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[ShoesandHats]

About a week ago during a Skype call with some friends, I jokingly tapped the left side of my headset against my desk (or with my finger, I can't exactly remember). The next time I put it on, I noticed a distinct difference in the audio playing from the left side. Not super noticeable, but it's obvious enough to be annoying. This is a pretty good headset, and it's been holding strong after a couple years of being accidentally dropped on the floor, so I'm not sure why such relatively light treatment made such an impact on audio quality. Is there any solution that doesn't involve buying a new one or opening the thing up and messing with the wiring or whatever?

[wierd]

Sounds like the kind of issue you saw in old headphones from the 80s!!

Those had this kind of "plastic blister bubble" over the speaker coil system, with the foam over the top of that.  If this bubble got scrunched, it would get deformed, and the audio quality went all to shit.

Spoiler: Looks like this (click to show/hide)

If that's what you have, then you need to try to un-deform the bubble. It will probably never sound the same again, but you can get some of the range back by "sucking" on the blister, to pop it back into shape. Just don't pop it!

[ShoesandHats]

Do any newer ones use them? I have a Corsair Vengeance 1500 Dolby 7.1, if that helps.

[gimlet]

Just something quick to check, sorry if it's blatantly obvious:  But check if the cord attachment to the headphones is the plugin kind, if it is try reseating it - I've had a couple headphones with cords like that. (And it's damn handy, 90% of the time when my headphones break it's 'cause something went wrong with the cord, being able to just plug in a replacement without all kinds of soldering is SO handy). I had that happen on a pair a few months ago, music and effects sounded OK but voices sounded a bit weird, and it was because the plug had pulled out a little bit from the headphones.   Also do the same with the other end of the cable -unplug it from the computer and plug it back in, can't hurt...

[Sappho]

My mother's computer is slowly dying and I'm not sure exactly what the problem is. There are probably many. She's on a Toshiba laptop, about 3 years old, which I really don't think should be having this much trouble. I don't know if it's a hardware issue or a software one.

In the last few months, it's been chugging slowly to a halt on a regular basis. If I plug in a USB mouse or external hard drive, it can take several minutes to recognize it, even after a fresh restart. In general, it runs so slowly that you can't really do anything with it. She says this morning she couldn't get it to start up at all (after it being fully powered down the night before). She says "I pressed F12 to go into the boot menu and it runs a diagnostic or something, and it said something about a driver error." (She doesn't know anything about computers and I can't be there to look at it myself, but I told her from now on she should write down error messages.)

Right now it's running, albeit horribly slowly. I'm pretty sure she doesn't have much of any excess programs and bloatware and stuff (at least she didn't last time I looked at it, which was long after this problem started.) I know that she has McAfee antivirus, which I would prefer she didn't, but it would be nearly impossible to get rid of at this point since I can't just sit down and clean the whole system out myself. Can anyone suggest what we should do to figure out what the problem is?

I'm going to have her clean out the dust today and see if that helps, but the computer doesn't seem to run terribly hot. Just sloooooow.

EDIT: I just got my hands on the computer and looked through it. I don't see any programs installed that shouldn't be, nothing in startup on msconfig.exe that shouldn't be there. I installed CoreTemp and the temperature hasn't gone over 50 C. I changed her power options so that it hibernates instead of sleeping and told her to shut it down more often. I think the problem may just be that she was leaving it in sleep mode for weeks on end. We're going to try to clean out the dust now. Any ideas or suggestions are welcome, but hopefully it will run a little better now.

[wierd]

She may be reporting a SMART hard disk diagnostic error.  That could be anything from "sectors ready to die" to "seriously, a bunch of sectors have failed totally and I reallocated from the reserve sector track, but i'm dying jim" to "whoa, why you drop me like that bro?" to "dangit man, why you let me get so hot?"

as for sluggishness... Windows PC? they get that way over time. registry get fat and bloated, software leaves little weedy bits behind when uninstalled, browser hijacks leave crap behind, etc.

Usually a fresh reinstall after backing up documents, pictures, and music is what the doctor ordered.

[wierd]

She may be reporting a SMART hard disk diagnostic error.  That could be anything from "sectors ready to die" to "seriously, a bunch of sectors have failed totally and I reallocated from the reserve sector track, but i'm dying jim" to "whoa, why you drop me like that bro?" to "dangit man, why you let me get so hot?"

as for sluggishness... Windows PC? they get that way over time. registry get fat and bloated, software leaves little weedy bits behind when uninstalled, browser hijacks leave crap behind, etc.

Usually a fresh reinstall after backing up documents, pictures, and music is what the doctor ordered.

[Arx]

CCleaner isn't a bad option for some of those either, and probably cheaper than buying another copy of Windows.

[wierd]

Why buy windows?

Laptops usually have the option to create recovery disc sets based off their recovery partition, which puts the thing back at "Factory fresh" (ahem) condition, complete with the same copy of windows it had when you powered it on.

That's still much more fresh than a 3 year old install.

[Thief^]

Windows getting slow over time isn't entirely true. Yes a fresh install is fast, but it's also useless. Once you've installed your critical programs it's just as slow as before.

That said, it's worth checking:
1: Ram use. An older laptop may not have enough ram for modern use, especially if it was cheap when new. If you go over 100% ram use it'll start thrashing the hard-disk, which is never good for performance.
2: Hard-disk health via SMART. This may need to be enabled in the BIOS.
3: overheating/dust as already mentioned.

[Sappho]

Thanks for the suggestions. We tried to open it up to clean out dust, but it was too complicated and I don't have enough time. There is definitely dust in there, BUT it's definitely not overheating.

I told her that the best thing to do would be backup and reinstall, but I don't have time to do it for her. I'm leaving the country tomorrow, hopefully for good this time. She definitely can't handle doing it herself, so I suggested she take it to a computer repair shop and have it cleaned out, both the dust in the case and a fresh copy of Windows. She complains that she can't afford it, but I told her that's the best I can do for her.

It seems the problem is mostly on startup. She says when she restarts, it takes forever to load windows. I told her I've already cleaned everything out of the startup that I could, and she just needs to shut it down more often and probably get a fresh copy of windows.

I thought of RAM use but I'm actually not sure how to check it. How do I do that?

[Arx]

RAM is easy enough - pop open Task Manager and switch to the processes tab. Lower right has RAM percentage, I believe.

[Arx]

RAM is easy enough - pop open Task Manager and switch to the processes tab. Lower right has RAM percentage, I believe.

[Aklyon]

Or the performance tab and look at memory.

[gimlet]

There's only one antivirus installed and active right?   One big cause of windows starting slowdowns is the antivirus programs run some checks (sometimes LONGISH checks) before they let windows start.  And it's only made worse if you have more than one active - windows will start that much slower and after starting the antiviruses can interfere with each other and *really* slow down activities on the pc.