General Computer Thread

[Gingerbread Demon]

Printers are the tool of the devil especially when they play up.

Interesting the toner cartridge for my printer costs $20 more than I paid for the actual printer, and that was brand new in a box from a store. It's cheaper to buy a new printer then just the toner.

 

[Marc]

Printers are the tool of the devil especially when they play up.

Interesting the toner cartridge for my printer costs $20 more than I paid for the actual printer, and that was brand new in a box from a store. It's cheaper to buy a new printer then just the toner.

And you've only just realized this?

 

[Random_Spock]

Oh hell no. Uh, Microsoft, I do not want or need Cortana on my laptop. There's a good reason why I have her disabled as much as I do now. I find her to be more of a hindrance than anything else.

From Bowden:

Microsoft's end goal here is to integrate Cortana into Windows 10 seamlessly so that users don't even know they're using the assistant. This is where the "productivity" aspect of this repositioning comes in. Cortana can keep you being productive by sharing activities across devices with Timeline and "Pick up where you left off," sync and manage notifications across devices, and present things contextually.

Essentially, Cortana is being repositioned to be more of a seamless helper across Microsoft's services, doing so in a way that you potentially won't even realize you're interacting with Cortana at all. What remains certain is that Cortana isn't going anywhere, but the smarts that power the assistant will be more integrated across Windows 10 and Microsoft's apps. Though it's an evolution that comes as a result of Microsoft's loss of ground to Amazon and Google in one sense, it also presents a potential opportunity to lean on everything the company has learned to make its apps and services even smarter across devices.

Source: https://m.windowscentral.com/cortana-reportedly-moving-under-microsoft-office-teams-purview


And some users are running into deleted/corrupted drivers due to the new Microsoft update!

https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/9nh91m/dont_do_the_update_it_deletescorrupts_drivers/

Source: reddit


https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/9ncliw/microsoft_pulled_the_1809_update_now_they_pulled/

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...ate-bsod/ee2ca1bc-b98f-4e1f-9fea-e0803b6766c9

Sources: reddit and microsoft

Womp womp. BSOD was happening on multiple kinds of laptops/computers. So now Microsoft pulls another update.

 

[Owain Taggart]

They just can't seem to catch a break in terms of updates, can they?

 

[Marc]

Oh hell no. Uh, Microsoft, I do not want or need Cortana on my laptop. There's a good reason why I have her disabled as much as I do now. I find her to be more of a hindrance than anything else.

tell use - do you actually experience any of these problems or do you simply search the net for negative stories on Windows 10?

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

And you've only just realized this?

I hadn't had to replace the toner for ages since this printer gets little use. My old one got lots of work printing invoices.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Pity Cortana fucks up on phones.

Do a search result and get blank page when you click on images. Nice

 

[Santaman]

In the past printers were expensive, ink cheap, soon printer people found out that it would gain them far more profit when they sold the printer cheap, make firmware that lies about the actual amount of ink inside the cartridges, make cartridges with a tiny amount of ink, tadaa screw the customer and money rolls in...

I still have a dinky old inkjet thingy, it was already on sale and then some extra price cut made it sell at 32euro, ink, even the cheapest non official kind would be between 38 and 42 Euros..

 

[Australis]

Years ago, I bought online a 2nd hand HP LaserJet 6P. It runs like a boss. The guy threw in some cartridges, they lasted years. Yes B&W, but that's all I need. If you can find one of these, grab it. The driver for it can be a bitch kitty to find, but if you use the HP PCL5 generic driver, you should be good to go. They are gold.

Windows. I'm sticking with 7, for all the stuff above. Hell I'll roll back to XP if I must. FTN.

Now, TWO URGENT REQUESTS!

One, a minimalist browser not heavy on system resources. This is coming from my notebook, because my main PC crashed. But FFox uses up so much CPU on the notebook it's running at dialup speeds. It's horrific.

Two, I can't connect the main PC to the net. I keep getting a 'broadband error 651 PPPoE' msg. I look up numerous YT vids, and they all say, "Oh, this is an easy fix, just do this!" And I do, and it makes zero difference, and fuck you.

Bonus: I also have to try and recover stuff from the crashed hard disk, but it's making the dreaded clicking noise. My son said a trck he's seen working, but it doesn't always, is stick the drive iun a dry bag, leave it in the freezer, then drop it straight into a caddy and run it as a slave, and it should work long enough to pull essential data. Any other suggestion welcome.

It crashed on the day I turned 60. Welcome to old age.

 

[Guy Gardener]

I used a free version of dmde to recover three terabytes from a non functioning drive. It took almost 40 hours to map the drive before the recovery started, but after that it was fine-ish. The free version of the recovery is very manual. You can only recover one folder at a time, which takes a long time to get through to the otherside, wheretofore the paid version is one click to recover everything.

https://dmde.com/

 

[Santaman]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-Meleon
Lightweight browser, I'm not sure Opera is still lightweight...

 

[Australis]

Thanks @Santaman yes, K-Meleon is much faster, FFox was maxing the CPU.

I will try DMDE as soon as I can acess a caddy to put the drive in.

Thanks chaps, much appreciated!

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

Printers are the tool of the devil especially when they play up.

Interesting the toner cartridge for my printer costs $20 more than I paid for the actual printer, and that was brand new in a box from a store. It's cheaper to buy a new printer then just the toner.

I don't even know what brand to get next. I had a nice HP, those a-holes make the printer decide the ink cartridges are "expired" long before they're empty and it won't use them. Out it went.

The Epson and Canon ones I had would take 10 minutes of f-ing around every time they were turned on so I could print for 1 minute and turn them off again. They ended up destroying themselves with all that mechanical BS. Not to mention they won't print in black if one of the color cartridges is empty.

3 printers down the garbage chute within a few years. I understand planned obsolescence, but c'mon man!

Thanks @Santaman yes, K-Meleon is much faster, FFox was maxing the CPU.

I will try DMDE as soon as I can acess a caddy to put the drive in.

Thanks chaps, much appreciated!

I have a 2 spot Thermaltake dock for SATA drives (laptop or desktop). It's nice to be able to access all my old drives when I only have a laptop now.

 

[Australis]

Update. Even though it's a fresh Win7 install, there are a bunch of devices with drivers missing, hence no network. Namely:
ethernet controller
network controller
SM bus controller
USB controller (though the USB devices I have plugged in are working fine).
PCI simple comms

How the hell do i find and install? The Win7 install I have is on a usb and plugged in. The troubleshooter said they were missing and couldn't find them.

 

[Santaman]

You need to download the drivers or look for the driver CD that came with your computer, the ethernet controller, network controller, SM bus controller and the USB controller are part of your mainboard, Windows does not have all drivers built in, so if you've got a Dell or HP etc you'd need to either find the CD's that came with it, if it is a no big name computer there should be a mainboard driver CD, as for the PCI simple comms, seems like a expansion card which either has a CD for the driver or you need to find the website of the manufacturer and download the drivers from there.

 

[Guy Gardener]

look under the lap top for the model type, or in properties... Put that into google and you should be able to find a driver site... The home website for the company that made your laptop might be useful, or might not.

 

[Marc]

Update. Even though it's a fresh Win7 install, there are a bunch of devices with drivers missing, hence no network. Namely:
ethernet controller
network controller
SM bus controller
USB controller (though the USB devices I have plugged in are working fine).
PCI simple comms

How the hell do i find and install? The Win7 install I have is on a usb and plugged in. The troubleshooter said they were missing and couldn't find them.

That's the problem people run into when they have a motherboard that came out later than their operating system. PCI simple coms sounds like there's a modem in there.

Two, I can't connect the main PC to the net. I keep getting a 'broadband error 651 PPPoE' msg. I look up numerous YT vids, and they all say, "Oh, this is an easy fix, just do this!" And I do, and it makes zero difference, and fuck you.

Are you actually still on dialup or connecting your computer directly to an ADSL connection? PPPoE (point to point protocol over ethernet) is used to establish an internet connection but that should be handled by a router. Connecting the PC directly to the internet is bad ju-ju in this day and age.

The Epson and Canon ones I had would take 10 minutes of f-ing around every time they were turned on so I could print for 1 minute and turn them off again. They ended up destroying themselves with all that mechanical BS. Not to mention they won't print in black if one of the color cartridges is empty.

haven't touched an Epson printer in years but was recently helping a person in the building getting her canon inkjet connected to wifi and it was one of the most irritating an unimaginative piece of shit I've ever worked with. The HPs my mother-in-law has had over the years are much better.

Years ago, I bought online a 2nd hand HP LaserJet 6P. It runs like a boss. The guy threw in some cartridges, they lasted years. Yes B&W, but that's all I need. If you can find one of these, grab it. The driver for it can be a bitch kitty to find, but if you use the HP PCL5 generic driver, you should be good to go. They are gold.

Some of those older HPs were built like brick shithouses and would go for ever and the HP driver support is pretty good (but we won't talk about HP's support for other systems for which they should burn in hell)

a couple of months back I read a click bait article of things that were a waste of money to buy and printers were high on the list but I know while not being overly worked ours comes in handy though it's only done 3052 pages but the scanning and faxing come in handy. After the warranty expired I've been using clone cartridges from Amazon. On a page per page basis they don't last quite as long as the genuine but I got to cartridges for less than the price of one HP so it doesn't mater as much.

 

[Australis]

Yesssss...

The USB, provided by the guy that sold it, has Win7 on it... in 48 different flavours! Diff brands, notebooks etc. My son's a bit of an IT guy, and I'm going to visit him in a few days, so I'll take it with me.

Yeah, without those drivers, it's trying to connect directly to the net, which will never happen, so I'll worry about it later.

The real blow was, I was working on a SF short story collection, and hadn't backed it up (yes, yes, I know!) but fortunately I'd sent most of them out to beta readers, so I've recovered about 95% of what disappeared. I wanted to have it up on Amazon about now, so I'm a bit disappointed in that regard. Oh well, that'll learn me, I guess!

Thank you all for your input, kind gentlepersons!

 

[Santaman]

You know what they say: Real men don't backup! ... they cry a lot though.. I hope this won't set you back too much.

 

[Owain Taggart]

Yeah, without those drivers, it's trying to connect directly to the net, which will never happen, so I'll worry about it later.

It feels like older versions of Windows had more drivers as part of the installation. Nowadays it all wants to look it up online to see if it can find them. Recently I had a bit of an issue trying to install a Logitech F700 gamepad. That's a wireless gamepad, and it's a still a popular item currently being sold in stores and it's technically Windows 10 compatible, but Windows 10 does not have any drivers for it. Detects it as a Rumblepad 2, but it doesn't work properly. Took me some figuring out that if you change the driver to an Xbox 360 Wireless pad, it works fine.