Flowchart of Diagnosing and Repair

                                  FLOWCHART DIAGNOSING

Eight of the troubleshooting flowcharts for PC hardware from my book "Computer Repair with Diagnostic Flowcharts Third Edition" are excerpted on this site and linked below. The non-active links are for charts that are included in the book but not available online. The Third Edition is 170 pages and includes seventeen flowcharts for troubleshooting PCs plus explanatory text for every decision symbol on every flowchart. The troubleshooting process is the same for an expensive Sony or IBM, or a cheaper eMachines or Acer. Dell and HP (who purchased Compaq) manufacture desktop PC's in a wide range of price points, but you have to go through the same troubleshooting steps for the cheap ones as the expensive ones if you want to correctly identify and repair the failure.

Thin Clients

                                                       THIN CLIENTS                                                                                                    

1. Although the term thin client usually refers to software, it is increasingly used for computers, such as network computers and Net PCs, that are designed to serve as the clients for client/server architectures. A thin client is a network computer without a hard disk drive, whereas a fat client includes a disk drive.

Video Graphics Performance

                                               VIDEO GRAPHICS

High End Video Card Chart

High to Mid Range Video Card Chart

Low to Mid Range Video Card Chart

Low End Video Card Chart

Best Value Video Card Chart

Common Video Card Chart

Direct Compute Video Card Chart

Virtually all current video cards are built with either AMD-sourced or Nvidia-sourced graphics chips.^[2] Most video cards offer various functions such as accelerated rendering of 3Dscenes and 2D graphics, MPEG-2/MPEG-4 decoding, TV output, or the ability to connect multiple monitors (multi-monitor). Video cards also have sound card capabilities to output sound along with the video for connected TVs or monitors with integrated speakers

Comparison between INTEL & AMD Processor

                                                    INTEL Processor                                         

Significantly newer manufacturing process	22 nm	vs	28 nm	A newer manufacturing process allows for a more powerful, yet cooler running processor
Much higher Maximum operating temperature	100 °C	vs	71.3 °C	More than 40% higher Maximum operating temperature
Higher turbo clock speed	2.6 GHz	vs	2.4 GHz	Around 10% higher turbo clock speed
Better PassMark (Single core) score	1,389	vs	881	Around 60% better PassMark (Single core) score
Better PassMark score	3,274	vs	2,517	More than 30% better PassMark score
Slightly better geekbench (64-bit) score	4,720	vs	3,702	More than 25% better geekbench (64-bit) score

                                                     AMD Processor

                                  

Significantly more l2 cache	2 MB	vs	0.5 MB	4x more l2 cache; more data can be stored in the l2 cache for quick access later
Much higher GPU clock speed	800 MHz	vs	200 MHz	4x higher GPU clock speed
Higher clock speed	2 GHz	vs	1.6 GHz	Around 25% higher clock speed
More cores	4	vs	2	Twice as many cores; run more applications at once
Supports trusted computing	Yes	vs	No	Somewhat common; Allows for safer, more reliable computing
Significantly more l2 cache per core	0.5 MB/core	vs	0.25 MB/core	2x more l2 cache per core
Newer	Jul, 2014	vs	Jul, 2013	Release date over 1 years later