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  1. J

    My mother passed away

    As some of you may know, I've been care taking for my mother for about the last decade. Things got more involved when she stopped walking about 6 years ago. I had to bathe her, put her on the toilet, move her from her bed to her recliner, and so forth. I semi-retired in 2018, both to take care...
  2. J

    Weird speaker problem (possible virus?)

    I've had an intermittent problem for months, possibly longer, which has been driving me crazy. At random times I get chatter on my speakers (cheap, generic external speakers I've had for years). It sounds like the kind of chatter you might hear on emergency frequencies like police, fire...
  3. J

    Samsung MZ7WD960HMHP (SV843) Read Speed Slow Down

    I bought three of these back in 2016. I've had no issues with them except for the fact that reads become slower in parts of the drive where data hasn't been refreshed in a while. For example: For now my kludge for fixing this has been to defragment the drive. I use MyDefrag and the "System...
  4. J

    Upgrading Samsung S5 SM-G900V to newer version of Android

    A few years ago I got my friend's old S5. I've been using it as a gadget, not a phone (i.e. no cell phone service). I can access the Internet via WiFi so it's fairly useful even without a phone contract. Anyway, one thing it's been great for is depositing checks from home. Unfortunately, first...
  5. J

    Microsoft Edge Update

    On June 25 MS released a Microsoft Edge update for Windows 7. So far I haven't installed it just in case there are any potential issues. Is it safe to install, or have any problems cropped up since the release?
  6. J

    New strain of coronavirus

    We bought some Chinese food yesterday after bringing my mother home from her doctor's appointment. I thoroughly washed down the containers before opening them. When they were drying on the stove I noticed something strange: Apparently it's a new strain of coronavirus which is visible to the...
  7. J

    Email forwarding from dead email address

    Here's the problem. I recently switched from TWC/Spectrum to Verizon FIOS. TWC had given me an email account in which I set up several email addresses. When I shut down my TWC account these accounts were deleted. I had already downloaded and saved all of the current messages so no issues there...
  8. J

    Vehicle Telemetry Recorders

    As a member of a site devoted to reducing the carnage caused by motor vehicles, one thing which has come up repeatedly is why don't motor vehicles keep an ongoing record of vital telemetry data like speed, pedal/steering wheel positions, turn signal state, and so forth. With the size of today's...
  9. J

    How to go from Office 365 to Office 2016

    Last year I was given a one year subscription to Office 365. It expired yesterday. I'm told the software will remain function for another month at least. Given that I don't need Office on more than one machine I've concluded it's better in the long run for me to just buy Office 2016 outright...
  10. J

    Sump pumps which don't need water cooling

    We've had basement flooding problems whenever it rains since we've moved here. I gradually fixed most of the problems except on one side of the house. The issue is caused by water flowing in under the driveway, then eventually filling the window wells, and spilling over into the basement. It...
  11. J

    Can't install Office 365

    I was given Office 365 as a birthday gift by a friend of mine. Unfortunately, when I tried to install it I only got as far as starting to set up a Microsoft account. Microsoft wanted a phone number so they could send a text message to verify my identity. I only have a voice-only VOIP phone...
  12. J

    USB drives larger capacity than advertised?

    I thought this might be of some general interest. We've all been buying USB drives for a long time. Usually their capacity seems to be exactly as advertised, or sometimes a slight amount less. For example, I have a pair of these I bought last year which are 127,968,411,648 bytes total capacity-a...
  13. J

    Recovering vanished partitions.

    I was working in Windows 7 today when I suddenly had no access at all to my 200 GB Maxtor drive. I have four partitions on this drive-an XP boot partition, and 3 data partitions. In truth, I have backups of probably nearly everything but I would like to try to restore my partitions if possible...
  14. J

    Internet very slow the last few days

    Is it just me, or are other people experiencing very slow internet connections lately? A few sites are loading quickly, many are taking literally forever (i.e. like over a minute) to load a page. Is some kind of cyberattack going on?
  15. J

    AVX- holy cow!

    Reading recently about CPU architecture and processor floating point performance, I was actually stoked to learn my new A10-5800K has AVX capability. It turns out AVX actually works exceedingly well in the real world. Here's Intel Burn Test with a regular (SSE?) floating point Linpack: And...
  16. J

    Gavotte Ramdisk Utility

    I came across the Gavotte Ramdisk Utility today when googling if it was possible to get XP to use more than 4GB of RAM. While you can't (unless you have SP1 and enable PAE), you can still make use of otherwise unaddressable RAM with this utility because it can access RAM over the 4 GB barrier...
  17. J

    Remapping parallel port addresses

    This problem is related to my new pc but I wanted to start a new thread in case others are experiencing the same issues, rather than burying this deep in the new pc thread. Here's the issue in a nutshell-I can't get my microcontroller programmer to work on my new machine. I more or less solved...
  18. J

    Synchronizing to an NTP server over LAN

    I recently set up my desktop PC as an NTP server ( don't ask-it's a really long story ). Everything works well, time seems to match my G-Shock solar atomic watch exactly. I even set up my laptop to synchronize to the desktop over the LAN every 15 minutes. I used task scheduler to run the net...
  19. J

    question PC may have died-need some feedback on MB/CPU/RAM

    My A7N8X-E may finally have given up the ghost. It was periodicly experiencing total freezes, and they were getting more and more frequent. Last night I figured I would open the computer up, dust it off inside, reseat the RAM, and replace the thermal compound on the processor heat sink. That...
  20. J

    MyDefrag

    I finally found a great, free, third party defragger called MyDefrag. Current version is 4.3.1. The program is completely customizable via scripts. It has several default scripts for both data disks and system disks which do a great job. I managed to defragment some volumes where Windows...
  21. J

    Fusion power and peak oil

    Despite all the hoopla about fusion as the ultimate power source of the future, the truth is pretty depressing. Especially sobering is the fact that starting up a single commercial fusion reactor will require more tritium than currently exists on Earth. Sure, deuterium fusion is a better...
  22. J

    Weird free space problem with 2TB drive

    I purchased a Samsung F4 2TB drive about a month ago. Generally, before using a drive, I'll let it burn in a while and also surface scan it a number of times. No problems there, but it seems the drive is reporting its free space incorrectly. The free space is correct after I format the drive...
  23. J

    Using GPU for math operations

    I've read about some programs greatly increasing calculation speed by using the GPU for floating point calculations. Is there any software or drivers which could make a computer do that with any program? I'm just curious because lately I've been doing a lot of circuit simulation, and I'm...
  24. J

    Goodbye to the decade of the crank

    It seems I'm not the only one to have complained about the growing phenomenom of uneducated "experts". Some of my favorite lines from the article: "Over the last ten years, we’ve been inundated by a constantly growing stream of punditry and in a quest to give every view its time in the sun and...
  25. J

    Regedit, cmd not working in XP

    All of a sudden my machine refuses to run regedit and cmd. All that happens when I try to run them is that all the shortcuts on my desktop disappear for a few seconds, and then reappear. Same thing when I try to run Windows Commander (a Windows management program similar to the old DOS-based...
  26. J

    pureSilicon 1TB 2.5" drive

    It looks like SSDs will beat the density of magnetic disks in 2009 Price to be announced....
  27. J

    1 TB Samsung for $94.99 free shipping at Newegg

    Title says it all. Less than $0.10 per GB. Both models are on sale: 5400 RPM 7200 RPM Why get the 5400 RPM over the 7200 RPM if the price is the same? Reading the reviews, it runs cooler, uses less power, makes less noise, and should have higher reliability. It isn't as slow as the speed...
  28. J

    Modern day tower of Babel

    Earlier this year the Burg Dubai surpassed all previous height records, including those for radio transmission masts. As of October 8, it stands at 720.1 meters (2362.5 feet) and still rising. Actual final height is still a secret, but 818 meters (2683.7 feet), or over half a mile, looks...
  29. J

    World's most disgusting apartment

    It never ceases to amaze me how some people can live like this. CAUTION: Link definitely not safe while eating!
  30. J

    Blocked tracking cookies list help

    I recently was bothered by something called MSAntivirus 2009 which redirected me to a site attempting to get me to download malware. Anyway, I came to the conclusion that I should have been selectively blocking cookies but never got around to it. Today I started adding sites to my blocked cookie...
  31. J

    TWC RoadRunner Speed Boost?

    After getting in the area of 10 Mbps for the last year or so I had heard RoadRunner bumped the speed to 16 Mbs. Turns out I'm even getting a bit more than that: Anyone else experiencing similar speeds now?
  32. J

    Dell Dimension 2400 (not mine) stuck in UDMA-2

    Yesterday I helped a friend install XP and otherwise get a Dell Dimension 2400 system he inherited from a neighbor into useable condition. Surprisingly since it was a Dell, everything went fine. The only glitch was that the hard disks (Samsung 250 GB, WD 80GB) are stuck in UDMA-2 (33 MB/sec). I...
  33. J

    Low fps in 3D applications when PC not shutdown for several days

    I've had this problem ever since I built my last machine. I'm not sure whether it also existed with my previous video card but it definitely exists with my present one (EVGA Geforce 6200). When the PC is freshly rebooted, I'll get decent frame rates in Train Simulator, often up to the maximum 60...
  34. J

    Is the concept of virtual memory obsolete?

    Looking at the latest offerings while researching the PC for my brother has led me to one conclusion-that the idea of virtual memory, paging to disk, or whatever other names may have been used, seems to be obsolete. I disabled the page file on my machine when I installed XP. I only had 1GB at...
  35. J

    New PC for my brother-best MB/processor combo?

    My brother has been stuck using an aging AMD K6-2 450 MHz machine. It's come to the point where the thing is both slow as molasses and very unstable, especially in hot weather. Me and my mom want to surprise him with a new machine for Christmas. I want to "future-proof" him as much as possible...
  36. J

    Need advice on disposing of Dad's hobby "stuff"

    Here's the problem-we have a basement full of crap from my Dad's hobbies. Since it's worth something and neither of us are rich we can't just throw it away. However, going by typical eBay prices most of it would sell for so little after counting eBay/Paypal fees that we wouldn't do much better...
  37. J

    Samsung makes 64 Gb NAND flash chip

    Samsung Electronics revealed that they have made a prototype 64 Gb NAND flash chip using a 30 nm process. Production is expected to start in 2009. The new process promises to improve cost efficiency as well as increase capacity to 8 GB on a single chip. I remember back when 8 GB represented...
  38. J

    Making a 4GB USB drive bootable

    I finally bought my first USB thumb drive. I've been wanting one for a while, but the prices for a given capacity point were too high for my tastes. Staples had a nice 4GB drive on sale for $29.99 last week. This seemed reasonable, so I bought it. Anyway, I figured it might be useful to make...
  39. J

    1GB then and now

    I came across this article about a state-of-the-art 1GB hard disk from 1980 recently. This really makes you appreciate today's technology. The first picture comparing the drive to a 1GB flash card is really a hoot. A more apt comparison would have been to compare a 16GB card to the roomful of...
  40. J

    Should we ban disposable batteries?

    Since we already have one "should we ban it thread" I figured it's time for another. Now our society makes a whole bunch of other, disposable junk I suppose I could pick on, such as one-use cameras, one-serving prepackaged meals, flashlights with no replaceable battery, etc. However, the one...
  41. J

    Downloads not working in IE7

    I've noticed this problem about two weeks ago. Whenever I try to do a download in IE7, no matter from where, I get the message "Internet Explorer was not able to open this Internet site. The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try again later." Any ideas of what can...
  42. J

    MIA members

    Going over the members list I noticed quite a few regulars haven't posted here in a while, sometimes a long while. Anyone know what happened to: Cougtek Fushigi Howell/Cliptin Prof. Wizard flagreen James SteveC honold Jan Kivar That about covers all those with >200 posts who haven't been here...
  43. J

    Any Samsung CLP-510 color laser printer issues?

    The local BJs has the Samsung CLP-510 for $250 with a $70 rebate good through 12/31. I'm seriously thinking of purchasing it since my HP Deskjet 940C refuses to recognize color cartridges, and therefore won't do anything. HP tech support either refused or didn't know how to tell me to override...
  44. J

    TV card suggestions

    My brother asked me what I needed for my birthday. I told him a TV card would be a good idea. I'm basically looking for something to enable me to transfer VHS tapes and/or record programs to DVDs. I'd prefer a component connection to my cable TV box for best signal quality. If possible, I...
  45. J

    Motherboard/processor suggestions for new PC for my mom

    I'm in the process of building my mom a new PC. I'm using a Lian-Li PC60 case and Seasonic power supply just like I used for the PC I built myself early in the year. The motherboard must have the following: 1) Slots for at least 3 GB DDR memory. Slots for DDR2 are OK also but it must have...
  46. J

    In Memory of Joseph T. Realmuto, Sr. (October 2, 1934 to March 28, 2006)

    Many here have speculated on my reasons for being absent from these forums for over 8 months. A few people who have contacted me privately already know the reason. Since this is a close knit group I thought it time to let everyone know the reason, and it should be obvious from the thread...
  47. J

    Error 29 and Turbo Tax

    My sister recently installed the latest version of Tubo Tax on her system. She did her federal return, and went to download the state information. She said she got an "error 29". She also got "error 29" when she tried to find any updates. Turbo Tax tech support said it was caused by...
  48. J

    Aggravation building new computer

    As some of you may know some time back Merc sent me an A7N8X-E motherboard and XP2500 processor. Last week I bought some RAM for it, and on Tuesday a nice Lian Li PC-60 case arrived. I assembled everything, put in a spare floppy, CD-ROM drive, and 40 GB Maxtor, and then installed Windows 98...
  49. J

    Xbox 360 stupidity

    First there was the hype, and then I saw idiots camping out Tuesday night waiting for the stores to open. Finally, everything else paled by comparison when I checked eBay. $12,100 for a game console!? :o And I saw quite a few other auctions which closed in excess of $5,000. If this...
  50. J

    eBay/Paypal holiday discount coupons

    For those who might be buying some things on eBay this month, there are a few holiday coupons: $5 off of $50, code: C2-Holiday2005 $15 off of $100, code: C3-Holiday2005 10% off ($25 max savings), code: C1-Holiday2005 I don't know the expiration dates, but the C1 code worked for me. Enjoy!
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