Any computer wizz's here?

[pmccarthy]

I always thought Roger Moore was a good stage name.

[Marty_d]

It's usually Roger Less after the honeymoon period. 

[onetrack]

On 31/05/2023 at 4:51 PM, octave said:

I think Ron Jeremy might have gone a little downhill since his heyday.

 

Ron Jeremy found ‘not competent’ to stand trial for multiple rape charges

Now let this be a lesson to you, young man!! Keep chasing pussy constantly, and you'll end up looking like Ron Jeremy!!  

[pmccarthy]

Today my computer locked up. A message on the screen and in audio said it had been infected with an identity theft virus. The message purported to be from Microsoft and looked genuine. It gave me a red button to click and a phone number to ring to get help. It warned me not to turn off my computer. Instead, I pressed CtrlAltDel and shut down all activities.

 

 I have since “spoken” to my antivirus people who said I did the right thing. Do not press the button or ring the number!

[onetrack]

I have Mailwasher installed and I've had nary a single problem with any virus, trojan, keyboard logger or other nasty in about 20 years. But in the early 2000's, before I got Mailwasher, I was overwhelmed with viruses and crap - and they all came in emails.

 

I reckon 99.9% of computer infections and scams start with dodgy or hacked emails. Mailwasher sorts them out, the best part is being able to examine emails prior to them being downloaded. You can examine the email header contents to see where the email source is - and that gives them away every time.

 

Edited June 9, 2023 by onetrack

[spacesailor]

I. Lost my desktop to ' ransom-ware ' .

It changed driveC drive to X : , .

So I will , one day remove that hard-drive , then try fixing the bios program. 

So it looks for C : not bloody X: .

spacesailor

 

Edited June 9, 2023 by spacesailor
AI put a smiley instead of C:

[willedoo]

Credit: Jon Erlichman.

 

In 1983, Steve Jobs typed this reply to a letter asking for his autograph:

 

[red750]

For anyone who has not seen one, this is a hard disk stack, a form of removable storage medium from 1960s computers. This one holds 200 mb of data. A 16 Gb SD card holds the equivalent of 80 of these packs.

 

 

When not installed in the disk drive, they are held in containers like this, which look like cake containers.

 

 

 

[spacesailor]

Computer power bits ? .

I have been gifted a '' mac-book-pro '' and an '' IPad '' .

BUT . No power cords or whatever you need to charge them .

SO

Anyone close-by have a spare to test them out .

If good I could ( hopefully ) purchase a new one ( power supply ) , but if dead or locked . I will pass onto someone for spare-parts .

spacesailor

[Jerry_Atrick]

6 hours ago, red750 said:

For anyone who has not seen one, this is a hard disk stack, a form of removable storage medium from 1960s computers. This one holds 200 mb of data. A 16 Gb SD card holds the equivalent of 80 of these packs.

 

 

When not installed in the disk drive, they are held in containers like this, which look like cake containers.

 

 

 

I think these are quite modern in comparison. And these types of disks were in use right up to the mid 80s. I worked in the Vic Public service from about 84 - 86 and my first job was changing these in and out for backups. The larger stack was about the size we used - they were, at the time, a whopping 300MB.

 

One day, the heads crashed into the production disks and brought he system down. Despite having "state of the art" database systems at the time, we worked around the clock for 2 days to bring the system back up in an integral state. The department head arranged to take the crashed disk platterrs apart and presented each of us one in a frame, engraved thanking us for our efforts. I still have it today.

 

[nomadpete]

Has the explosion of cheap computer memory led to sloppy bloating code?

Those archaicmemories seemed to hold a disproportionately large amount of real data.

[Jerry_Atrick]

And despite all of the latest object oriented, aspect oritented, functional programming methokds, even more uinmaintainable code than the good ol' days.

[nomadpete]

3 minutes ago, Jerry_Atrick said:

And despite all of the latest object oriented, aspect oritented, functional programming methokds, even more uinmaintainable code than the good ol' days.

But we hope they at least get a better spelling score than amateur forumites....

🙂

Edited July 2, 2023 by nomadpete

[red750]

I thhink Jerry types on an iPhone keyboard with his toes. Even his edited posts have typo's. 

[spacesailor]

BUT

It's the new A I , that changes what we wish to say, to what the a i hopes is right .

It still is unable to spell the " pronunciation " of words pronounced the same although spelt differently. 

spacesailor

[Jerry_Atrick]

For some reason, the spellchecker doesn't work on my browser.. Maybe even it gave up!

 

[Jerry_Atrick]

1 hour ago, nomadpete said:

But we hope they at least get a better spelling score than amateur forumites....

🙂

You can tell I was a programmer - Too used to compilers and interpreters. 😉

Edited July 2, 2023 by Jerry_Atrick

[Jerry_Atrick]

1 hour ago, red750 said:

I thhink Jerry types on an iPhone keyboard with his toes. Even his edited posts have typo's. 

Who says I edit my posts to correct typos 😉

 

[Bruce Tuncks]

I buy lots of stuff online, and I know I should keep records but don't do it.

If I can, I use paypal but not all accept it.

SO....  I tried to use the computer, asking it for details of online purchases recently from this computer...

I just got a lot of gobbledigook, trying to sell me software etc...  Did I do something wrong?

[nomadpete]

What did you say to it?

 

And did you say please?

Edited July 17, 2023 by nomadpete

[Marty_d]

12 hours ago, Bruce Tuncks said:

I buy lots of stuff online, and I know I should keep records but don't do it.

If I can, I use paypal but not all accept it.

SO....  I tried to use the computer, asking it for details of online purchases recently from this computer...

I just got a lot of gobbledigook, trying to sell me software etc...  Did I do something wrong?

Email searches are your friend.  Try "receipt" or "invoice".

[willedoo]

Computers are frustrating; just lucky I haven't got any hair to tear out. I run Windows 10 on a laptop and about a week ago it suddenly slowed down to a crawl. Surfing the net wasn't too noticeably affected apart from some browser crashes, but almost everything else was. Boot and shutdown times were much longer and apps and programmes were taking a minute or two to start and were running slow. Doing anything in Explorer like opening folders and files was a real pain.

 

I've noticed that these days the amount and quality of online advice re troubleshooting is poor compared to what it was like a few years ago, so no joy there. Maybe it's the Google algorithms burying stuff deep in the search pages.

 

First up was the obvious scans for viruses and malware and that was all clean. Next I got rid of any old unused and unwanted programmes, stopped some non critical resource hogs from running automatically at startup, cleaned up all the crap temp files and did some basic housekeeping. Still no joy, so I decided to defrag the disc. That just stalled out, then I found out it's all quite different for an SSD. The system is set to maintain that, so that was not the problem. Next, I set the page file at a fixed, more than adequate size. Still no luck, so I was about to pull the RAM out, give the slots a blow out and refit it which sometimes works. Before I did that, I decided to see if the graphic drivers needed updating.

 

Device manager said they were the latest available, so I clicked on the option to search for newer drivers on Windows update. On the update page they had a pending update available. I have the computer set to notify updates so I can manually install them, rather than auto update. The update was one of those cumulative .NET Framework updates, so I downloaded that, rebooted, and the problem was solved. It's now going full throttle. What caused the original problem, I have no idea. It seems all a bit weird to me, but the end result is good. Caused by a corrupted file or driver maybe. Whatever it was, that update fixed it.

[willedoo]

54 minutes ago, willedoo said:

just lucky I haven't got any hair to tear out

A small correction, that's actually not true - there's plenty growing out of my ears.

[Jerry_Atrick]

I fire up task manager and look at resource usage (cpus, etc). I think go to the process list and sort the processes on the highest usage of whatever resource looks to be the problem and kill whatever the process is. That often works.

 

The .net framework has incremental process improvements whith each release, but that alone wouldn't have fixed it by as much as you have said. You may well have been running a process that terminated on a restart (restartsd by default close the whole system down, empty queues and stacks and remove the temp memory snapshots on disk  - to speed up booting, switching off keeps a memory image on disk and reboots to this rather than a fresh system - by default).

 

The other think is that you mat have a program running that was designed to take advantage of a big fix in a later .net version that you were running at the time.

 

[willedoo]

Thanks Jerry, I think the latter could be more likely. The problem was ongoing over quite a few days, so there were lots of reboots with no improvement in the meantime. I hadn't installed any new programmes or software around that time. I did update Firefox to the latest version which turned out to be another nightmare, so uninstalled it and went back to the previous version. But that was a couple of days after the problem began, so it wouldn't be the cause.

 

Just another thought, I downloaded a Windows update on 30.9.23, so was wondering if something went wrong there that the later update corrected.