As long as it's at least vaguely related to technology and fits within the forum rules, as long as you have something that doesn't really belong on a thread, or something of the chit-chat variety, feel free to make use of this thread. (Scotty does reserve the right to spin off threads that do warrant further discussion.)

Anyway, well, I've been thinking about it lately. Ever since switching to a 1 TB system drive, with it being half-filled, I noticed that Im outgrowing my external disk drive, which is also 1 TB. At this rate, said disk drive would only allow for at most two entire backups before things start getting deleted.

I think it might be time for me to go to a computer shop or something and get a significantly larger external disk drive - something in the 4 TB or bigger territory, though I do suspect that I'll have to go desktop and powered instead of being able to stay fully portable and have it just like any other USB flash drive.

Decisions, decisions... Portability's hard.

If you're backing up against hard drive failure and are using a desktop, you should buy a second 1 TB internal drive and set up RAID. You may need to buy the same one you already have.

If you're backing up against both hard drive failure and personal stupidity, you may want to give monthly + incremental backups a shot. That's where you make a full backup at the beginning of every month, then you make a smaller backup every day with just the changes since the last backup. There are a number of programs that enable you to do this easily.

If you don't mind me asking, exactly what does one fill up 1 TB with? I've been doing YouTube for more than 3 years now, and I don't even think my 700+ videos add up to that much yet . . .

It's almost always video that takes up large amounts of space, but I know professional photographers can burn through a few gigabytes after a photo shoot. Musicians can easily have songs that take up several gigabytes in raw form, especially when every track is stored as a lossless 24 bit 96 kHz stereo waveform.

As for me, I actually needed a few hundred gigabytes for a single capture session when gaming in HD for a while with my previous capture card. The best method was to capture to M-JPEG with uncompressed audio, which could easily be 60 GB per hour of footage. Of course, that got compressed down to 2 gigs per hour once converted to MPEG-4.

My media club needed a hard drive to put videos on so we a 1TB hard drive that will probably last a lifetime.

What's with me and laptop repairs? Seriously, I think I need to give better care to my laptop. It's due for a repair (though there are no broken hinges, so it's mostly usable). Again.

I'm on my third laptap and everyone I've owned has had damage in the same place.

What am I doing wrong?

I just hope that the repair bill doesn't end up getting more expensive than a new laptop with similar or better capability.

Nowadays it's often cheaper and less time-consuming to just replace broken laptops instead of having them repaired. That's how it goes nowadays, where companies want the tech to break so you have to spend more money.

If the repairs are fairly easy, I usually do them myself. By "easy," I usually mean replacing something like a hard drive, RAM, keyboard, or screen.

Good luck sourcing casing, a replacement Ethernet port, fingerprint reader, and sleep activator.

So at work today, we had to move some of our older servers. I went to go move one and heard a nice grinding noise inside (like something hitting against a fan). I took it apart and was greeted with:



Silly molex connector... oh wow



Remember to bundle your loose wires kids! (Yes the heatsink fan still works).

I have my keyboard layout set on "Canadian Multilingual" so I can access more symbols without using alt codes, but for some reason it reverted itself to regular. U. S. Qwerty. However, it still says "Canadian Multilingual" in the Control Panel. Does anyone happen know why this would happen?

Also while I'm at it, does anyone know of a keyboard layout where I can use symbols like ° and the acute-accented E without alt codes but have easier access to other symbols like " and {} and?

Usually, it's a very good idea to make sure that the keyboard layout in use corresponds to the actual keyboard. Leave the special characters to Character Map.

I get the feeling Microsoft is trying to keep me as a loyal user of its OneDrive service. Tell me, what on earth am I going to do with 153 gigs of cloud storage?! Store backups of backups of backups?

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I didn't get any fancy new doodads.

Microsoft sent me two OneDrive codes, first one for 20 gigs, then another one for 100 gigs. Guess I can start backing up my larger files in the cloud, like videos and such.

My dad and I are planning about... plans if the repair quote for my laptop gets too expensive. I'm back to using a Surface as my main PC...

Well speaking which my lap top managed to survive it's first year, it be unable to recharge sometimes but at least it hasn't gotten worse in the past few month.

I seem to not have much luck with the current laptop.

Maybe I should look for greener pastures.

One thing's never gonna change though - it will have to be 14" and has a real GPU.

My R button stopped responding some time ago, and I'm wondering if anyone here has ever had to fix their L and R before on their own and how they did it. The general consensus of Google searches is that the best way to fix your 3DS L and R buttons is to (a) not break them or (b) send them off for repairs

(As a note, 3DS shoulder buttons do NOT work the same as the last-generation handhelds do.)

Huh, I'll try that tomorrow. Thanks.

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2014/04/...-data-at-risk/
http://heartbleed.com/

Well, that's absolutely lovely. Looks like anything transmitted "securely" over HTTPS in the last two years has actually been insecure and capable of being compromised. During a "handshake" (a connection by a computer to a server stating who you are, what you want, and what your capabilities are), it's possible to request any part of the server's memory (which may contain passwords, temporary data for other users, database tables, and any runtime information), not just the part containing the information intended for you.

You all may want to change your high-security passwords, like banks and e-mail.

It's amazing how a logical programming error can mess up so many things at the same time.

On another topic, I've been thinking of getting this gaming laptop after weighing other similar options from other brands and built-to-order vendors.

Quad-core fourth-generation Intel Core i7 processor, 8 GB of RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 M with 2 GB of GDDR5 memory, backlit keyboard, DVD drive, 1 TB storage (that I'm going to replace ASAP with leftover SSHD), 1920x1080 15.6" IPS anti-glare display, 4+ hour battery life unplugged, and, best of all, I actually also need a new backpack and a headset (freebies never hurt). (The wired mouse will make for a nice backup.) Two-year standard international warranty is in the cards, and so is a free subwoofer.

It feels like I'm getting so many things that I'm willing to accept that it doesn't come with a 860 M.

How would you like to have a screen that large?
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/...tag=RSS56d97e7

To have? I'd have nowhere to put it. To have a screen like that near me? I'd have a new movie for each and every night!

Still waiting for the mythical YouTube 4K to become a common thing. And the ensuing complaints about buffering times going out the window.

YouTube video quality is nothing to write home about unless you plan to downsample.

I recently got really upset about my lap top getting its screen cracked until I found out this actually incredibly common for my model of computer. I had to turn off the touch screen but that's really no big deal though.

I turned the touch screen back on and it's acting less chaotic but only one side of the cracked screen is broken.

I feel strangely compelled to get a Nokia Lumia 930 as soon as possible. That might be the phone of my dreams.

A new prank idea for Windows 8/8.1, based on a classic prank.

1. Optional: Go to the Start Screen and unpin (or move off to the right) the calendar. Disable live tiles for things like e-mail, news, weather, and stocks that show current information.
2. Take a screenshot of the Start Screen.
3. Paste it into Paint and save it as a PNG image, but don't put it somewhere obvious.
4. Change the wallpaper to that image.
5. Hide desktop icons and the taskbar.
6. Get out of there before anyone sees you messing with the computer.

I changed my desktop to a blue screen of death in 11th grade. Teacher flinched every time they walked past for the rest of the year.

The next year, we weren't allowed to do anything to the computer appearance settings, at all. I wonder if I was the one responsible for that.

I love to collect Virtual Studio Technology (VST) plugins for use with FL Studio and other VST hosts... is that a good or a bad thing? o.o

Quote:

Originally Posted by Twiggy It's called "using JPEGs from the get-go". (If it's a JPEG, Windows shouldn't do anything to the image.)

Even if I use JPEGs, it still re-compresses them badly.

As for VSTs, my dad uses those all the time for music production. He's bought dozens of high-end ones too.

Looks like PNG works fine, actually. Haha, nice. JPEG doesn't, though.

Details: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/w...f-93f6bb5f4f92

Must have been misremembering things. xD

Either way, it feels funny to be so used to 8.1 at this point.

I guess we somehow end up speaking the same language even though we're more interested in different areas.

They've made Windows quite... a different thing since 8, and a bit since 7. When was the last time you've used Windows?

So I've been having printer problems for a little while. Paper getting stuck as it goes through, and whatnot. Finally it decided to stop recognizing that there was paper in the tray at all.

It turns out that there was an SD card stuck down by the rollers that push it through the place with the toner cartridge. How in the world did I manage to lose an SD card and not notice? And how long has it even been down there, anyway? -____________-

That reminds me of something I accidentally did a few days ago. I have one of those combination floppy disk/memory card reader drives. Without looking at the drive, I tried to insert an SD card, but rather than stick it in the SD card slot, I missed and put it in the floppy drive. I had to remove the front cover of the computer, then remove the face plate for the drive before I could dislodge the card.

They better not introduce a nanoSD format. Otherwise, well, they'd be extremely easy to lose. Seeing as microSD is plenty small already, I doubt it... unless manufacturers are deciding to go "make everything thinner". At all costs.

I do hope microSD is the smallest consumer format. Anything smaller than that should just be soldered directly onto a board.

And the obligatory xkcd link:
http://xkcd.com/691/

While on that subject, I think, with the rapidly increasing sizes of flash memory and hard drives very slowly increasing in size comparatively (are they reaching the limits of hard drive technology?), that the future of mass storage may very well be in solid state devices hosting flash memory.


EDIT: Another thing that's really annoying: downloading a large driver package, in this case 150 MB, then discovering after opening the zip that the bulk of that size is the user manual in 11 languages (11 megs each) plus an old version of Adobe Reader (22 megs). The actual drivers for all operating systems total only FIVE MEGABYTES. Another stupidity is the fact that they copied the entire driver package to another folder just to make the Vista installer.

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Speaking of helium drives, those must be a nightmare for those disk recovery services. It's a couple thousand bucks to recover a hard drive, and what they do is move the platters, physically, into another (identical) hard drive. Then they spin it up and immediately copy data, hoping to get everything before it crashes. When you MUST have helium inside the drive, that could be close to impossible for drive recovery groups without a special apparatus, if one exists.

As for price-per-gigabyte, I think the best headway being made is in USB flash drives. Those things are becoming so cheap that they're putting my older hard drives to shame. These days you can get 32 gigs on a tiny stick for ten bucks, and if you catch it around Black Friday, you can get a USB 3.0 one for the same price. For a mere $50, you can get 128 GB in your pocket. In a few years, 1 TB drives may be that cheap. Excluding those who work with high definition video (or large collections of video in general), it's getting to the point where the vast majority of folks will be able to back up their entire digital life to a single USB stick. I bet there are plenty of folks on this forum who can do that with the aforementioned 32 GB stick. (Just please be smart and not make the flash drive your ONLY copy of your data. More data doesn't make them harder to misplace. )

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I remember first starting to pay attention to computer hardware around 2008-2009, and the price of terabyte hard drives were comparable to the computer itself.

Nowadays the price of a terabyte is a little higher than your average pair of shoes.

Have to wonder what it'll be in another five years . . .

Don't worry, content quality will just keep getting higher and higher. There'll be always a reason to have a storage device that's reasonably sized at a given period.

For my important stuff, I have like 300 gigs of files, but I haven't finished cleaning my desktop. A lot of that can be erased, and a lot of it is installers for games and software I bought through the years. That also excludes roughly 650 gigs of unedited game videos.

Me in 2008 (pre-YouTube): "My hard drive is 160 GB? What am I ever going to do with all that space?"

Me today (post-YouTube): "I have 1.200 TB total storage and really thinking about getting another terabyte of external |: "

Uncompressed Microsoft AVI is the greatest thing ever. Funny how times change.

Nokia Lumia 1520: it's just XBOX HEUG.
Nokia Lumia 930: Does not have a microSD slot.
Sony Xperia Z2: Fragile.

Hmm... Maybe I should keep on waiting?

For your perfect smartphone?

Please tell me that you're getting a Droid...

Speaking of Droids, I've had my Moto G since late April/early May, and quite honestly, I couldn't be happier than when I was on my iPhone 4s. o.o

I believe the Droid line is old news at this point.

I don't feel like going Android is going to have a significant benefit for me, as pretty much every single app I do care about now has apps for Windows Phone. Besides, I couldn't care less about smartphone gaming.

The Xperia Z2 does have its own allure, though.

I just feel so much freer with the Droid than I felt with the iPhone 4s... there's something about running on a non-Apple platform that makes me feel that way, and it applies to my computer, as well. Plus, it's about $30 cheaper to run the Droid than it was to run the iPhone 4s, even though both phones are on the same network.

So now that I have a Droid, what am I doing with the iPhone, you ask? Simply put, mobile audio production. There are lots of iOS-compatible synthesizers, drum machines, and other cool audio apps that I've bought for the iPhone over the years that are either not available on Google Play, or won't be available.

That sounded like something that belongs in my "Tech Ramblings" thread. o.o

Anyone know how to force a program (Adobe Premiere) to use most/all CPU power in Windows 8.1? I need to render a video and would prefer that it get done quickly, but it's only using up to about 12% of my CPU time. Considering that I'm not doing anything else with my computer at this point, that seems like kind of a waste of my time. Tried setting Priority, Affinity, whatever, and it had no effect.

So I decided to do a quick quality comparison between my recently-acquired Visioneer flatbed scanner from 1999 and the HP Photosmart printer/scanner/copier I use for business, which was made in 2007. The inkjet samples I took were scanned at 600 dpi and in color on both machines:

Visioneer OneTouch 7600 (1999)

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gdi, Apple.

Against my better judgement, I bought some stuff on iTunes. Then the Internet blipped in the middle of it and a few of them downloaded incorrectly, giving me unplayable files. Searched for an hour. Nowhere is there a "Restart Download" button or anything similar. afaik iCloud is only available on Apple handhelds.

Windows 8.1, iTunes 11.1.5.5.

All I want is a few of my ninety-nine cent songs back. What to do?

Remove the songs from your library. Then use Store > Check For Available Downloads. Your purchases are stored with Apple, so you should be able to redownload them until they take away that ability. If that doesn't work, try deleting them from Music > iTunes > iTunes Media > Music first.

Files are gone, but I still get this:

Thanks, though.

Edit: Think I got it. I assume deleting the files had something to do with it, thanks again.

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Yeah, I've had weirdness with iTunes, Xbox Music, and Amazon MP3, particularly when trying to download songs over a wonky network.

About a half hour ago I learned that trying to import six hours of video into Premiere at once is not such a good idea. Just getting control of my computer back now.

Spamming this thread a little more . . . a few days ago I spilled apple juice on my keyboard. Wiped it off and thought it was fine. Well, apparently it leaked under the keys and has now started gumming up the top-left quadrant of the keyboard. Still works but it's like typing on a sponge.

Oops.

edit

Okay, uh, does anyone have a really, really good way of getting grease out of this thing? ._.

You can safely submerge a spring-based desktop keyboard in water, as long as you let it dry afterwards.

If it's a laptop keyboard (or a desktop keyboard with rubber under the keys), don't do it because you will destroy it even if removed from the laptop first, due to the glue keeping the rubber bits to the circuit board. Instead, you can gently pry most keys off and very carefully wipe them clean with cotton swabs and isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol or a damp rag. Be careful not to touch the rubber, and be sure to snap the metal bar back into place if it's a wide key, which can be a complete pain sometimes.

Rubbing alcohol and Q-tips seemed to do the trick. A couple of the keys still take a minute to depress and I probably won't win any typing competitions any day soon but at least I don't have to use a screwdriver to unstick the Escape key now.

Laptop disk drive decided to give the occasional VERY LONG wait every so,often during boots. Nothing but a black screen and sustained HDD activity light that means nothing but stalling.

Not good.

Not bothering with replacing it. I ended up with a Samsung 840 EVO as a replacement for the possibly problematic drive. Might as well as go ahead and get a fast one.

(This SSD seems to had an issue with performance on old data, but it is fixed with the latest firmware, and my drive came pre-shipped with said fix. Nice. (The bug being more of an annoyance than data destroying helps a lot, too, not that I needed any help.)

You know how fast hybrids are? Now imagine that cranked up to several orders of magnitude faster. That's what happens when you're talking about some of the Samsung's finest drives, whether MLC or TLC. (No relation to the band known for a song about scrubs.)

My laptop has been purely on SSDs for a little over a year now, and it's amazing how fast the thing starts. My desktop has had an SSD for some time too (after upgrading the laptop, it inherited the replacement), but its drive is a little slower, and the motherboard takes a long time to scan all the hardware anyway. Here's one gripe: 64 gigs of space on a laptop is all fine and dandy until you try to install a large program or game and realize that it takes up 20% of your free space, and you tend to live on a different set of data than you use on a desktop. (OneDrive has been great for keeping my most important data accessible on all my systems.) On a desktop, that problem is less pronounced because you typically can put a hard drive or two in there with your data and any large programs you need.


If you want to test your possibly-dying hard drive, you can use this:
http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/
Run the Long Generic test. Yes, it takes a few hours. No, you can't use the drive while it's running. But if it's going to die, be sure to back your stuff up before letting a few extra hours of spin time pass on it.

It's funny how booting the laptop with the SSD inside pretty much means "turn on, flash logo for so fast that the loading indicator doesn't even get to show up, lockscreen" combined with Windows 8.x's fast boot mechanism. I can practically forget about Sleep mode.

I got a 250 GB drive. Turns out I still have 74 GB of free space, all things considered, and I have two 1 TB portable HDDs should I need to store more data or shuffle them around.

So I recently hooked up my Sega Genesis to a new TV, and the video connection works perfectly fine.

Oh yeah, one of my sets had trouble displaying the Atari 2600, displaying the signal very weakly. I most certainly suggest S-video if your TV has the inputs (or RGB if you have a fancy monitor ).

So, this happened to me today. Would have gone out for a hard drive on Friday but I didn't feel like being trampled to death.

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Terabyte of something, maybe 2 if it goes on sale. I've been milling through the ads in the weekend newspaper for a month or so now, but haven't found anything really good yet.

In terms of manufacturer, I'll go for whatever I can get that doesn't have red warning flags all over the Internet reviews. I'm hoping for a Toshiba, I have a Toshiba laptop and I really trust their products, but it's not the end of the world if I can't get ahold of one.

That, and so far as I've seen SSDs are way more expensive than what I need right now. I'm not going to be running games off it or anything, I just need a place to park all of my YouTube files while I'm not using them.

As today is Cyber Monday, there are some deals on Newegg now for deeply discounted drives of all types:
http://www.newegg.com/store/EventSaleStore/ID-60

Now I wonder if he/she scored a nice system drive.

Anyone hate complicated things in everyday PC usage?

Well, it seems like a lot of companies are trying to uncomplicate your most important files by making their own programs that sync between all of your computers and a website, so you should almost always have your files available. Of course, nearly all of them lead to the same caveats:

• No Internet, no syncing.
• You need a fast connection, at least to sync with the website, when dealing with large files.
• Many of them still only provide a modicum of space for you to use. On the plus side, the fact Microsoft and Google are offering terabytes for a measly few bucks a month seems to have eradicated this issue for those taking cloud syncing seriously, so if you need to back up your video projects or databases you can do so. (Although, for the time being, I still suggest keeping your large videos on an external hard drive instead.)
• Storing a lot of files may take a while to compare every one, but recent advancements seem to have eliminated this problem.
• You still need a local copy before you can use something. The reason this is a problem is because you may not always know what you'll need, so if you have a small hard drive and selectively sync only a few critical files, you may be stuck downloading a large file over of a slow connection.

Might be more of a video game general thing, but my 3DS is starting to get a bit old and the battery isn't lasting as long as it used to. Aside from things like turning off the 3D and brightness and turning on Power Save and draining the battery completely before charging it, is there much I can do to extend the life a bit?