Author Topic: A random thread for small computing things that don't really warrant a thread of their own (Read 300853 times)

Mr Larrington · « **Reply #2050 on:** 19 May, 2022, 02:24:34 pm »

I hope to dog I don’t need to replace that video card any time soon coz the little clips wot hold it into its slot are somewhat inaccessible…

Beardy · « **Reply #2051 on:** 19 May, 2022, 04:04:57 pm »

Also, I believe there is something of a dearth of high end video cards currently.

Feanor · « **Reply #2052 on:** 19 May, 2022, 09:59:07 pm »

My landline has been suffering from a lingering death for a couple of years. It's become noticeably noisy on analogue calls, and the ADSL sync speed has been dropping.

An SMS from AAISP two days ago saying '###No Carrier' marked it's final demise.
No dial tone.

Yay! A hard voice fault. The one thing that BT will pay attention to. Finally, BT will fix the bloody thing.
And so they did.

Two days later, the dude appeared, we had a chat, and off he went to ferret around in holes in the ground. A few hours later he returned, triumphant. 'Try it now!' quoth he. 'There were a great multitude of faults on your line, and I have vanquished them all!'

And lo, so it was: the line was quiet, and the ADSL sync speed had gone from an uncertain 17Mbit to a solid 27Mbit, never before seen in these parts.

Mr Larrington · « **Reply #2053 on:** 21 May, 2022, 12:53:11 am »

'kinell! The screen saver on the Estate Office PC now works, which it never did on the old one after I added a second monitor

Now it proclaims “l33t h@XX0r” across both screens, in tumbly-spinny Comic Sans.

TimO · « **Reply #2054 on:** 21 May, 2022, 03:21:01 pm »

I managed to acquire some almost unobtainium, a Raspberry Pi CM4, or more specifically a CM4001000, for £33.

OK, it doesn't have WiFi, only 1GB of RAM and no eMMC (it's the Lite version), but it's a lot cheaper than the same part on AliExpress, which would be around £120! Alternatively I could back-order a part from RS or Farnell, a little cheaper for around £27, but those are probably going to be delivered in late November (or later).

Checking Octopart, they last saw some inventory about 7 months ago.

Mr Larrington · « **Reply #2055 on:** 21 May, 2022, 06:50:01 pm »

So, mostly for teh lulz, I turned on Spencer The Halfwit — a 13 year old EeePC with Win 10, 1GB RAM and an Intel Atom powered by ants — for the first time in nearly 3 years, just to see how long it’ll take him to do all the updates

I'll report back tomorrow.

StuAff · « **Reply #2056 on:** 21 May, 2022, 06:52:42 pm »

I bought a new mouse pad. I've been using its predecessor for twenty-one years.

Mr Larrington · « **Reply #2057 on:** 21 May, 2022, 07:04:59 pm »

I think mine dates back to 1994, but it spent a long time in a drawer when I was using a Microsith trackball on what was then my only PC.

rafletcher · « **Reply #2058 on:** 21 May, 2022, 07:28:07 pm »

I’ve not had a mouse mat since the advent of optical mice.

Mr Larrington · « **Reply #2059 on:** 22 May, 2022, 11:34:33 pm »

O hai Microsith!

I want to rename that file. Things you don’t need to do before renaming it:

Ask me whether I want to keep using $PROGRAM to open it, because I want to rename it not open it, and
Open it with $PROGRAM, because I want to rename it not open it

Idiots.

Mr Larrington · « **Reply #2060 on:** 23 May, 2022, 09:52:31 am »

Quote from: Mr Larrington on 21 May, 2022, 06:50:01 pm

So, mostly for teh lulz, I turned on Spencer The Halfwit — a 13 year old EeePC with Win 10, 1GB RAM and an Intel Atom powered by ants — for the first time in nearly 3 years, just to see how long it’ll take him to do all the updates

I'll report back tomorrow.

Hit “Restart” at 09:30 yesterday. By 13:00 he'd reached 22% of installing the update. By 01:00 this morning he'd still reached 22% of installing the update. I switched him off and went to bed. Now he’s doing a system restore. Assuming that finishes OK I may have to nuke from orbit and try reinstalling.

I see you can still get 8.1 from Microsith. Anyone know if it’ll let me downgrade without needing to try to find a product key?

ian · « **Reply #2061 on:** 23 May, 2022, 10:03:49 am »

I have an old Asus one somewhere, of the same vintage. It was slow when I bought it (ants are far faster than those Atom chips, and it was writing to the solid-state storage with, as far as I could tell, small chisels). The most awful computer I ever bought, fortunately it was a cheap refurb.

Mr Larrington · « **Reply #2062 on:** 23 May, 2022, 10:27:52 am »

Spencer is so amazingly primitive he still has spinning rust in his tummy and I for one have no intention of trying to install anything more modern. I'd rather pension off Slow Dempsey and buy a new lapdancer, though that would, rationally speaking, be a colossal waste of money. Plus all current laptops seem to be huge. I don’t want huge. I want small and light and not a Chromebook and not with a four figure price tag.

ian · « **Reply #2063 on:** 23 May, 2022, 12:42:41 pm »

Everything about that little computer was awful, it was just a clutch of unpleasant compromises, from tiny screen to cramped keyboard, and complimentary sucky performance from a chip that would have been underpowered in a pocket calculator. The SSD was based on some technology unearthed from the ancient Sumerians. Even on a cut-black flavour of Linux, it had performance on a par with Liz Truss explaining quantum mechanics.

I still have it somewhere. I went out and bought and bought a Macbook Air which weighed only marginally more while being a real computer. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire concept of that little laptops was a mere marketing ploy by Apple.

Kim · « **Reply #2064 on:** 23 May, 2022, 01:08:34 pm »

I have one of those EeePCs. It's running some obsolete version of Debian. Very slowly.

I keep it around purely because it's got a proper Ethernet port and can just about run a browser, which combined with sensible Linux networking, makes it handy for configuring routers and the like without mucking up my proper computer.

Mr Larrington · « **Reply #2065 on:** 23 May, 2022, 02:05:22 pm »

Unfortunately the little plastic cover over the Ethernet 'ole b0rked off mine and I never did figure out a reliable way of making one stay in place without it. Or at least not one which didn’t involve superglue.

And I just noticed he's connected to the distascope in the Grand Bedchamber. Albeit via VGA which means the picture is shit, but the thing can be used without having to sit at an awkward angle and without the bed frame jammed painfully into my arsecrack.

I left him doing a full backup. There’s bugger-all on him, most of which is Windows, but it'll still take hours.

Mr Larrington · « **Reply #2066 on:** 24 May, 2022, 09:59:49 am »

So now Spencer The Halfwit is having a second go at installing the 21H2 update and just like last time he’s been sitting on 22% for a Several of hours $:-\$

Edit: I have a feeling that 21H2 might be an update too far. If he ent made any further progress by tomorrow it’s time for a fresh install of either 10 or 8.1. No, Linux is not an option because it doesn’t speak iTunes.

Mr Larrington · « **Reply #2067 on:** 25 May, 2022, 10:12:37 am »

Still on 22% this morning. Update LARTed. USB drive o'DETH on standby.

Mr Larrington · « **Reply #2068 on:** 25 May, 2022, 11:49:34 pm »

“Reset PC” seems to have installed an up-to-date Win 10. Spencer is celebrating this triumph by declining to talk to network disks, or vice-versa. If this cannot be rectified it rather negates his existence, which is primarily to pipe iTunes from a NAS to an amplifier.

Bah!

Polar Bear · « **Reply #2069 on:** 26 May, 2022, 04:47:44 am »

I have a few PC projects landing. Looking at the spec of two of the machines they are woefully inadequate for today's internet surfing and zooming demands. Whoever considered 3gb of memory in a Windows 10 pc could ever rock it?

The vague plan is to add memory, do clean installs of Windows and see if either machine can cope with the basics.

The third machine takes more than five minutes to boot. Knowing the owner I rule nothing out but purely as a consequence of user awareness and not because of deliberate visits to dodgy websites or clicking on other "snareware".

Beardy · « **Reply #2070 on:** 26 May, 2022, 10:53:59 am »

I still have fond memories of increasing the RAM in my first work PC from 560kb to 640kb via a config change and then adding a small piece of software that allowed me to access and use the rest of the 300 or so Kb of the RAM. The OS was unable to access more than the 640kb directly.

I was considered something of a PC super nerd back then…

Mr Larrington · « **Reply #2071 on:** 26 May, 2022, 11:13:48 am »

All the faffing about with config.sys and autoexec.bat to get it to use all of the 1MB all of the time. My cow-orker Mad Dog had a lucrative sideline in optimising people's PC's – one pint of BEER per Babbage-Engine.

Beardy · « **Reply #2072 on:** 26 May, 2022, 11:59:46 am »

That PC also had a 40mb hard disc although the OS (Dos 3.1) could only address 30mb so I had to mount the other 10mb as a separate drive. Mind ewe, that was a little pointless because there’s no way I was going to be able to generate enough data to actually fill the 30mb let alone the extra 10mb. And that included my pools analysis spreadsheets¹ that I was using at the time.

Ah, jumpers for goal posts and all that.

1. No, they didn’t work, so it was mostly an exercise in learning more about SuperCalc.

ian · « **Reply #2073 on:** 26 May, 2022, 12:19:54 pm »

Try to explain to Young People word processors before WYSIWYG¹.

I vaguely remember this, Wordperfect, and you had to book a slot in a library for access to a precious computer. When it came to writing up my degree project, I nicked my supervisor's little Mac and blamed three o'clock Paul², which I think ran Word 2.0.

¹Word excepted, your picture is over there, to the right of the virtual Bermuda triangle.

²So named because no one ever saw him before 3pm. Allegedly a PhD student. This might have been news to him.

woollypigs · « **Reply #2074 on:** 30 May, 2022, 11:10:51 pm »

Quote

"My left shoe won't even reboot." writes another

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/my-left-shoe-wont-even-reboot-faulty-app-bricks-nike-smart-sneakers/

old story I know but I just saw it, clearly shows that the future is doomed