General Computer Thread

[Santaman]

5 years isn't old for a computer these days, personally I would stay the hell away from all in one machines, they usually contain laptop parts, cooling such a thing is harder to do, parts either hilariously expensive and probably not to be found anymore after production is over and upgrading it would be a nightmare if even possible.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

5 years isn't old for a computer these days, personally I would stay the hell away from all in one machines, they usually contain laptop parts, cooling such a thing is harder to do, parts either hilariously expensive and probably not to be found anymore after production is over and upgrading it would be a nightmare if even possible.

Exactly. There's a huge lack of upgradability for all in one PC's not to mention the lack of cooling or standard parts.

 

[Shatinator]

So who here knows or has a chromebook. What has been your experiences? I and my partner had purchases two chromebooks at the start of 2018, after MS bricked my PC. Mine is Acer chromebook 15, and I have had some mechanical issues and update "wonkyness". It often moves my files around, It loops when trying to log on to certain sites (i.e. previous yahoo post, also it does this with my bank). I never was able to resolve this. And now ... I can not move my files to the folder I created on my c drive. This has happened in the past when it has updated, first time it was for a couple days and solved itself. Then with another update restricted itself again, allowed it a few days later and then now it's restricted again.

All very frustrating, I've spent many hours on line trying to research a solution, usually ending up at a Chrome / Google "help forum" where people will post my exact problem to little or nor response going back years by the so called experts running said forum.

Has anyone ever had these experiences or knowledge about said issues with chromebook?

 

[Santaman]

Sorry but I've got no idea about these things, if it were a Windows machine I'd suggest to reinstall the damn thing.

 

[Shatinator]

Sorry but I've got no idea about these things, if it were a Windows machine I'd suggest to reinstall the damn thing.

I gets this completely, but .. I'm trying to put some daylight between me and Windows because they killed my last perfectly operational computer. Aaa'twell, life happens and I will solider on ..

 

[Santaman]

Go Linux, a distribution like Linux Mint would be SO much more than Chrome OS, I kicked Windows off my machines and running Linux Mint 18.x and the just released Mint 19. On them using the Cinnamon desktop, never looked back.

 

[Guy Gardener]

An external hard drive failed

2.5 terabytes of media.

I found a recovery tool called "dmde 3.06", that I may ave used before, that worked, but if it's the free version of the tool I think that it is, it is very labour intensive.... Because they want me to shell out for the premium tool.

I'm 67 percent through a 35 hours long HD scan, which will tell me how much of my media is recoverable.

"Sigh"

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I have a hardware RAID-5 array that I perhaps put too much trust in being able to recover, should a single disk fail in the array. The inadequate documentation states barely more than to use a replacement disk of the same or larger size than the original. There's no mention of how it should be partitioned (I assume it shouldn't) or whether the array needs to be shut down before replacing the disk (the disks are supposedly hot swappable but I assume the array should be able to deal with a disk failing while offline). Of course, if two disks were to fail in the array at the same time or another original disk were to fail during recovery after replacing the original failed disk, I'd be stuffed anyway.

 

[Santaman]

You do not have to partition the drive, the array will do a rebuild, if hot swappable then not turn off the machine, stop/starts are hard on harddrives, if these have been spinning for years they might simply not spin up again, I've seen this happen a few times, also, when one drive fails and the others are of the same type and age then you can bet more will kick the bucket, RAID 5 is obsolete and performance not all that great either.
back to hot swap, of course hot swap as in: Fitted into a hot swap bay which can cut power by a push on the button after which the drive, usually mounted inside a caddy, can be taken out.
As for non server people without a tape archive or other neat toys but with data they REALLY do not want to lose, get a second machine, backup routine would be: make backup on external drive then copy that onto the other machine, that will make three places already with your data.


Edited to add: Windows Defender is working again.
https://www.askwoody.com/2018/windows-defender-is-now-working-again/

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I would suggest also storing data that is really valuable to you offsite - in the cloud, for example, or at least as many miles away as possible.

 

[Santaman]

Personally I do NOT want to store anything in "the cloud" I simply don't trust any of them.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Personally I do NOT want to store anything in "the cloud" I simply don't trust any of them.

Same. I don't even sign up for so called "cloud services" like onedrive or such. It might come with Windows but I have never used it or wanted to. The only thing I've touched is dropbox for sharing files and then only with people that I know and have vetted.

Cloud services to me is a sign saying "we might get hacked one day and all our data stolen"

 

[Guy Gardener]

There's a cloud service that lets you store 5tb forever gratis.

The down side is that if you want to download anything back, to your physical drives... They make you wait ten hours, before the down load starts.

The free recovery tool that I am using is working well, but it only lets me reconstruct one folder at a time, manually, and there's easily hundreds of folders on this bloody hard drive.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I wouldn't recommend storing any information in the cloud that could be used for identity theft, especially email folders, tax records, bank account records, financial spreadsheets, passport and birth certificate scans, and the like. Although, in theory, if you use very strong encryption you should be ok, there is always risk.

 

[Guy Gardener]

the cloud storage user agreement for Tencent, China's largest cellphone provider, says, and I shit you not, we own everything you put on our servers, and we reserve the right to use any of that information in any way we see fit, up to and including making a cartoon sitcom from your family photo albums.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

the cloud storage user agreement for Tencent, China's largest cellphone provider, says, and I shit you not, we own everything you put on our servers, and we reserve the right to use any of that information in way we see fit up to and including making a cartoon sitcom from your family photo albums.

I wonder how many customers they have.

 

[Shatinator]

the cloud storage user agreement for Tencent, China's largest cellphone provider, says, and I shit you not, we own everything you put on our servers, and we reserve the right to use any of that information in way we see fit up to and including making a cartoon sitcom from your family photo albums.

Umm, hmmm ...reading this with my partner we think something may of gotten lost in translation.

 

[Marc]

I have a hardware RAID-5 array that I perhaps put too much trust in being able to recover, should a single disk fail in the array.

first rule of RAID - RAID is not a backup. I also had a university lecturer 20+ years ago who said you didn't need backups when you had RAID.. Wanted to tell I'd spent the previous weekend rebuilding a client's server after the RAID-5 setup shit it's self. Unfortunately it was in the days before bare metal restores.

In this day and age RAID-5 is a concern because drive sizes mean huge rebuild times (talking days into weeks here). People are going towards RAID-6 which uses two parity drives (still huge rebuild times but you're covered in case a second drive goes south).

 

[Shatinator]

So I solved one of my Chromebook issues, at least presently .. the issues with this Chromebook were really piling up. Today I found I was inhibited from deleting any files. Not any critical ones either - my own pictures and the like that I transferred from my cell or downloaded from the web. But I discovered why, the reason I couldn't delete or move files to folders ... Google Play Store.

This is the most bizarre OS I have been exposed to. Google claims this is a fast and easy system, but they apply so many road blocks to simply user controlled functions it is astounding. I access the play store app, to no surprise solve another Chromebook issue; but to find this.

Well, small victories!

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

first rule of RAID - RAID is not a backup. I also had a university lecturer 20+ years ago who said you didn't need backups when you had RAID.. Wanted to tell I'd spent the previous weekend rebuilding a client's server after the RAID-5 setup shit it's self. Unfortunately it was in the days before bare metal restores.

In this day and age RAID-5 is a concern because drive sizes mean huge rebuild times (talking days into weeks here). People are going towards RAID-6 which uses two parity drives (still huge rebuild times but you're covered in case a second drive goes south).

Yeah, not my only copy of the data.