- Joined
- Sep 7, 2016
No, it just works. I am a blessed tech priest in that I just bang on things and it sorts itself out. What's your experience, BSOD during startup but not always?
'No Stupid Questions' (NSQ) Internet & Technology Edition
- Thread starter Arm Pit Cream
- Start date
- Joined
- May 13, 2020
Only happens when I first turn on the computer. Afterwards, it automatically restarts itself and works perfectly fine.
Probably need to update a driver or two.
- Joined
- Jan 20, 2019
OH FUCK YEA!!! I loved Dos 4.22 but when Win 3.0 and 3.1 came out it was rock solid.
My path is as follows. Win 3.0/3.1 I used until 2000. In 2000 I used Win2000 for 10 years until 2010. Win 7 from 2010 to Current as it is in one of my swapple SSD's. Win 10 started in 2017 on another SSD.
I'm also messing with Zorin right now as well.
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Stasi
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2019
Anyone here use mobile broadband/internet at home? My area does not have fibre broadband yet and I can only get internet out of the phone line with average speeds of about 250 kbps download.
I just realised I can get a 4g mobile sim with unlimited data for about the same price I pay for my interned and get a mobile broadband/4g hub to connect all my devices at home. In theory, even with 4g I should get way better speeds than what I'm getting with my provider now.
Is there anything I'm missing, any obvious downsides?
I just realised I can get a 4g mobile sim with unlimited data for about the same price I pay for my interned and get a mobile broadband/4g hub to connect all my devices at home. In theory, even with 4g I should get way better speeds than what I'm getting with my provider now.
Is there anything I'm missing, any obvious downsides?
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2016
Check what "unlimited" means(from this point on I will talk about the mobile broadband and router setup).
I've known people in the past that got unlimited plans(3G) that were 20GB at full speed then 4KB/s after that. I've also known people that have old 3G routers and subscriptions with ACTUAL unlimited data at full speed, that's what they signed up for. If a provider is looking to vacuum up customers in a region then it might actually be unlimited, they make a deal that's too good to be true to gain market share then they try to change the deal down the line, so be careful and don't let them re-neg on it in a sneaky way. One such way might be them asking if you want this-or-that for no extra charge for the next 6 months! Wow, a fancier router, Disney+ and VOIP or some other shit! Which changes the contract/subscription, sucks to be you, now you're on 20GB fullspeed and 4KB/s after that.
What they can do depends on the laws and country I assume, but that's how they've always done it over here to get people out of legacy subscriptions that they don't want to exist anymore.
- Joined
- Mar 9, 2020
Thinkpad T400 or toughbook? which meme laptop should I consume? Im sick of using a chromebook.
- Joined
- Feb 3, 2013
T400 is just too old these days for anything more than a GNU-plus-Linux meme build. Core 2 Duo, 8GB RAM maximum, no USB 3.0, and only SATA-II. You're not going to have much fun.
I wouldn't go any older than 430/530.
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2019
I have a T420 with Windows 10 on for situations where I need to run software that only works on Windows. It still works quite well, though I don't use social media so I never have it on super-resource intensive sites. If you tried to take it on Tik Tok that fucker may well explode.
- Joined
- Jul 6, 2020
I've done this before for a few weeks when I didn't have internet. Mobile providers usually have "unlimited" data but you either can't use a mobile hotspot or it's limited to x GB per month. I had a mobile provider which had unlimited hotspot at one point and even then they have a limit of 60GB where after they can turn off your data for any reason. Eventually they completely removed hotspot where you just couldn't use it and added it back with a cap later. I don't think it's a permanent solution. I think it's worth a shot either way but you might be stuck with 250 kbps.
Stasi
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2019
I'll add x230 to the mix, I like the smaller form factor and use one myself. The i5 is holding up pretty well and I have no issues with day to day computing on it but yeh any older than that is a meme machine that will struggle with tasks these days.
I will say though that now might not be the best time. Covid fucked the used laptop market a bit with everyone and their kids wanting their home work/home school laptops. Not as bad as GPUs but still higher than prices in 2019. Thinkpads seem to be some of the worst affected so worth shopping around for alternatives. I've seen HP Elitebook 2570p go for ~£70 recently but Thinkpad x230 are going for £120+ and they are basically exactly the same spec. Actually, think the 2570 has a socketed CPU that you can upgrade so has a leg up on the Lenovo in that regard.
- Joined
- Sep 16, 2018
Would it be safe to store paper keys (e.g. crypto wallet seed phrases) directly in a password manager in case you haven't got something to write them in on hand or just can't be bothered to, or should you absolutely keep those separate? Is there kind of a limit to what you should keep in a password manager before you end up jeopardising any security?
- Joined
- Dec 1, 2018
What has more moving parts that can break, a password manager or a pen and pad?
As an aside putting on my tinfoil hat I'm waiting for the day when it breaks that all the users of some popular password manager are compromised because of a trojan or similar.
- Joined
- Sep 16, 2018
i figured. i'm using both for the time being for backup's sake but eventually i might just drop from the pw manager any and all keys like those that i already have in a notebook.
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2016
Posting this here preemptively because it might be helpful for someone at some point, I'll try to explain what happened and point out some Windows recovery things that makes perfect seem but are outdated yet google/msdn will still present it as the solution.
Windows updated my computer at some point in the middle of the night and then restarted. The next day when I tried to wake it by shaking the mouse nothing happened. It had shut off because it couldn't boot. It seemed to have hosed my Windows installation. Blue screen on boot, could not find anything to boot from with the error message 0x0000000c. Very helpful.
I don't have a recovery disk/stick/media because I'm not a scrub.
Feeling professional I googled the error message and problem. Google suggested I had another problem. Not helpful. Kept googling, found "solutions" on MSDN. I dug up the stick with the installation media and booted from that. On the first screen installation screen I pressed shift-F10 for a command prompt, typed notepad, ctrl-O("Open file") and now I had a basic GUI to navigate with. I typed c: in the filename prompt to jump into C: to see what was going on there. Only four folders, Applications, Program Files, Program Files(x86) and WindowsApps. That's not right at all, WindowsApps shouldn't even be on C:
That was a good clue to what was going on and I used the Notepad dialog window to back out to "my computer". CrucialSSD_OLD was now C: and WD_NVME was G: - windows had decided to swap things around for reasons unknown.
Failed solution 1 as suggested by MS/MSDN/Pajeet8938: Advanced Repair/Fix Startup Problems/System Restore/Uninstall Updates
Those are all good ideas that have been helpful since XP but it couldn't understand where the windows installation was located so all of those failed. The boot record must be pointing to the wrong thing and my C is now G.
Unplugged the other drives and tried again, nothing. Moving on, I saw someone mention bootrec so I'll put that into google.
Failed solution 2: bootrec from the command prompt as suggested by lots of first page results on google.
Fixing the boot record was the solution, I knew that already and bootrec seemed to be the program to do it. Maybe I wouldn't need to use Linux to fix this.
I went back to the command prompt, bootrec /? to list options. Used bootrec /scanos to scan for a valid OS across all drives, it picked up that Windows was located on G: - "Windows installations found: 1" - very promising.
bootrec /fixboot - access denied.
bootrec /rebuildbcd - access denied
bootrec /fixmbr - works but does nothing
Turns out that Windows broke bootrec in late 2019/early 2020. Google will still give you a hundred results that are almost exclusively "can't boot" threads marked as solved where the solution is bootrec. They're all from 2019 or earlier.
Failed solution 3: everything else I can think of, including bcdboot, diskpart and probably more
Fiddling with diskpart, my boot drive is disk 4 while the old one is disk 0, maybe messing around with that does something.
chkdsk /r - maybe there's something going on there.
bcdboot wasn't helpful.
Assigning the hidden system partition a letter so I could take a peek in there.
All of this had the worrisome result that when I tried to see what was going on with "bootrec /scanos" it now reported 0 installations found. It would be annoying to reinstall but using robocopy or the Open File dialogue I can copy my files to another drive and re-install if I have to, the windows 10 installer picks up USB drives so I can just copy things there.
I think it was at this point a new option had appeared, instead of just "repair windows", "advanced options" and "turn off my computer" there was a "go into windows" button. It didn't work, but it wasn't there before.
Working Solution: that was easy. why did I spend two hours doing this shit? Oh for fucks sake Microsoft.
When I booted from my USB stick, created with Rufus, and didn't pay attention(i.e choose exactly what to boot from) it popped up text saying that I need to boot it from UEFI, which makes sense. If I chose the UEFI partition on the usb stick manually it booted as it should.
That's a little bit strange, my boot drive is GPT as required by UEFI, I just checked with bcdboot. My old boot drive is GPT as well, the one before that was GPT as well. I have just been cloning the same installation over and over, only the USB stick had a small FAT32/MBR partition to tell the user to boot using UEFI.
In the bios I found whatever the setting was called and set UEFI booting from AUTO to UEFI ONLY and that was it, it finished installing the update(I had forgotten about that part) that caused all this.
I had never ever touched this option before, everything had worked as intended so why should I? Windows Update can't mess with it either so the update must have changed some part of windows that wasn't happy with my BIOS setting.
I'm not the only one with this problem as I just found out. It's the April KB5001330 cumulative update patch that fucks something up.
Hm, but I defer all my updates for this very reason.
"Microsoft Removes the Option to Defer Windows 10 Feature Updates through Settings App for Business Users"
Oh. [it can still be done, it's in group policy now]
Windows updated my computer at some point in the middle of the night and then restarted. The next day when I tried to wake it by shaking the mouse nothing happened. It had shut off because it couldn't boot. It seemed to have hosed my Windows installation. Blue screen on boot, could not find anything to boot from with the error message 0x0000000c. Very helpful.
I don't have a recovery disk/stick/media because I'm not a scrub.
Feeling professional I googled the error message and problem. Google suggested I had another problem. Not helpful. Kept googling, found "solutions" on MSDN. I dug up the stick with the installation media and booted from that. On the first screen installation screen I pressed shift-F10 for a command prompt, typed notepad, ctrl-O("Open file") and now I had a basic GUI to navigate with. I typed c: in the filename prompt to jump into C: to see what was going on there. Only four folders, Applications, Program Files, Program Files(x86) and WindowsApps. That's not right at all, WindowsApps shouldn't even be on C:
That was a good clue to what was going on and I used the Notepad dialog window to back out to "my computer". CrucialSSD_OLD was now C: and WD_NVME was G: - windows had decided to swap things around for reasons unknown.
Failed solution 1 as suggested by MS/MSDN/Pajeet8938: Advanced Repair/Fix Startup Problems/System Restore/Uninstall Updates
Those are all good ideas that have been helpful since XP but it couldn't understand where the windows installation was located so all of those failed. The boot record must be pointing to the wrong thing and my C is now G.
Unplugged the other drives and tried again, nothing. Moving on, I saw someone mention bootrec so I'll put that into google.
Failed solution 2: bootrec from the command prompt as suggested by lots of first page results on google.
Fixing the boot record was the solution, I knew that already and bootrec seemed to be the program to do it. Maybe I wouldn't need to use Linux to fix this.
I went back to the command prompt, bootrec /? to list options. Used bootrec /scanos to scan for a valid OS across all drives, it picked up that Windows was located on G: - "Windows installations found: 1" - very promising.
bootrec /fixboot - access denied.
bootrec /rebuildbcd - access denied
bootrec /fixmbr - works but does nothing
Turns out that Windows broke bootrec in late 2019/early 2020. Google will still give you a hundred results that are almost exclusively "can't boot" threads marked as solved where the solution is bootrec. They're all from 2019 or earlier.
Failed solution 3: everything else I can think of, including bcdboot, diskpart and probably more
Fiddling with diskpart, my boot drive is disk 4 while the old one is disk 0, maybe messing around with that does something.
chkdsk /r - maybe there's something going on there.
bcdboot wasn't helpful.
Assigning the hidden system partition a letter so I could take a peek in there.
All of this had the worrisome result that when I tried to see what was going on with "bootrec /scanos" it now reported 0 installations found. It would be annoying to reinstall but using robocopy or the Open File dialogue I can copy my files to another drive and re-install if I have to, the windows 10 installer picks up USB drives so I can just copy things there.
I think it was at this point a new option had appeared, instead of just "repair windows", "advanced options" and "turn off my computer" there was a "go into windows" button. It didn't work, but it wasn't there before.
Working Solution: that was easy. why did I spend two hours doing this shit? Oh for fucks sake Microsoft.
When I booted from my USB stick, created with Rufus, and didn't pay attention(i.e choose exactly what to boot from) it popped up text saying that I need to boot it from UEFI, which makes sense. If I chose the UEFI partition on the usb stick manually it booted as it should.
That's a little bit strange, my boot drive is GPT as required by UEFI, I just checked with bcdboot. My old boot drive is GPT as well, the one before that was GPT as well. I have just been cloning the same installation over and over, only the USB stick had a small FAT32/MBR partition to tell the user to boot using UEFI.
In the bios I found whatever the setting was called and set UEFI booting from AUTO to UEFI ONLY and that was it, it finished installing the update(I had forgotten about that part) that caused all this.
I had never ever touched this option before, everything had worked as intended so why should I? Windows Update can't mess with it either so the update must have changed some part of windows that wasn't happy with my BIOS setting.
I'm not the only one with this problem as I just found out. It's the April KB5001330 cumulative update patch that fucks something up.
Hm, but I defer all my updates for this very reason.
"Microsoft Removes the Option to Defer Windows 10 Feature Updates through Settings App for Business Users"
Oh. [it can still be done, it's in group policy now]
- Joined
- Dec 20, 2019
Is there a preferred torrent client these days? I've been using utorrent for years, but it's started freezing constantly.
- Joined
- Oct 8, 2013
qBittorrent has been suggested before here and it has a similar interface to µTorrent without any adware.
- Joined
- Dec 20, 2019
- Joined
- Jul 25, 2016
My apologies if it has already been asked and possibly discussed to death, but what is the consensus on Guilded? My first impression so far was that it is basically Discord, but it doesn't ask you for your phone number and isn't run by paedophile jannies.
- Joined
- May 26, 2020
A couple of my WOW-fag pals use it for their guild and they complain endlessly about how basic stuff doesn't work or works in a strange way. Can't really give you specifics, because every conversation they start about it is a powerful cure for insomnia, so I've long since stopped listening to them.