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Author Topic: The Generic Computer Advice Thread  (Read 492938 times)

wierd

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3495 on: August 31, 2017, 08:40:05 pm »

sounds like an alsa.conf related thing...
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Tawa

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3496 on: August 31, 2017, 10:24:43 pm »

I thought it might be that, as it occurred while I was messing around with alsa's settings to try and temporarily disable my laptop's built-in microphone, but I don't think it's that at this point, because the complete reinstallation of Alsa should have reset the program's config files.

Something else strange is that when messing with each individual setting (e.g. speaker volume, headphones volume, etc.), the sound cuts out if I mute the headphone audio, but changing the headphone audio's volume does nothing--I can turn headphone volume to 0 and nothing will change, but muting it kills the music outright.

I've tried messing with pavucontrol as well. The only difference I can seem to make is that if I manually change the port from "headphones" to "speaker", the aforementioned effect stops occurring--if the port is set to speaker, the headphone audio can be muted or unmuted and sound will still play.
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Paxiecrunchle

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3497 on: August 31, 2017, 10:28:18 pm »

PTW, I just might need this thread someday.

Tawa

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3498 on: September 01, 2017, 03:43:40 pm »

I'm not quite sure which thing I did fixed it--I think it was uninstalling and reinstalling 'qasmixer'--but the issue has been solved.
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chaotic skies

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3499 on: September 01, 2017, 09:35:22 pm »

Hopefully there are a few people here who know the magic of google/excel, as I don't.

So, I'm trying to convert a table of results from a tabletop game into google sheets (I'm cheap and don't have excel). Basically, I want to be able to role 2 dice and plug in their results, and then get an output from the table. One part is easy; rows are numbered, so they only need some minor amount of math. The problem is, columns aren't; they have letters. So i'm trying to find a way that doesn't involve writing 100 "if b3 = x then output y" cells to convert from numbers to letters. I've googled it, and either something isn't quite clicking or I'm asking the wrong question.

If something doesn't make sense and I need to explain more, I can, I'm probably missing some small thing anyway.
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wierd

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3500 on: September 01, 2017, 10:19:37 pm »

Pswrwrwrt--- (You can totally get "math" from libreoffice, even on windows. It does spreadsheets, and can save in excel format. It costs 0$.)
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Greiger

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3501 on: September 01, 2017, 11:39:26 pm »

Probably a stupid question because I really should know this, but my PC kicked the bucket, all signs point to a worn out power supply.  I salvaged the drives and am connecting them up to a laptop while I wait for parts for my new baby, the SSD reads fine, but for some reason the main Drive is not readable, not showing up in explorer.  In disk management, it shows as G: but as no media.  Old PC was win 8.1 the temporary laptop I'm working with is win 7.

Anybody know what I'm doing wrong?
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wierd

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3502 on: September 01, 2017, 11:58:01 pm »

It might be getting a drive letter as a removable device class (similar to an SD card slot with no card inside), but might have a nuked partition table.

Try looking (DONT TRY RECOVERY YET!) at it with TestDisk. It is designed to recover nuked partition tables.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

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Greiger

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3503 on: September 02, 2017, 12:03:05 am »

Awesome, thanks, it's been ages since I did this kind of computer work.
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Reudh

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3504 on: September 02, 2017, 04:51:45 am »

Probably a stupid question because I really should know this, but my PC kicked the bucket, all signs point to a worn out power supply.  I salvaged the drives and am connecting them up to a laptop while I wait for parts for my new baby, the SSD reads fine, but for some reason the main Drive is not readable, not showing up in explorer.  In disk management, it shows as G: but as no media.  Old PC was win 8.1 the temporary laptop I'm working with is win 7.

Anybody know what I'm doing wrong?

If a PSU fails, depending on how good it was, it can end up nuking just about every other component. When my old PC's PSU died, I was extremely lucky to escape with no damaged components (maybe motherboard, which began to fail about a year after the PSU).

It might simply be that the hard drive isn't mounted properly; it might be that the drive is buggered. The fact it's reading it at all is a good-ish sign.

Khan Boyzitbig

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3505 on: October 04, 2017, 01:51:31 pm »

So my laptops hard drive recently did something, sounded like it was skipping and windows decided to shutdown saying there was an error. I had tried to open task manager when I heard it start making the noises which didn't open. It had no effect on the browser until windows said nope and began trying to shutdown.

I checked event viewer to see what it was saying and see if any events were logged, the actual error isn't listed as having happened but that a shutdown occurred that was unexpected. Multiple NFTS logs stating that the drives were all healthy (it scanned them during boot) and I ran the hardware checkup program that came with the PC that wasn't window's own and that said the drive was okay too.

Everything important that was on the laptop has been backup up to an external drive I have which is both a very large drive and almost completely empty (well 164gb is on that drive but the total size is 3.63tb). I'm just confused as to exactly what happened there. Although it is a 4ish year old laptop and has been in heavy use over the past 2.5 years.
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Rose

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3506 on: October 05, 2017, 01:58:49 am »

So I decided to revive my old laptop, and put windows 10 on it.

And it has a habit of randomly shutting off for no reason. Not shutting down cleanly or sleeping, just powering off.

It doesn't have that problem in win7, or linux. Only Win10.

Anything I can try?
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Lord Shonus

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3507 on: October 05, 2017, 02:01:57 am »

That sounds like a faulty sensor (or driver) is triggering a "critical battery" setting in Windows 10. Try turning off every power saving function you can find.

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AzyWng

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3508 on: October 05, 2017, 10:09:51 am »

Does defragmenting a game's files improve its performance? If so, why?

Does defragmenting shorten the lifetime of a hard drive? If so, why?

Defragmenting is bad for SSDs, right? Why?
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Reelya

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #3509 on: October 05, 2017, 10:31:32 am »

Hope this is clear, I'm trying to keep this non-technical.

The whole point of defragging was for physical hard-drives with a moving read-write head: by packing related data near each other, the amount the head needs to move is reduced, which reduces latency but also wear and tear on the arm mechanism, but at the expense of read/write wear and tear on the platter. So the goal is to minimize read/write head movement, which improves access speed and avoids jumping around (which is more wear and tear on the read/write head). to do this it needs to shunt old files out of the way and pack new files in, which means a lot of shuffling of files.

Hhowever, SSDs don't have moving parts, so they don't need to have a file packed in sequentially for faster access. So the defrag shuffling is just wear and tear on the drive for no good reason. Additionally, SSDs have special controllers in them that shuffle the blocks around as needed, to ensure that all wear and tear happens evenly. Defragging just messes that up.
« Last Edit: October 05, 2017, 10:44:42 am by Reelya »
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