A thread for boring computer questions.

More here: http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries

thanks, that vid was helpful (+ your pic should go on TRYPOHPOBIA)

Ha - didn't realize that What the Tech? was at the end of that!

What's the best way to dispose of an old computer?

I've got a 2004 HP laptop that is unbearably slow and only has half a gig of RAM. I've reformatted with linux supposedly suitable for low power laptops, but it kept freezing up, so I reinstalled a fresh windows XP - is this enough to overwrite previous information? What's the best way to dispose of it ethically and convenience-wise?

http://www.computeraid.org/ <- something like this?

hey mac dudes,

so i have been charged with "sorting out" the missus' bloated and creaking macbook (2008 unibody) which she has just used out the box for 3 years and never backed up/used time machine/updated to snow leopard/whatever else. now i'm not unnerdy but nor am i a mac man so i guess i just kinda need someone to help clarify my fog of thoughts as to what to do and in what order etc.

the only nonregular thing about her setup is she is a photographer and so has shitloads of big raw files etc.

so i was thinking:

1. tidy up her mac as best as poss, run onyx and all that
2. buy 2x500gb ext drives
3. put a superduper clone on each
4. then just leave time machine running on the mb but not backed up onto the ext?
5. manually update them myself once a month until she learns for herself / i get her to buy the full version of superduper for smart update
6. install snow leopard and redo the cloning again
7. ummmmmm i dunno anymore

i guess my main sticking points are

1. not understanding time machine properly and whether that really needs backing up or what
2. whether it's worth doing separate backups of her itunes and all her photo stuff in addition to the disk clones
3. do i need to partition something somewhere?
4. whether there's a smarter way i could be using the two externals here

there's also an ancient imac g4 with stuff on as well that i don't want to think about but probably should

any help much appreciated, and apologies if i'm sounding like a fucktard here

http://blog.macsales.com/9102-secret-firmware-lets-late-08-macbooks-use-8gb

oh also i'm probably just confusing myself further but has anyone ever done this? i checked the boot roms and the macbook in question is eligible.

Time machine needs an external drive to back up to. It's also pretty good. I'd hook up the drive and let Time Machine do its thing and forget SuperDuper.

After it has a whole backup (which can take many many hours during which you shouldn't put mac to sleep or disconnect drive) upgrade to SL. Lion can probably wait, it has a lot of big changes and might break stuff.

(Also is she cool with upgrades? This can make ppl mad...)

Does it already have max supported memory?

isnt it something of a ballache to boot from a time machine backup though? will need to check if she's still got all her install cds.

yeah i wasnt going to bother with lion precisely cos of the difference it looks like it'd make to her workflow - snow leopard is just more of an efficiency upgrade right? in any case i couldnt go straight to lion without sl first if i'm not mistaken.

can still double memory up to the supported 4GB but i was just wondering about that one loophole since the comments are largely positive and it looks relatively painless.

Yeah, if you want a bootable drive as well maybe use the second one for that? Ball ache to keep that up to date as well, though.

I'm always a bit wary of firmware hacks, but if you need the 8gb it might be worth it.

dunno, i can never really gauge what to expect with memory upgrades. i was just thinking "if you're spending then spend" basically. probably not worth it though.

if i bought superduper a bootable drive would only be a ballache once right? smart update after that. shame there's no firewire on this thing :(

not really sure why i'm mistrusting time machine a little here.

should also say the other reason i was thinking about upgrading to snow leopard at all is having a go at putting it on the imac g4 since it's near useless under tiger as it is

Snow leopard is x86 only, sry.

Are the externally always connected, or does laptop go on the road? Problem is remembering to reconnect the backup disk and eject it properly every time, so that's not an issue if it lives on a desk.

nuts. is there anything useful i can do with that old beast?

laptop will be on the road and tbh even at home she rarely sits in front of a desk, so the exts will most likely be kept in a cupboard in the meantime or something idk. pure backup purposes.

os9 will run like a demon on it i bet.

The g4 iMacs are the best-looking Macs Apple's ever done imo. Too nice to get rid of. You could make it a iTunes machine, maybe?

Is there such a thing as a free file converter that can turn, say, an .avi into an iPad friendly file? I see a bunch are available for about 30 bucks, but they all have tons of features I don't need.

http://handbrake.fr/

Can someone help me troubleshoot a display/possibly videocard related problem? I have a Dell XPS M1530 laptop. Sorry for length of description but I want to provide absolutely everything I know.

- About 6 months ago, my computer started to act up at a frequency that it never had. I ran into the blue screen of death a few times, I had to do hard resets several times, etc.
- About 3 months ago, after another blue screen of death/hard reset, I noticed performance problems in Photoshop that weren't there previously - hard to explain, but it just seemed like I had downgraded to a 2005 videocard or something.
- I went to nvidia's website and updated the driver for the videocard, which didn't seem to make much difference.
- I dealt with it, like the dog with sunglasses.
- Starting two weeks ago, I ran into issues where the whole screen would just freeze, out of nowhere. The mouse pointer wouldn't move. I'd let it sit for an hour, come back, nothing. Each time I had to do a hard reset, and then things would be fine again for a while.
- I traveled home, taking my laptop with me. The Display wouldn't work during the entire trip. I'd turn the computer on, the disc would spin up, but the screen was black. Again, I'd let it sit for hours, come back, but no dice. This happened several times, until I just gave up trying.
- When I got home, I tried again. Mysteriously, everything was fine. The display came back up, I could use it.
- Then the other day, when I turned my computer on, it had a solid dark gray screen instead of a black screen with text. I stared at it in wonder as it gradually faded into the image below like a polaroid picture:

http://a8.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/302480_10150329811980959_638030958_8133527_725471091_n.jpg

- It took about 2 minutes for it gradually fade into the white screen with a solid black vertical bar.
- I turned off the computer and sacrificed an orphan
- When I turned it back on, the display looked just like the image above, without any gradual fading. It just instantly looked like that.
- I turned it off and got really pissed off.
- This morning, I turn the computer on, and it's ok again. I'm using it right now. Everything looks fine.

Based off of all this, is it a...

1) loose display cable? (I thought this might be the case, but in browsing a few tech forums people seemed to suggest that if it faded to the image above, rather than instantly appearing like that, it could be a problem with screen itself?
2) shitty videocard?
3) messed up screen?

or of course,

4) the mysterious "other"

If you've open and closed the lid between turning it off and turning it back on again, a loose display cable seems probable. Do you have a spare monitor that you can plug into it?
Another cause might be overheating, due to a cooling fan wearing out. Check if there's airflow going into/coming out of the vents, particularly on the underside.

man, it might be BOTH of those things...it's true that one thing that seemed to help was closing the lid and then opening it back up again. I suppose I should open it up and check all the display cable connections.

Overheating has been a problem since I got the computer. It always feels warm on the bottom, and sometimes it gets downright HOT. I

a Microsoft Outlook question!

on my works laptop i have to archive my emails every now and again.

Yesterday i decided to create a load of folders in my normal in box, to tidy things up, and moved loads of emails to these folders. Now the archive thing doesn't work! I tried putting everything back to how it was, and deleting those folders but it still won't archive anymore.

help!

ah

is it because its looking at the date i moved them to the folders, rather than the received date?

Just use the web app if you can - wash your hands of the office client

this might stupid but is there anyway to improve video streaming on a mac? except your broadband connection and i guess ram, what else affects this?

What browser?

chrome. but if other browsers would be better i'm willing to try that

Oh, I don't know then, soz

video streaming tends to take up a lot of processing power (to decompress the video stream), so if any other programs are running which are taking up some of that processing, then you might want to shut them down.

Do we have a web design/html/css/web coding/etc help thread? Or can anyone suggest some good, friendly, helpful forums to ask such questions? I could do with some help on a few subtle specific coding difficulties...

so after my spilling coffee on my mac and it not working for the past few weeks, i finally figured out how to remove the battery and then all of a sudden it worked except the T keys u, j, m, p and none of the numbers. so i have to cut and aste those letters or any numbers, also the enter key doES NOT WORK, NOW THE CApS IS STuCK, ANY IDEAS, SERIOuSLY THE CAS IS NOW STuCK

Get a cheap external keyboard?

I spilled some beer on my laptop a couple of months ago and bunch of keys stopped working. I ended up having to replace the keyboard. It was pretty easy to do though.

What kind of external hard drive do you guys recommend for a Macbook Pro? I'll mainly be using it to hold my music collection to run it through iTunes, as well as for some backup. Here's the story, I've been using a couple Western Digital drives for backup of photos and personal documents, but neither really have the kind of expansion space for my growing music collection. Anyway, my wife bought me a 3TB Seagate GoFlex drive which is supposedly totally Mac compatible. I hooked it up and had no problem consolidating my 450+ GB collection to it, but it is constantly freezing my Finder and/or iTunes even when in use. It appears to be still spinning, but just locking things up and forcing me to do a hard reset. Anyway, much research leads me to see that this is a really, really common problem with these new USB 3.0 drives since Mac doesn't support 3.0 - something about them just not working well together. I also saw that you can buy an adapter base with Firewire 800 that might (key word there) alleviate this issue and give me more stable connection. Problem is, I've called about 7 stores and no one has these and they are even on backorder direct from Seagate. I don't really want to wait to see if this MIGHT fix my problem and miss out on my return window for the drive.

I think I've answered my own question here, but am I better off just returning this and starting over?

What kind of drive would you recommend for my use/setup? I appreciate you smart peoples' advice.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003HIXOOQ/ref=oh_o02_s00_i00_details
what I got

Thats a little more than I hoped to spend, but not significantly so. Especially with all those positive reviews.

some wifi routers let you attach hard drives to them to make net drives, which should be good enough for streaming music, occasional backup -- i dunno if the usb3.0 issue would affect it as much?

halp.

mac laptop. no sound from speakers. can hear sound & adjust volume while headphones are plugged in, but internal speakers not working. sound preferences not displaying internal speakers, only 'digital out.' haaalp.

mac hides some audio prefs in the audio MIDI Setup

Check the audio-out minijack. Can you see a red light shining inside? There's a little switch in there that controls optical audio out, and it sometimes gets stuck in the on position. While it's active, your internal speakers get cut off. Carefully plugging-in and unplugging your headphones will usually get the switch unstuck, but sometimes you'll have to poke it with a toothpick.

i will check that out & will report back, thx!

the red light is on inside the port, but plugging / unplugging headphones hasn't worked. i'm poked in there with a toothpick, paperclip but I can't seem to catch whatever switch is on in there. dangit.

On mine, the switch is rectangular and near the top opening of the jack. If fiddling with it doesn't work, I hope Apple will fix it for you. Seems like a common enough problem.

so i bought a cheapo $10 replacement charger for my laptop. it overheats (which isn't a huge problem but it gets hotter than my last charger, which is an accomplishment) and whenever the computer's charging the cursor starts to lag like crazy. sometimes it's completely unusable. am i just gonna have to deal with it? i'm assuming i just have to deal with it.

throw your laptop away

not what i was expecting but ok

just spitballing here tbh

i tried setting the computer on fire now i'm on fire

friend of mine bought a cheapo charger which got really hot but seemed to do the job, then after about six months it went out in style, catching fire and blowing the fuse. good 2 c that u've accelerated the process.