Author Topic: Fettled any computer stuff today? (Read 216714 times)

Kim · « **Reply #300 on:** 18 April, 2015, 06:23:05 pm »

Persuaded a friend's MotoG that had ostensibly bricked itself to reboot. All I did was apply power and sit holding the volume and power buttons for an unreasonably long time, at which point it hiccuped and went into charging mode as if nothing was wrong.

Afasoas · « **Reply #301 on:** 19 April, 2015, 10:57:05 am »

Quote from: Mr Larrington on 18 April, 2015, 05:22:27 pm

Cheers Biggsy - normal drive lettering has been resumed. Now I have to figure out how to disable the annoyance that is:

>>Checking media presence.....
>>Media present.....
>>Starting PXE over IP4.

after the BIOS splash screen. The last line changes to IP6 after a while. Quite a long while, which is somewhat negating the speed advantage of booting off a supersonic SSD. I may have to RTFM

What BIOS is it?
You have PXE boot enabled - that is, the machine is looking for a network service that will enable it to download and boot from an image on a PXE server. You need to disable PXE/network boot options in your BIOS/UEFI configuration. That's usually access by hitting either 'Delete' or 'F2' whilst the BIOS/UEFI splash screen displays after you first turn the PC on.

I have no idea about checking media presence/media present - I've never seen that before. I suspect it sounds like it is searching for all available boot media - optical drives, network cards and hard disk drives. Have a look at the "Boot Options" menu within the BIOS/UEFI configuration.

If your PC came with a manual for the motherboard, there should be some clues contained there-in. If not, you should be able to download a manual. The motherboard model number is usually stamped on the board between the PCI slots - chances are if you search for that with your favourite search engine, you will find the manufacturers specification and support pages for the motherboard. There or there abouts will be an option for downloading the manual.

barakta · « **Reply #302 on:** 19 April, 2015, 11:14:48 am »

Quote from: Kim on 18 April, 2015, 06:23:05 pm

Persuaded a friend's MotoG that had ostensibly bricked itself to reboot. All I did was apply power and sit holding the volume and power buttons for an unreasonably long time, at which point it hiccuped and went into charging mode as if nothing was wrong.

I suspect you also applied the knack and are not a known bogon-emitter too.

Mr Larrington · « **Reply #303 on:** 19 April, 2015, 11:44:55 am »

I did RTMotherboardFM and found it was trying to boot over the network by default. One short bit of clickiness later and SSD-induced happiness is restored. In fact it's now so whizzy that accessing the "BIOS" for further tweaking appears to be impossible.

Now I need to sort out this nonsense with the desktop background. The laptop was back to showing Bonneville this morning, which looks shit because the aspect ratio is all wrong

Salvatore · « **Reply #304 on:** 22 April, 2015, 03:58:43 pm »

I recently replaced an old PS2 keyboard with a new USB one. The old one was a victim of one too many coffee spills, and not many of the keys worked any more after the final caffeinated deluge. I put it to one side and plugged in the new one. The new one appeared to be OK at first, but I was plagued with what seemed to be random phantom keypresses - especially repeating # or ?. Eentually I solved the problem by

(click to show/hide)

D'oh.

Feanor · « **Reply #305 on:** 27 April, 2015, 10:30:19 pm »

Just had a power outage which took out all the street ( and possibly more ).
All the servers and network stuffs came back up OK, and the various PCs too.

But the phones were not happy.
Sad bootloader faces on them, unable to contact the Asterisk box.
It's not responding to pings, and I can't ssh into it.
Bah.

It's a headless box tucked away in a dark corner.
Rummage, rummage try to hook up a monitor and keyboard.

Hmm, root filesystem corruption, fsck failed to automatically fix it.
Cue 30 minutes of manual fsck-ing the filesystems.
Reboot, and crossed fingers.

Yay! Them inodes is all fixed up.
Initiate a global phone re-boot ( by power-cycling the PoE injector ), and all is well.
Telephony goodness is restored.

Kim · « **Reply #306 on:** 27 April, 2015, 11:01:14 pm »

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/fdi1cbldIcE&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/fdi1cbldIcE&rel=1</a>
http://youtu.be/fdi1cbldIcE

Mr Larrington · « **Reply #307 on:** 28 April, 2015, 05:33:10 pm »

The combination of Seagate NAS and Denon AV amplifier likes FLAC format tunes. In fact, it likes them so much it won't stop playing them even when you tell it to. Converting them to mp3 seems to have put a stop to this nonsense.

Afasoas · « **Reply #308 on:** 28 April, 2015, 10:38:33 pm »

Windows Server 2k12 R2 installed on my trusty old Dell PowerEdge 2950 without any sweat.

This is a good news as we're looking to get it rolled out to servers at work by the end of June, including some similarly old kit.

pcolbeck · « **Reply #309 on:** 29 April, 2015, 11:58:22 am »

Got called into PColbeck Juniors bedroom after loud complaints about the expensive new graphics card he had just purchased for his gaming rig. "Look Dad the HDMI port is too small for a HDMI cable !!!!!". I asked where was the box it came in "There is only a paper manual in that". Again I asked where was the box "There's no point there is nothing in it". Get me the box I said again. Off he went to the recycling and retrieved the box. I looked in it and there was a little zip lock bag with an adaptor to take the HDMI cable ...
Score 1 for Dad.

David Martin · « **Reply #310 on:** 29 April, 2015, 12:25:24 pm »

Cobbled together a small Java app that processes exam scripts. As we have moved almost entirely to online exams, adding diagrams is a challenge. These are drawn on individually qr coded sheets and attached into the questions by putting the 8 digit code into a dialogue.
They are then scanned and uploaded and automagically attached, usually.

I put together a script that reads the qr code and renames the scans with the qr-code instead of 'scan-1' etc. ANd today hacked it about a bit more to remove the student identifying bits from the scan so that the anonymous marking can proceed duly anonymously if they need to refer to the scans because it failed to attach to the answer they can see online. (markers get the text with the scanned images inserted minus the student identifying bits)

All seems to work.

Bledlow · « **Reply #311 on:** 01 May, 2015, 11:17:49 am »

Yesterday - doubled the RAM in this cheap old desktop PC. Mrs B noticed an improvement in loading stuff, & was pleased.

Pingu · « **Reply #312 on:** 01 May, 2015, 06:47:11 pm »

Got BBC iPlayer working again on the Squeezebox

We'll see how long this lasts.

Mrs Pingu · « **Reply #313 on:** 01 May, 2015, 06:48:14 pm »

^ my hero

Mr Larrington · « **Reply #314 on:** 18 May, 2015, 02:04:13 am »

Been scraping the rust off my Un*x-fu at the command line level in an attempt to make the DLNA server bits of it do MOAR things. I don't think I have succeeded but nor have a broken anything yet.

Ham · « **Reply #315 on:** 18 May, 2015, 09:44:56 am »

Quote from: Pingu on 01 May, 2015, 06:47:11 pm

Got BBC iPlayer working again on the Squeezebox

We'll see how long this lasts.

Is that a box full of ikkle kittens and puppies? No? It should be.

Mr Larrington · « **Reply #316 on:** 19 May, 2015, 04:15:22 pm »

Seeing as how my old desktop monitor was:

Exhibiting suspicious wibbly lines, and
Altogether a funny shape (4:3 aspect ratio if you can believe it ), and
Ancient (October 2002 vintage)

I have repurposed the Grand Bedchamber's Anbaric Distascope as a monitor and bought a new AD which actually has a means of getting sound out to an amplifier. The string round the back of the TV/PVR/DVD/amplifier/squeakers is starting to resemble the Clangers' favourite dessert in most aspects save colour.

Plug in, switch on. It looks awful

Reboot. It has adjusted itself

No need to fork out for a poncy graphics card after all.

Gattopardo · « **Reply #317 on:** 19 May, 2015, 07:16:47 pm »

Is going to change three differet android phones to theree different cyanogen android thingies...wish me luck.

Bledlow · « **Reply #318 on:** 19 May, 2015, 09:26:05 pm »

Having been informed that spam is originating from an old & almost unused e-mail account of mine, I went for this computer with all the AV tools I could. Found a nasty worm - but it was in a backup on an external HDD not plugged in since February.

Gattopardo · « **Reply #319 on:** 19 May, 2015, 10:06:32 pm »

Quote from: Gattopardo on 19 May, 2015, 07:16:47 pm

Is going to change three differet android phones to theree different cyanogen android thingies...wish me luck.

And fail as I can't find the sd card adaptor.

tiermat · « **Reply #320 on:** 20 May, 2015, 08:15:12 am »

Quote from: Gattopardo on 19 May, 2015, 10:06:32 pm

Quote from: Gattopardo on 19 May, 2015, 07:16:47 pm
Is going to change three differet android phones to theree different cyanogen android thingies...wish me luck.

And fail as I can't find the sd card adaptor.

ADB is your friend there, use it, from the commandline on your computer to push the files to internal storage (I have had to do this several times in the near past and will be doing it again soon as I am going to CM or OMNI my HTC One M7). Incidentally, if you are going for KitKat, go for Omni rather than Cyanogenmod as the battery management is better (I went from getting less than 6 hours on my Samsung to getting 4 days when I changed). Lollipop is a different kettle of fish, it appears that no-one, not even Google, has found how to solve the battery usage problem.

Kim · « **Reply #321 on:** 20 May, 2015, 01:49:46 pm »

Quote from: Bledlow on 19 May, 2015, 09:26:05 pm

Having been informed that spam is originating from an old & almost unused e-mail account of mine, I went for this computer with all the AV tools I could. Found a nasty worm - but it was in a backup on an external HDD not plugged in since February.

Yeahbut you can use anything as a from address in an email. Is the spam actually coming from your account, or is it just using your address in the header?

Bledlow · « **Reply #322 on:** 20 May, 2015, 03:17:17 pm »

I suspect, from my investigations, that it's just using my address. It's on some old mailing lists that have been on the net for some number of years in double figures. My other two addresses, including one from the same ISP, have not been cited as sources of spam.

I've swept out some malware, but it was all old & tucked away in backups on external drives. None of it was live, as far as I could tell.

barakta · « **Reply #323 on:** 20 May, 2015, 06:46:49 pm »

ObVisiting my mum so
* Applying windows updates
* Updating Virus Checker (MSE)
* Removing the CrapWare she's installed since last time
* Running Malware Bytes and Crap Cleaner

Not defenestrating this 5 yr old laptop with notenoughRAM which keeps locking up for 2-3 mins at a time at random cos crapywebbyscripts...

New laptop time, but she wants to replace this with an iPad *scowl*... I don't think it is worth me reverting-system-to-original state cos I did that recently to another 5 yr old laptop and it's /just/ as bad... The web has got VERY bloaty in the last 5 years, especially for hardware which was lowish end to begin with...

Mr Larrington · « **Reply #324 on:** 06 June, 2015, 04:49:03 pm »

This post comes to you from my old XP desktop machine

The hard disk is a bit on the noisy side and the other hard disk is deader than a lizard in a tin of tomatoes but it does work.

Author Topic: Fettled any computer stuff today? (Read 216714 times)

Afasoas

Afasoas