General Computer Thread

[Santaman]

7 is and will be totally safe until support drops in 2020, as for offline machines, every OS will be safe in that case, I've got XP machines around which are never connected to the net, got Win2k machines, 98SE machines and even machines that run 95, as long you don't let them online they're safe.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

7 is and will be totally safe until support drops in 2020, as for offline machines, every OS will be safe in that case, I've got XP machines around which are never connected to the net, got Win2k machines, 98SE machines and even machines that run 95, as long you don't let them online they're safe.

Cool then that's what I will do. Only what about activation? I'll probably have to activate it.

 

[Santaman]

Yep, that you still need to do, but again, 7 is still a current OS so no problems there.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Yep, that you still need to do, but again, 7 is still a current OS so no problems there.

Good then once activated I yank the Wifi card. That's on a small SATA port so maybe I can swap it with another SSD

 

[Random_Spock]

Oh boy. It's very bad there.

ramakitty
https://www.reddit.com/r/softwaregore/comments/4ckdod/anonymous_exmicrosoft_employee_on_windows/

Source: https://en.reddit.com/r/Windows10/c...0_is_almost_3_years_old_what_do_you/?sort=new

Just double checked and thankfully I'm not in their ridiculous insider program... but it's rather unsettling seeing this on my system. >_>

Spoiler

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Yeah the insider program is bollocks.

Why did MS stop making full stable operating systems like Windows 7, which was the greatest windows.

 

[Random_Spock]

Yeah the insider program is bollocks.

Why did MS stop making full stable operating systems like Windows 7, which was the greatest windows.

Exactly. It wasn't perfect, but it made sense and wasn't overly controlling. 10 feels like one big old beta. Ugh. Hate it. And if something gets f'd up I'll be sore out of luck. 1709 has been relatively stable for me so far, at least in terms of being semi Windows 7-ish.

Money, I'm betting.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Exactly. It wasn't perfect, but it made sense and wasn't overly controlling. 10 feels like one big old beta. Ugh. Hate it. And if something gets f'd up I'll be sore out of luck. 1709 has been relatively stable for me so far, at least in terms of being semi Windows 7-ish.

Money, I'm betting.

I know right?

I wonder why MS shifted tracks in such a big way. Did they sack all the programmers?

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I know right?

I wonder why MS shifted tracks in such a big way. Did they sack all the programmers?

To save money and keep shareholders happy, I think MS got rid of a lot of QA folks and are relying on developers (and customers) to test the software. The trouble is developers have zero interest generally in testing apart from that their bit works. They usually don't do any integration testing with other software or hardware.

 

[Santaman]

Windows and Windows users are no longer a priority to M$, Spycro$oft is all about the cloud now, anything else is second fiddle, Windows is nothing, it doesn't bring them money, the server side with its lucrative licences and the cloud stuff brings them money so get ready for things to get worse.

 

[Random_Spock]

I know right?

I wonder why MS shifted tracks in such a big way. Did they sack all the programmers?

Yea. It's one big headache. Especially when a lot of customers aren't technically inclined. And then you gotta love when the customers are blamed for the problems! /facepalm

https://www.google.com/search?q=mic...rome..69i57.6510j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 (about laid off Microsoft workers over the years)

So we're wondering why it's so f'd up.

To save money and keep shareholders happy, I think MS got rid of a lot of QA folks and are relying on developers (and customers) to test the software. The trouble is developers have zero interest generally in testing apart from than that their bit works. They usually don't do any integration testing with other software or hardware.

Yep and that equals one big mess.

 

[Santaman]

To those who design laptops.. would you stop mounting the fan(s) in stupid places? This is one of the reasons I like my desktop machine, it takes 10 minutes to open it up, remove all the fans, clean the insides and to put the fans back after they've been carefully cleaned...

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

To those who design laptops.. would you stop mounting the fan(s) in stupid places? This is one of the reasons I like my desktop machine, it takes 10 minutes to open it up, remove all the fans, clean the insides and to put the fans back after they've been carefully cleaned...

Why is that? Where do they put the fans?

 

[Santaman]

Usually they're mounted somewhere on the bottom of the machine, which in itself isn't bad but they make sure you first have to remove the battery the HDD etc just to open up the part where the fan is mounted, then you can clear away more stuff to get to the hatch they put over it and when you're all the way inside the guts of the damn thing you are able to get at the fan itself, this is the case with 99% of all laptops..

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Usually they're mounted somewhere on the bottom of the machine, which in itself isn't bad but they make sure you first have to remove the battery the HDD etc just to open up the part where the fan is mounted, then you can clear away more stuff to get to the hatch they put over it and when you're all the way inside the guts of the damn thing you are able to get at the fan itself, this is the case with 99% of all laptops..

Yikes......... They do make it hard to service stuff these days, I guess they are counting on people chucking them when the overheat and "die"

 

[Santaman]

There's the easy way, use a can of air to blow out dust, that works sorta, I don't like to do that, there's a chance that you blow dust into the bearings and you'll never get rid of all the dust, it would be nice if you just had one hatch with one screw or so which gives you access to the fan, that way you can clean it more carefull and blow out the heatsink itself as well.
I have one laptop which has such a design.. it is a '90's era Clevo.. a Pentium 150 which has a simple hatch you can open, heck you can even remove the fan without much effort if needed.

 

[Santaman]

I've got a Medion desktop machine, old thing which is made out of the parts of three similar Medion machines all from 2002 and all had about the same specs and they were all incomplete, after messing around with the parts I ended up with a Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM and a 80 Gb HDD, all three graphics cards from these machines had a Geforce 4 series of card, all with a broken fan, one so badly broken that it sailed right out of the machine when I switched it on.. so I installed a mighty Geforce FX5200 which has a passive heatsink, these things also came with a TV Capture card and a 56K modem boah!
Pulled this thing out of storage, and it did boot up, though after a short while it suddenly rebooted and gave me a an omnious black screen with a message that was kinda like AARG!!? Can't find IMPORTANT FILE.OMG
Found out the harddrive had kicked the bucket, while I do have old PATA drives around I need to reinstall the machine, XP of course, hunting down the drivers was quite a hassle, the machine used to run 98SE not XP but after a while I got them all, the modem was a real bitch though, it did NOT want to install, it refused the XP driver, after a while I found out that for some reason it accepted the Win2K driver, so now I've again got a working 2002 era machine.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

How much are old fashioned hard drives these days? Like the old bigger IDE things? I'd love to find one to play with.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

How much are old fashioned hard drives these days? Like the old bigger IDE things? I'd love to find one to play with.

I think you mean SATA, not [E]IDE. A desktop 4TB hard drive is about £100 in the UK. You can search these things, you know.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I think you mean SATA, not [E]IDE. A desktop 4TB hard drive is about £100 in the UK. You can search these things, you know.

No I meant old fashioned IDE connectors. The ones with the pin headers, and I did search and found some but kinda pricey. You'd think old fashioned stuff like this would be sold for chump change.