A thread for boring computer questions.

"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.

Oh it looks like you can select an internal mic, so maybe this will work if I just got a USB mic...

There's a newish app called anchor that allows multiple people to "call in" to the same program and record. I think they have a phone-in option but probably for best audio quality both sides would need to download the app.

so my E: drive, a regular internal SATA drive, is showing "This folder is empty" when i open it in W10 file explorer. thankfully my data is not lost, because when i open the properties, it shows me file name, file system, used space, free space, etc. as if it is all there. if i shut down and reboot, i can access the drive as usual. but if i use my computer for any length of time the drive reads zero and i cannot access it. one time i even clicked on a shortcut to a folder on the "empty" drive and was able to see the files. it's really quite insane.

Freaky
Get that data off there ASAP

^^^

weird black full-screen flashing

i was able to mostly eliminate this by uninstalling and re-updating video drivers, specifically via my hardware manufacturer's system updater and not the windows updater, which seems to have meant going back to an older version than the creator's update left me with.

but it did come back once, and onset seems to be free-space related.

janky

Any ideas how to connect to a personal hotspot from phone to Mac when the error “cannot connect to iPhone” appears on the Mac. I can charge my phone but despite trying USB and Bluetooth as well I cannot make the device appear in airport

Restart, reconnect

if that doesn't work you can try opening Airport Utility, there might be something diagnostic in there?

is personal hotspot actually available on your phone plan or did it erroneously appear enabled

I’d try turning hotspot off and on again, and making the Mac forget the password and re-adding it

my parents are running xp on a very old dell optiplex gx520 (!), and it has as far as they know recently crashed after no changes, installations, power surges, etc., with an error at (prior to) boot time of 'sata primary hard disk 0 failure'.

from what i was able to walk them through over the phone, it seems that the boot drive has problems that are unrecoverable from within the windows recovery console.

from what i've read on the internet, there could be a variety of causes for this kind of error, some repairable, some not. if my parents can boot from an install disk and can run windows recovery, is there anything they can do to determine, at least, whether the drive has physically failed versus having some other issue?

Sounds like they shipped with an 80GB hard drive, perhaps a cheap 128-256GB SSD would be a worthy replacement, and put the dead HDD into an enclosure where it could be read by a good recovery utility?

are scandisk or chkdsk on that windows recovery disk? maybe start with something like that

Or - maybe get them an external HDD and then remove the bad drive and freeze it inside an airtight bag - if there is a physical failure this can unstick things for long enough to boot up and copy the essentials off it.

xp yeah, without my having much awareness of what it was doing or could do, i got them to run chkdsk and it was what reported unrepairable problems, with no more info than that. dunno what its diagnostic powers are usually thought to be.

every dell i've worked with has a diagnostics option if you press f12 upon boot up. on a model that old, that may have to be run from a separate disc, but if it's an available option, it will tell you whether or not the hard drive has failed.

chkdsk /f /r

fixes errors and checks for bad sectors. if they are getting HD error messages it's probably time to just get a new drive. you can get 2TB for $60 these days, and it'll help future proof their setup.

Not sure if anyone can help:

I just downloaded three albums via iTunes Store but I’m without internet at home. The downloads are incomplete and coffee shop wireless doesn’t seem to enable it. Automatic downloads are on not sure why it doesn’t work

When I'm using Google to search for things, my computer is jumping to qxsearch and then https://uk.search.yahoo.com rather than finding Google answers. Is that normal??? I'm using Mozilla.

You have malware. I suggest hurling your computer into the sea.

What would a Plan B be?

Go to your add-ons and see if qxsearch is there. If it is, remove it.

Thanks. Where would I find them?

ctrl-shift-a or look under the 3-bar menu on the upper right

Thanks ... There doesn't seem to be anything much there.

How odd. It occurred to me that I have Norton Security and going through them ... they don't think there's anything wrong.

I remain vaguely paranoid, mind.

what happens if you use any other browser

what is your default search engine set to ?

about:preferences#search

I can use Google on Internet Explorer.

wouldn't you just go to settings or preferences and change the default search engine? sometimes my anti-virus security software resets mine to enable "safe search" but it's probably because they have some deal with yahoo to make it the default.

X-post. It's set to Google on Mozilla.

sarahell, I guess I could just not use Mozilla (which is where the problem seems to be happening). I'm just a bit nervous that something is going on, for some reason.

Hmm. Removing an extension called PDF 1.2.1 seems to have resolved the issue (I removed it on the grounds that it was the only extension ...)