#2
|
||||
|
||||
If you're backing up against hard drive failure and are using a desktop, you should buy a second 1 TB internal drive and set up RAID. You may need to buy the same one you already have.
If you're backing up against both hard drive failure and personal stupidity, you may want to give monthly + incremental backups a shot. That's where you make a full backup at the beginning of every month, then you make a smaller backup every day with just the changes since the last backup. There are a number of programs that enable you to do this easily. |
#5
|
||||
|
||||
It's almost always video that takes up large amounts of space, but I know professional photographers can burn through a few gigabytes after a photo shoot. Musicians can easily have songs that take up several gigabytes in raw form, especially when every track is stored as a lossless 24 bit 96 kHz stereo waveform.
As for me, I actually needed a few hundred gigabytes for a single capture session when gaming in HD for a while with my previous capture card. The best method was to capture to M-JPEG with uncompressed audio, which could easily be 60 GB per hour of footage. Of course, that got compressed down to 2 gigs per hour once converted to MPEG-4. Last edited by Cat333Pokémon; March 17, 2014 at 03:39:35 PM. |
#7
|
||||
|
||||
Quote:
Looks like after a full overnight backup operation, the external drive has only 336 GB free. (The backup takes up 584 GB. (1,000,000,000,000 bytes, anyone?)) For me, I think I have my games backlog and massive archive of photos to blame. Last edited by Twiggy; March 17, 2014 at 08:34:45 PM. |
#13
|
||||
|
||||
Quote:
Seeing as it's still usable, I think I'll wait until the Broadwell CPUs come out, so that I can have an ultraportable with a Broadwell CPU and a Maxwell GPU when the time comes (probably my birthday). Last edited by Twiggy; March 26, 2014 at 07:13:38 AM. |
#16
|
||||
|
||||
So at work today, we had to move some of our older servers. I went to go move one and heard a nice grinding noise inside (like something hitting against a fan). I took it apart and was greeted with:
Silly molex connector... oh wow Remember to bundle your loose wires kids! (Yes the heatsink fan still works). |
#17
|
||||
|
||||
I have my keyboard layout set on "Canadian Multilingual" so I can access more symbols without using alt codes, but for some reason it reverted itself to regular. U. S. Qwerty. However, it still says "Canadian Multilingual" in the Control Panel. Does anyone happen know why this would happen?
Also while I'm at it, does anyone know of a keyboard layout where I can use symbols like ° and the acute-accented E without alt codes but have easier access to other symbols like " and {} and? |
#28
|
||||
|
||||
My R button stopped responding some time ago, and I'm wondering if anyone here has ever had to fix their L and R before on their own and how they did it. The general consensus of Google searches is that the best way to fix your 3DS L and R buttons is to (a) not break them or (b) send them off for repairs
(As a note, 3DS shoulder buttons do NOT work the same as the last-generation handhelds do.) |
#29
|
||||
|
||||
Quote:
|
#31
|
||||
|
||||
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2014/04/...-data-at-risk/
http://heartbleed.com/ Well, that's absolutely lovely. Looks like anything transmitted "securely" over HTTPS in the last two years has actually been insecure and capable of being compromised. During a "handshake" (a connection by a computer to a server stating who you are, what you want, and what your capabilities are), it's possible to request any part of the server's memory (which may contain passwords, temporary data for other users, database tables, and any runtime information), not just the part containing the information intended for you. You all may want to change your high-security passwords, like banks and e-mail. Last edited by Cat333Pokémon; April 9, 2014 at 01:19:41 AM. |
#32
|
||||
|
||||
It's amazing how a logical programming error can mess up so many things at the same time.
On another topic, I've been thinking of getting this gaming laptop after weighing other similar options from other brands and built-to-order vendors. Quad-core fourth-generation Intel Core i7 processor, 8 GB of RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 M with 2 GB of GDDR5 memory, backlit keyboard, DVD drive, 1 TB storage (that I'm going to replace ASAP with leftover SSHD), 1920x1080 15.6" IPS anti-glare display, 4+ hour battery life unplugged, and, best of all, I actually also need a new backpack and a headset (freebies never hurt). (The wired mouse will make for a nice backup.) Two-year standard international warranty is in the cards, and so is a free subwoofer. It feels like I'm getting so many things that I'm willing to accept that it doesn't come with a 860 M. Last edited by Twiggy; April 9, 2014 at 06:21:20 AM. |
#33
|
||||
|
||||
How would you like to have a screen that large?
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/...tag=RSS56d97e7 |
#41
|
||||
|
||||
Quote:
But that's all I can say on the subject. |
#43
|
||||
|
||||
A new prank idea for Windows 8/8.1, based on a classic prank.
Last edited by Cat333Pokémon; June 13, 2014 at 05:41:58 PM. |
#44
|
||||
|
||||
I changed my desktop to a blue screen of death in 11th grade. Teacher flinched every time they walked past for the rest of the year.
The next year, we weren't allowed to do anything to the computer appearance settings, at all. I wonder if I was the one responsible for that. |
#45
|
||||
|
||||
Quote:
|
#48
|
||||
|
||||
I love to collect Virtual Studio Technology (VST) plugins for use with FL Studio and other VST hosts... is that a good or a bad thing? o.o
Are you sure about that? I just tried making a screenshot of my live tile screen - using PNG format - and I found no artifacts when I set it as a wallpaper. Of course, I also set the DPI setting of the PNG to 1200, not that it'd make that much of a difference, anyhow. Last edited by Seiji J. Konokama; June 18, 2014 at 10:40:25 AM. |
#51
|
||||
|
||||
Looks like PNG works fine, actually. Haha, nice. JPEG doesn't, though.
Details: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/w...f-93f6bb5f4f92 |
#53
|
||||
|
||||
At the time I bought my Lenovo laptop, I thought switching from Mac OS X to Windows 8 was going to be a nightmare, seeing how Windows was so difficult for me to get used to in the past... The actual switch to Win8 was much easier than I thought.
I don't mean to keep quoting you, Twig, though I kind of have to relate with you on getting used to Windows 8.1. Last edited by Seiji J. Konokama; June 19, 2014 at 04:48:04 PM. |
#54
|
||||
|
||||
I guess we somehow end up speaking the same language even though we're more interested in different areas.
They've made Windows quite... a different thing since 8, and a bit since 7. When was the last time you've used Windows? |
#55
|
||||
|
||||
So I've been having printer problems for a little while. Paper getting stuck as it goes through, and whatnot. Finally it decided to stop recognizing that there was paper in the tray at all.
It turns out that there was an SD card stuck down by the rollers that push it through the place with the toner cartridge. How in the world did I manage to lose an SD card and not notice? And how long has it even been down there, anyway? -____________- |
#56
|
||||
|
||||
That reminds me of something I accidentally did a few days ago. I have one of those combination floppy disk/memory card reader drives. Without looking at the drive, I tried to insert an SD card, but rather than stick it in the SD card slot, I missed and put it in the floppy drive. I had to remove the front cover of the computer, then remove the face plate for the drive before I could dislodge the card.
|
#57
|
||||
|
||||
They better not introduce a nanoSD format. Otherwise, well, they'd be extremely easy to lose. Seeing as microSD is plenty small already, I doubt it... unless manufacturers are deciding to go "make everything thinner". At all costs.
|
#58
|
||||
|
||||
I do hope microSD is the smallest consumer format. Anything smaller than that should just be soldered directly onto a board.
And the obligatory xkcd link: http://xkcd.com/691/ While on that subject, I think, with the rapidly increasing sizes of flash memory and hard drives very slowly increasing in size comparatively (are they reaching the limits of hard drive technology?), that the future of mass storage may very well be in solid state devices hosting flash memory. EDIT: Another thing that's really annoying: downloading a large driver package, in this case 150 MB, then discovering after opening the zip that the bulk of that size is the user manual in 11 languages (11 megs each) plus an old version of Adobe Reader (22 megs). The actual drivers for all operating systems total only FIVE MEGABYTES. Another stupidity is the fact that they copied the entire driver package to another folder just to make the Vista installer. Last edited by Cat333Pokémon; June 21, 2014 at 01:53:44 AM. |
#59
|
||||
|
||||
Quote:
Quote:
Heat-assisted magnetic recording: it's in the name Shingled magnetic recording: tracks are spaced as closely as possible, seeing as tracks only need to be as wide as the read head to be read successfully. (The write head is somewhat wider.) Pro: more data. Con: SSD-like RMW cycles for writes, in a nutshell. (Won't affect media endurance, but performance tanks in random writes.) Helium used instead of air inside: allows more platters per drive, but expensive. I think they're going to need to fix the price per GB thing before they can wipe out HDDs. They're getting pretty close these days, though, seeing as drives with a $/GB of less than 0.5 exist now. I'd say that when it hits 0.2 we're all set. Quote:
I think the only driver writers worth any salt are probably Microsoft and NVIDIA at this point - their drivers are... well, almost faultless. Every single time. Last edited by Twiggy; June 21, 2014 at 02:11:29 AM. |
#60
|
||||
|
||||
Speaking of helium drives, those must be a nightmare for those disk recovery services. It's a couple thousand bucks to recover a hard drive, and what they do is move the platters, physically, into another (identical) hard drive. Then they spin it up and immediately copy data, hoping to get everything before it crashes. When you MUST have helium inside the drive, that could be close to impossible for drive recovery groups without a special apparatus, if one exists.
As for price-per-gigabyte, I think the best headway being made is in USB flash drives. Those things are becoming so cheap that they're putting my older hard drives to shame. These days you can get 32 gigs on a tiny stick for ten bucks, and if you catch it around Black Friday, you can get a USB 3.0 one for the same price. For a mere $50, you can get 128 GB in your pocket. In a few years, 1 TB drives may be that cheap. Excluding those who work with high definition video (or large collections of video in general), it's getting to the point where the vast majority of folks will be able to back up their entire digital life to a single USB stick. I bet there are plenty of folks on this forum who can do that with the aforementioned 32 GB stick. (Just please be smart and not make the flash drive your ONLY copy of your data. More data doesn't make them harder to misplace. ) I have this assortment of flash drives on my desk now, along with 3 external hard drives and myriad SD cards. (The Rainbow Dash one is 8 GB and is USB 3.0.) For the most part, all of these drives cost me about the same amount (roughly $20). As you can see, that used to buy a mere eighth of a gigabyte and will soon buy an eighth of a terabyte. Last edited by Cat333Pokémon; June 21, 2014 at 03:03:44 AM. |
#61
|
||||
|
||||
I remember first starting to pay attention to computer hardware around 2008-2009, and the price of terabyte hard drives were comparable to the computer itself.
Nowadays the price of a terabyte is a little higher than your average pair of shoes. Have to wonder what it'll be in another five years . . . |
#63
|
||||
|
||||
Quote:
Heh, I still remember when everything I made was able to fit on a single CD-R, with all my important files backed up to multiple floppy disks. That was back when the majority of my computer work was with Office and Cubase, meaning Word files and MIDIs. Last edited by Cat333Pokémon; June 21, 2014 at 01:32:30 PM. |
#64
|
||||
|
||||
Quote:
Now I half expect 2 TB of external storage to be just barely enough. |
#65
|
||||
|
||||
For my important stuff, I have like 300 gigs of files, but I haven't finished cleaning my desktop. A lot of that can be erased, and a lot of it is installers for games and software I bought through the years. That also excludes roughly 650 gigs of unedited game videos.
|
#66
|
||||
|
||||
Me in 2008 (pre-YouTube): "My hard drive is 160 GB? What am I ever going to do with all that space?"
Me today (post-YouTube): "I have 1.200 TB total storage and really thinking about getting another terabyte of external |: " Uncompressed Microsoft AVI is the greatest thing ever. Funny how times change. |
#71
|
||||
|
||||
I believe the Droid line is old news at this point.
I don't feel like going Android is going to have a significant benefit for me, as pretty much every single app I do care about now has apps for Windows Phone. Besides, I couldn't care less about smartphone gaming. The Xperia Z2 does have its own allure, though. Last edited by Twiggy; June 29, 2014 at 12:05:42 AM. |
#72
|
||||
|
||||
I just feel so much freer with the Droid than I felt with the iPhone 4s... there's something about running on a non-Apple platform that makes me feel that way, and it applies to my computer, as well. Plus, it's about $30 cheaper to run the Droid than it was to run the iPhone 4s, even though both phones are on the same network.
So now that I have a Droid, what am I doing with the iPhone, you ask? Simply put, mobile audio production. There are lots of iOS-compatible synthesizers, drum machines, and other cool audio apps that I've bought for the iPhone over the years that are either not available on Google Play, or won't be available. That sounded like something that belongs in my "Tech Ramblings" thread. o.o Last edited by Seiji J. Konokama; June 29, 2014 at 01:34:18 PM. |
#73
|
||||
|
||||
Anyone know how to force a program (Adobe Premiere) to use most/all CPU power in Windows 8.1? I need to render a video and would prefer that it get done quickly, but it's only using up to about 12% of my CPU time. Considering that I'm not doing anything else with my computer at this point, that seems like kind of a waste of my time. Tried setting Priority, Affinity, whatever, and it had no effect.
|
#74
|
||||
|
||||
Quote:
By the way, it sounds like your computer has a CPU capable of handling eight threads at once. Not all programs can take advantage of that; some programs do all of their processing on one thread, and that's all you're going to get on a CPU. (This does help on ensuring other processes on the same PC work smoother, though; there's always spare CPU!) (What CPU?) |
#75
|
||||
|
||||
So I decided to do a quick quality comparison between my recently-acquired Visioneer flatbed scanner from 1999 and the HP Photosmart printer/scanner/copier I use for business, which was made in 2007. The inkjet samples I took were scanned at 600 dpi and in color on both machines:
Visioneer OneTouch 7600 (1999) HP Photosmart C6280 (2007) Interesting to see the evolution of imaging hardware over the course of even 8 years. Last edited by Seiji J. Konokama; July 20, 2014 at 11:29:40 AM. |
#76
|
||||
|
||||
Quote:
Switching CPU cores (I have an 8-core) doesn't seem to do much besides move a little bit of the activity to the ones I select, so it seems to be the same total amount of productivity. |
#77
|
||||
|
||||
Quote:
|
#78
|
||||
|
||||
gdi, Apple.
Against my better judgement, I bought some stuff on iTunes. Then the Internet blipped in the middle of it and a few of them downloaded incorrectly, giving me unplayable files. Searched for an hour. Nowhere is there a "Restart Download" button or anything similar. afaik iCloud is only available on Apple handhelds. Windows 8.1, iTunes 11.1.5.5. All I want is a few of my ninety-nine cent songs back. What to do? |
#79
|
||||
|
||||
Remove the songs from your library. Then use Store > Check For Available Downloads. Your purchases are stored with Apple, so you should be able to redownload them until they take away that ability. If that doesn't work, try deleting them from Music > iTunes > iTunes Media > Music first.
|
#83
|
||||
|
||||
Quote:
Also, while on the subject of video editing, I hate interlacing, but at the same time I find it annoying how hard it is to encode a video with the interlacing preserved. I don't care about uploading it to a service that will just deinterlace it and forever damage it. |
#84
|
||||
|
||||
Spamming this thread a little more . . . a few days ago I spilled apple juice on my keyboard. Wiped it off and thought it was fine. Well, apparently it leaked under the keys and has now started gumming up the top-left quadrant of the keyboard. Still works but it's like typing on a sponge.
Oops. edit Okay, uh, does anyone have a really, really good way of getting grease out of this thing? ._. Last edited by Dragonite; November 21, 2014 at 08:16:24 PM. |
#85
|
||||
|
||||
You can safely submerge a spring-based desktop keyboard in water, as long as you let it dry afterwards.
If it's a laptop keyboard (or a desktop keyboard with rubber under the keys), don't do it because you will destroy it even if removed from the laptop first, due to the glue keeping the rubber bits to the circuit board. Instead, you can gently pry most keys off and very carefully wipe them clean with cotton swabs and isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol or a damp rag. Be careful not to touch the rubber, and be sure to snap the metal bar back into place if it's a wide key, which can be a complete pain sometimes. |
#86
|
||||
|
||||
Rubbing alcohol and Q-tips seemed to do the trick. A couple of the keys still take a minute to depress and I probably won't win any typing competitions any day soon but at least I don't have to use a screwdriver to unstick the Escape key now.
|
#87
|
||||
|
||||
Laptop disk drive decided to give the occasional VERY LONG wait every so,often during boots. Nothing but a black screen and sustained HDD activity light that means nothing but stalling.
Not good. Not bothering with replacing it. I ended up with a Samsung 840 EVO as a replacement for the possibly problematic drive. Might as well as go ahead and get a fast one. (This SSD seems to had an issue with performance on old data, but it is fixed with the latest firmware, and my drive came pre-shipped with said fix. Nice. (The bug being more of an annoyance than data destroying helps a lot, too, not that I needed any help.) You know how fast hybrids are? Now imagine that cranked up to several orders of magnitude faster. That's what happens when you're talking about some of the Samsung's finest drives, whether MLC or TLC. (No relation to the band known for a song about scrubs.) |
#88
|
||||
|
||||
My laptop has been purely on SSDs for a little over a year now, and it's amazing how fast the thing starts. My desktop has had an SSD for some time too (after upgrading the laptop, it inherited the replacement), but its drive is a little slower, and the motherboard takes a long time to scan all the hardware anyway. Here's one gripe: 64 gigs of space on a laptop is all fine and dandy until you try to install a large program or game and realize that it takes up 20% of your free space, and you tend to live on a different set of data than you use on a desktop. (OneDrive has been great for keeping my most important data accessible on all my systems.) On a desktop, that problem is less pronounced because you typically can put a hard drive or two in there with your data and any large programs you need.
If you want to test your possibly-dying hard drive, you can use this: http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/ Run the Long Generic test. Yes, it takes a few hours. No, you can't use the drive while it's running. But if it's going to die, be sure to back your stuff up before letting a few extra hours of spin time pass on it. |
#89
|
||||
|
||||
It's funny how booting the laptop with the SSD inside pretty much means "turn on, flash logo for so fast that the loading indicator doesn't even get to show up, lockscreen" combined with Windows 8.x's fast boot mechanism. I can practically forget about Sleep mode.
I got a 250 GB drive. Turns out I still have 74 GB of free space, all things considered, and I have two 1 TB portable HDDs should I need to store more data or shuffle them around. Last edited by Twiggy; November 23, 2014 at 05:32:03 AM. |
#90
|
||||
|
||||
So I recently hooked up my Sega Genesis to a new TV, and the video connection works perfectly fine.
See?
(...and yes, that's supposed to be a solid white) And yeah, I'm pretty sure the problem lies in the TV/game switch because I've been having this problem ever since I got the console, but this is the first TV to actually deny there being a picture on the screen. I've been wanting to pick up a later-model Genesis just because it connects with composite and I won't have to deal with this dinosaur coaxial nonsense anymore. |
#94
|
||||
|
||||
Terabyte of something, maybe 2 if it goes on sale. I've been milling through the ads in the weekend newspaper for a month or so now, but haven't found anything really good yet.
In terms of manufacturer, I'll go for whatever I can get that doesn't have red warning flags all over the Internet reviews. I'm hoping for a Toshiba, I have a Toshiba laptop and I really trust their products, but it's not the end of the world if I can't get ahold of one. |
#95
|
||||
|
||||
Quote:
|
#97
|
||||
|
||||
As today is Cyber Monday, there are some deals on Newegg now for deeply discounted drives of all types:
http://www.newegg.com/store/EventSaleStore/ID-60 Last edited by Cat333Pokémon; December 1, 2014 at 11:50:36 AM. |
#99
|
||||
|
||||
Well, it seems like a lot of companies are trying to uncomplicate your most important files by making their own programs that sync between all of your computers and a website, so you should almost always have your files available. Of course, nearly all of them lead to the same caveats:
Last edited by Cat333Pokémon; December 4, 2014 at 11:36:19 AM. |
#100
|
||||
|
||||
Might be more of a video game general thing, but my 3DS is starting to get a bit old and the battery isn't lasting as long as it used to. Aside from things like turning off the 3D and brightness and turning on Power Save and draining the battery completely before charging it, is there much I can do to extend the life a bit?
|