A thread for boring computer questions.

Does the F8 trick not work on BIOS startup with Win10???

F8 did not work for me! i was able to get some text readable and then configure for Advanced Start Up and supposedly a blue screen w options is supposed to pop up on reboot but i saw nothing. i moved the mouse and it looked like it was in safe mode, mouse cursor over a black screen.

then the cursor started flickering to a blue Germs Burn and back to a cursor, flickering back and forth really fast. it just sat there doing this until i shut it off and played BOTW instead.

ok its weird. i found some fonts i had downloaded and reinstalled them and now my font for everything is this cheap open source copy of a real font. well not everything, my clock still looks like a ziggurat.

Internet Explorer works fine but when I try to open Chrome it is displaying in all heiroglyphs and in that browser cannot connect to the internet. which is weird, because a font shouldn't really have anything to do with internet connection.

in Chrome what characters it is trying to print on the screen, i have no idea what they say. i guess a temporary solution would be to copy the test and paste it into notepad.

you can get into safe mode in windows 10 by holding the shift key while you click restart

thanks! ill try that. i do have a bootable USB a reinstall may be in order lol. i have had Windows 10 for less than a season and already im doing this.

Run a virus scan when you're able to.

Also, this might help:
https://www.digitalcitizen.life/4-ways-boot-safe-mode-windows-10

ok that's the webdings font with some of the characters not displaying properly.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/3nimxl/windows_10_font_got_changed_to_wingdings/

ok, best instructions

Hmm. My Local Disc (D) has completely disappeared ...

(Or ... anyone recommend/trust a computer repair person in Oxfordshire?)

??

This looks...unhealthy

ERROR: Service 'jobs' failed to build: failed to register layer: Error processing tar file(exit status 1): write /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.9/cc1: no space left on device

^C^C% ➜ v1 git:(master) ✗ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
/dev/disk1 112Gi 95Gi 17Gi 85% 4051615 4290915664 0% /
devfs 186Ki 186Ki 0Bi 100% 643 0 100% /dev
map -hosts 0Bi 0Bi 0Bi 100% 0 0 100% /net
map auto_home 0Bi 0Bi 0Bi 100% 0 0 100% /home
/dev/disk2s1 58Gi 38Gi 20Gi 66% 603920 4294363359 0% /Volumes/research

I ran fsck -fy in single user mode, it fixes some errors with invalid block counts or something like that and boots up ok, but problem persists

Installed Mac OS to usb no problem, just blew everything away and started again, looks a lot healthier. dotfiles worked perfect!

/dev/disk1 37Gi 15Gi 22Gi 41% 548297 4294418982 0% /
/dev/disk0s5 3.6Gi 25Mi 3.6Gi 1% 78 4294967201 0% /Volumes/downloads
/dev/disk0s4 19Gi 4.9Gi 14Gi 27% 109 4294967170 0% /Volumes/docker
/dev/disk0s7 19Gi 2.7Gi 16Gi 15% 122 4294967157 0% /Volumes/vagrant

thank you for the instructions mh! i will try as this is exactly what the issue was w my computer.

the good news is that i was able to boot from the USB i used to install and run chkdsk /r /f /x on command prompt to fix disk issues. sadly upon starting my machine i find that Windows 10 will not start. it seems to be trying to start Safe Mode but is stuck on a loading cursor. i can reinstall Windows but attempting to do so brings up a "This hard drive is locked" message. wonderful, my only operating system will not start and has not provided the necessary tools to unlock the hard drive and fix its shit. i googled this and found myself at a website called www.windowsreport.com and thought, should i really be downloading "repair tools" from a website with that name?

this shit is so tiring. i have been dealing with Windows since 3.1 and it seems like things have only gotten worse. the scary thing is Microsoft Windows is used in public infrastructure. i see it all the time on the public transit terminals and monitors. i know it is Windows because the system is down and i see the same damn error dialog box i see at home. scarily, this tech is everywhere. this stuff is running space stations. i fear the state of shitty bloated UI accidentally bringing down modern civilization far more than any AI.

tbh the best thing about cloud/container stuff is Microsoft having to make OS variants that are first-class citizens that aren’t the mainline gui version

the kiosk stuff was always pretty halfassed, they’re getting closer on that front

I have a coworker who loves to talk about this and I roll my eyes, but he’s not wrong.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_flaw/

great now the next time Windows updates my computer will run 30% slower

Crucially, these updates to both Linux and Windows will incur a performance hit on Intel products. The effects are still being benchmarked, however we're looking at a ballpark figure of five to 30 per cent slow down, depending on the task and the processor model.

or 5%

but probably 17.5%

most workloads won't notice much difference at all. the 30% is a ceiling that assumes a shitload of calls that require the kernel page separation stuff

Most of my pc's workload is managed by the graphics card I'm guessing anyway.

My windows 7 HP fails to start and I've tried all manner of system restore repair options to no avail. The boot disc for windows 7 gets to the point where I can select a partition to install to but neither one can be used (errors). Reformatting fails and my only option seems to delete the partitions - I'm not sure that's wise; any ideas?

sounds like your HD is f*cked?

Can an external HD be used as a partition?

I would abandon that hard drive - can you slave it to get your data , or boot from a live cd?

Sorry what do you mean by slave it?

well you need another hard drive that works - you connect it with the scsi cord so you can read the bad hard drive from teh good one - its been a long time since I worked withhardware

Sounds about right - hd is pooched. Thanks for the help in the revive here, gonna need to get a hd. Externals not recognized - I'm not super good with hardware tbh

I think LG is referring to putting the current one in an external enclosure or connecting via a USB->SATA cable. So, clean install on a new drive, then see if you can connect the old one externally, or internally as a second drive, and seeing if you can get to the data

obviously external stuff isn't needed if it's a desktop, you'd just put it in as a secondary drive

Yes. USB/Sata cables should be cheap on ebay
After you remove the HD you can just Hook it up to another computer

Thanks everyone. I was able to hook up an external monitor to an old macbook and I can use that one now. Will fix other comp eventually as I'm too broke atm

this isn't a computer question exactly but why is the app store so pedantic with the downloads? what is the difference between 'GET' and 'INSTALL' and the little cloud with the little arrow? why do you have to press so many buttons

install means you haven't downloaded it previously and it may have terms of service / cost money / in-app purchases

'get' means you've installed it before or it's completely free

iirc "install" requires you to confirm your identity and 'get' is an instant thing

"GET" used to be "FREE" but they got to many complaints about in-app purchases in "FREE" apps

in essence my diagnosis is that nothing i've done has significantly affected the amount of free storage space, so they sold me a machine whose brand-new os' technical requirements prevent it from updating itself : /

― j., Thursday, August 24, 2017 12:35 PM (seven months ago)

finally solved my problem, which i had fruitlessly been poking at every month or two and then kicking the can down the road on (w/ annoying incessant 'upgrade now oops sorry can't upgrade' nags from the OS)

i don't know what the exact solution ultimately was because i changed a few key factors all in a row/at once without trying to ascertain which if any did the trick.

but amid all the frustrated pleas for help and complicated advice (and useless advice from MS help staff) i found online - there are apparently quite a few people w/ different hardware but this same problem, because 32 gb storage is a popular configuration for tablets and lightweight laptops and netbooks - i happened upon some simple advice that just said to uninstall the windows update assistant if it was having trouble locating external storage, then trying again.

i also reformatted a USB drive to NTFS from its default exFAT, thinking that could matter due to some comments about the need for the former to build an installer on bootable removable media (still being considered as an option, although in the past the builder software hadn't liked my setup any better than the main updater did); and at some point in the process was attempting updates with no microSD card mounted (since a lot of people on different setups with the same kind of update-space problems had identified inability to see the card slots without some firmware update as a problem for the installer).

in any case this - probably just the tweak to the updater assistant itself - made my usb drive (and later microsd card) visible to the updater and enabled the remainder of the update process(es) to work, although it still required ~4 gb of c/boot drive space for the first overdue update to be done, which was a pain to free up because of windows' finicky and unpredictable use of cache space, but doable by offloading data/documents and being canny about when to run the updater; and then > 5 gb of c drive space for the next overdue update to be done, which i could only get by uninstalling all software i actually use (office, browser, pdf viewer/processor). during all of which the installers had to be repeatedly coaxed through 'fixing' 'problems'.

ugh.

yikes that sounds like a nightmare

and it's not actually done pffft

fwiw you can get a new 2TB HD for under $100 these days.

ugh now i'm getting weird black full-screen flashing (again, i saw this a bit right after i first got the computer)

real fine operating system

real fine

sounds like a bad video chip?

naw, i think it's software, some update at some point caused it to stop. seems that people report the problem arising after the creators update (the one i just finished) as well, so i guess it undid something that had been fixed for me.

ugh now i'm having a corrupt tile database problem

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-reset-start-menu-layout-windows-10

there are actually MS support staff on the internet telling people the only fix is to create a new user account and migrate all your files to it! which if true would be ridiculous

if i create a temporary account and log in to it, it doesn't actually populate its start menu with live tiles, though i found i could manually get a blank one to change over to the weather app tile. yet that doesn't seem to result in the temporary account's application data folder acquiring a tile database file of its own - instead, it has nothing (in the expected location, or seemingly anywhere in its files).

Windows CE 4 lyfe

gg i hate Windows 10. i can't ever recall having to rebuild a star menu in Windows 3.1/95/98/XP/Vista/7

start menu even

interestingly, it seems that every application that has been touched as 'new' since the update (which registers in the start menu's list of all apps) also has a broken tile; but you can't manually pin an app's tile to the menu to fix it because it's marked as pinned even though no tile shows for it.

Ok, this seems like it should be simple but has been surprisingly difficult so far -- for a podcast, I want to talk to someone on Facetime on an iPad and record the audio (both their voice and mine). Is this possible? I tried a voice memo app, and it cut out whenever they talked (even though I enabled something in settings about 'use audio from other apps' or similar).

I know that the ideal way to do this would be to have the person record their voice on their side (with handheld recorder, phone, etc) and edit the two sides together, but this interview subject is very resistant to doing that for some reason.

i don't know how to do it ON IPHONE, so apologies if this is unhelpful but if you can persuade them, use https://zencastr.com. it looks complicated but it's extremely simple for the guest (just a browser window). it records on both sides and splices the two recordings together for you.

Ooh thanks. That looks very appealing, although the requirement for an external mic on both sides might be a sticking point for me (and yeah, no iOS).

Basically my limitations are that I have PC computers without usb mics, and this guest apparently doesn't have one either, and my only Apple device is this iPad mini.