Just anywhere?

[Thief^]

I suspect it just wants a temporary location to extract to while it's working. The files will actually install into the windows system folder.

[Gamerlord]

It's working now, thanks mate!

EDIT: YES NOW CRUSADER KINGS II IS WORKING.

[Sinistar]

So,

Display driver amdkmdap stopped responding and has successfully recovered.

This is the message I've occasionally been getting during the past week. Completely random at first, happened only once while playing The Witcher 1 but I've played it many more hours before and after this message without problems so I just assumed it was something random.

But lately this kept popping up while playing Dawn of War 2. How and what usually happens is my screen goes black and if I ctrl+alt+del it takes a long time and after that usually I manage to get to task manager and desktop where this message pops up. If I try to return to the game it just tilts completely (black screen, any sort of sound that was playing goes into a crazy, short loop) and hard boot is required. Happened a few times game just tilted instantly, couldn't even reach desktop.

Now, I'm sorta familiar with this tilting as I've been having GPU over-heating problems for the last couple of months (and such exact tilts happened then) so I just assumed this has to do with over-heating again... only the GPU didn't feel that hot to touch and °C wasn't that high according to SpeedFan. And all that "amdkmdap" things was new too.
But just few moments ago it crashed again while trying to run Salem... which is a Java-client-based MMO, so not really GPU intensive.

I'll go clean install GPU drivers as this is one of the suggestions I could find on the net, but tell me - how big is the possibility my GPU is irreversibly broken after all? With all that overheating I was just waiting for something like this to happens... 

edit:
Speaking of broken GPU - say I'm in the market for a new one. Any useful sites for comparing different GPUs? Quick search tells me there seems to be a lot of them but are there any that really stand out or it just doesn't matter?

Also - my current GPU is ATI HD4870 with 512MB DDR5. It served me great for what I needed her. Say I'd like to just have something like that, but newer. Any cheap new GPU out there that'd offer the same power as this years old one? I haven't really been paying attention what's going on on GPU market at all for last few years, but I mean, technology probably advanced forward enough I could get just cheaper HD4870 equivalent these days... right?

Well, I'm open to suggestions.

[Thief^]

Looking at raw numbers, the 4870 is a very powerful card for the era, at 1200 GFlops processing power. For AMD, the Radeon R7 250X is much the same power (1280 GFlops). Out of older cards, you'd be looking at a Radeon HD 7770 (also 1280 GFlops) or above.

If you were looking at nVidia, a 750 Ti is 1306 GFlops of processing power, as well as being more power/heat efficient than the other 700s (it's actually a trial of the Maxwell architecture used in the 900 series, rather than the Kepler architecture used in the rest of the 700s) making it a very quiet card.