Author Topic: A random thread for small computing things that don't really warrant a thread of their own (Read 299334 times)

T42 · « **Reply #950 on:** 28 January, 2018, 09:33:07 am »

A pome:

<textarea>
When I double-click a word
In this editor of text
I just want to mark the letters
And not the bloody space
Before the next.
</textarea>

(Yes, I have just been reading Brian Bilston.)

hellymedic · « **Reply #951 on:** 30 January, 2018, 01:11:37 pm »

Harrow Times story

'Students take part in digital project for Comic Relief'

Methinks the aspect ratio of this image needs Comic Relief...

Mr Larrington · « **Reply #952 on:** 03 February, 2018, 07:02:35 pm »

Backup! You normally take abut two hours so why have you been running for ten? Explain yourself!

Polar Bear · « **Reply #953 on:** 03 February, 2018, 07:10:36 pm »

Chrome: Why do you choose to freeze my machine every few months? Delete, reinstall, problem solved.

I do clean down history regularly so I am perplexed as to what is causing these issues but at least I know the solution.

Beardy · « **Reply #954 on:** 03 February, 2018, 08:42:21 pm »

Ponders: am I the only person in the western world to have never used chrome?

SoreTween · « **Reply #955 on:** 04 February, 2018, 08:07:31 am »

Kim · « **Reply #956 on:** 04 February, 2018, 02:36:21 pm »

Chrome is the new IE6.

Polar Bear · « **Reply #957 on:** 04 February, 2018, 03:38:22 pm »

I just love it when geeky types give you a tech slapdown!

Kim · « **Reply #958 on:** 04 February, 2018, 03:42:30 pm »

To be fair, I'm using Chromium right now.

Just like I used IE6 back in the day.

ian · « **Reply #959 on:** 04 February, 2018, 06:04:09 pm »

I find that Chrome periodically stops working on particular web pages (Expedia the other day wouldn't go beyond 'we're finding you...') but worked fine in Safari. I'm mostly moved over to Safari which seems to have fewer issues and is so fast it's usually found the answer before I've thought of the question.

In other news, aspect ratios, you know my thoughts. I don't understand what is wrong with the sort of people that do that and don't appear to notice. Same with TVs until HDMI took over.

Mr Larrington · « **Reply #960 on:** 07 February, 2018, 02:08:53 pm »

Quote from: Mr Larrington on 03 February, 2018, 07:02:35 pm

Backup! You normally take abut two hours so why have you been running for ten? Explain yourself!

Yesterday's backup: I/O Performance: Read 1.1 Gb/s - Write 92.7 Mb/s

Rebooted NAS

Today's backup: I/O Performance: Read 1.1 Gb/s - Write 792.2 Mb/s

Now that's more like it.

freeflow · « **Reply #961 on:** 07 February, 2018, 03:51:09 pm »

No broadband yesterday. I waited several hours after checking that there were no planned outages. Rang Zen to ask if there were issues and after a short delay was told that there was 'maintenance' ongoing and that they had people in the exchange. Service would be resumed by 5:30 pm (I was ringing just before midday). About an hour later broadband came back. Download speed was only 38 Mbps.

Trouble is, the best I'd ever had before the outage was 1.4 Mbps. I wonder how long the new speed will last.

T42 · « **Reply #962 on:** 12 February, 2018, 08:29:46 am »

Just had El Presidente on the blower. His 2-year-old laptop's mother board has gone phut. Apart from a trip to Quebec last summer it had never left his desk. Are they that fragile these days?

Beardy · « **Reply #963 on:** 12 February, 2018, 09:46:25 am »

I have managed to confuse myself with email
I have; two apple accounts, three email providers, five domains, multiple email addresses, email forwarding and email address aliasing across domains and providers, two ipads, one iPhone one desktop. Add to this mix; six users (family members) plus various iPhones, macbooks, ipads, desktops etc. Oh, and family sharing between my own apple accounts and between my and Dr Beardy's (Mrs) apple accounts.

I _think_ all my devices are logged on as the same person with the mail accounts set up accordingly BUT I'm getting imessages and text messages seemingly randomly on my devices. My outgoing emails are also confusing me, largely because, probably due to my sknflintness, my email providers don't support outgoing email aliasing on my accounts, so I have to change the 'from' address on replies to one that will work. <$deity knows what my correspondents think of my ever changing emails.

I'd go and sit in a corner and rock backwards and forwards if I didn't have to go and grapple with the monster that is GDPR!

Ham · « **Reply #964 on:** 12 February, 2018, 10:48:18 am »

I'm in a workshop for summat to do with quite a big system. The guys that put it together have a dashboard that includes a counter that counts the number of system hits, looking like an odometer, starting with a unit wheel. And going up to approximately 1.5 billion per day. wheeeeee!

mrcharly-YHT · « **Reply #965 on:** 12 February, 2018, 11:04:34 am »

Quote from: T42 on 12 February, 2018, 08:29:46 am

Just had El Presidente on the blower. His 2-year-old laptop's mother board has gone phut. Apart from a trip to Quebec last summer it had never left his desk. Are they that fragile these days?

Usually not. Have multiple laptops around house, belonging to children etc. Not had a motherboard blow on any of them.

Kim · « **Reply #966 on:** 12 February, 2018, 02:18:37 pm »

Quote from: mrcharly-YHT on 12 February, 2018, 11:04:34 am

Quote from: T42 on 12 February, 2018, 08:29:46 am
Just had El Presidente on the blower. His 2-year-old laptop's mother board has gone phut. Apart from a trip to Quebec last summer it had never left his desk. Are they that fragile these days?
Usually not. Have multiple laptops around house, belonging to children etc. Not had a motherboard blow on any of them.

Quite. Usual failure mode for our laptops is diminishing battery life, followed by terminal lack of RAM upgradability.

Usual failure mode for other people's laptops I've dealt with over the years is Windows, followed by fluff ingestion / fan bearing failure, hard drive failure, lost/broken power supplies and physical damage. (There's obviously a selection bias here, on account of only seeing the out-of-warranty broken ones, and whose crusty laptops I'm willing to expend effort on.) Some of these issues have affected our laptops too (particularly fluff and OS problems), but since we're able to deal with them they don't really count as failure.

I think barakta had several cases of logic board failure on Apple laptops in the 1990s...

Not that desktop computers are that much better, they're just an order of magnitude easier to maintain/diagnose/repair, can hold a lot more fluff before performance is affected, and are extremely unlikely to be dropped. Over the years I've had several motherboards fail due to the capacitor plague (fortunately now seems to be a thing of the past); countless fan failures (cheap and easy to replace unless it's the graphics card), a couple of PSU failures (one was repairable); various dodgy hard drives; a few instances of dodgy RAM (mosly the eBuyer value RAM favoured by PSOs in the early 2000s); one small fire (graphics card) and a CPU damaged by overheating (original Athlon). I think the only really interesting failure of someone else's desktop I encountered was the aftermath of a lightning strike.

T42 · « **Reply #967 on:** 12 February, 2018, 04:53:43 pm »

Yes, well, that's what the bloke in the shop where he bought it told him. From what El P. told me, though, the machine will actually run about one time in 30 that it's turned on, which sounds less like a motherboard failure than power supply, or something between the supply and the board. I don't have sufficient HW nous to get in there & boogie, though.

Kim · « **Reply #968 on:** 12 February, 2018, 05:08:42 pm »

Agreed. There will be plenty of power gubbins on the motherboard that can fail in the usual PSUish ways. But also boring things like loose RAM might give the same symptoms.

ScumOfTheRoad · « **Reply #969 on:** 12 February, 2018, 05:14:10 pm »

T42 You should be looking for a beep code or a light code.
When motherboards cannot boot up far enough to display on the screen they will try to tell you what the failure is by beeping a Morse code like pattern. Dells signal to you by using the front LED lights.
Of course a total PSU failure results in nowt beep code. But at least try to listen to the poor thing in a quiet room. It may be asking for help.

mrcharly-YHT · « **Reply #970 on:** 12 February, 2018, 09:16:55 pm »

I think I am going mad
I cannot see any way of creating a jobseeker account on this site:

https://www.jobvite.com/

There is a login page, but no account creation. Attempting to login and entering details just gets 'no account exists' message.

T42 · « **Reply #971 on:** 13 February, 2018, 08:08:22 am »

@Kim & Mr. C.: Looks like the first thing to do is to tell El Prez not to junk the thing out of hand. Could be a hiding to nothing if PSU stuff on motherboard is fried, though... And as I mentioned, I've no idea how to fix it. I know the bloke who told him it was kaput and I'm pretty sure he'd have pressed home RAM etc. - it's not exactly good publicity to flog a machine that craps out in 2 years. I got my my tower PC from him and it's still going strong after 5 or 6 years.

I'll toddle up to El P's place and have a gander. If nothing else he has half-decent coffee. Thanks, both.

mrcharly-YHT · « **Reply #972 on:** 13 February, 2018, 09:08:12 am »

Is it truly out of warranty? Some companies run a longer warranty than others. Might be worth checking (it depends on the type of failure).

ian · « **Reply #973 on:** 13 February, 2018, 11:08:41 am »

I think you'd have a reasonable expectation that a laptop should work for more than two years. I took a four year old Mac Mini back to Apple and uttered the phrase 'sale of goods' and while they didn't look entirely enthused, they replaced a faulty wifi card at no cost to me.

T42 · « **Reply #974 on:** 13 February, 2018, 02:09:20 pm »

Back from El Prez's. Laptop is totally unresponsive. Well, the power lights come on, but they don't flicker and there are no beeps. We did have a gander under the keyboard, but nothing was apparent - no surprise, given my lack of knowledge. Even a swift anointing with El P's espresso had no effect.

He's left with a creaky old mini-tower PC. It's a Pentium 4 and the clock resets to 2002 when it's unplugged because etc. It has a mix of RAM card frequencies and capacities to a total of 4 Gb. He has W7 Pro on it, and it crawls. Performance Index is 2.7. It must be paging like buggery at the speed of a dead snail. The motherboard'll probably take 4 Gb but I doubt if that'd make much difference. Heigh ho.