Octopus Overlords

Posted: **Tue Dec 25, 2018 7:01 pm**

stessier wrote: ↑Tue Dec 25, 2018 3:21 pm
MonkeyFinger wrote: ↑Tue Dec 25, 2018 12:58 pm
stessier wrote: ↑Tue Dec 25, 2018 10:18 am
MonkeyFinger wrote: ↑Tue Dec 25, 2018 10:05 am Had to look up what the heck a "finger mouse" was... you're right, just a wee bit weird.
MonkeyFinger thinks a finger mouse is weird. I love the internet!
I was SO hopeful for a brief, shining moment and then...
To be clear, I was just laughing at the oddity of the juxtaposition of the words, not your opinion. I've never even heard of a finger mouse.

Not to worry, we knows!

Posted: **Wed Dec 26, 2018 2:19 pm**

stessier wrote: ↑Tue Dec 25, 2018 10:18 am
MonkeyFinger wrote: ↑Tue Dec 25, 2018 10:05 am Had to look up what the heck a "finger mouse" was... you're right, just a wee bit weird.
MonkeyFinger thinks a finger mouse is weird. I love the internet!

Here's some more weirdness for ya:

Across the pond, 'Fingermouse' is best known from a '70s era British television series for pre-schoolers. Indeed, once upon a time, finger puppets were genuinely seen as viable television entertainment for kids.

Posted: **Wed Dec 26, 2018 2:35 pm**

Posted: **Thu Dec 27, 2018 2:33 am**

This may be the best option so far if I can find a two-piece palm rest to go around it... or do without palm rest at all.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001OO0LXC/

Posted: **Wed Feb 06, 2019 3:32 pm**

We no longer support Chromecast setup on a computer. To set up your Chromecast, please use a mobile device.

grumblegrumbleLAMEgrumble

(and i don't want to install all this crap on my phone.)

edit: installed the stupid Google Home app to initialize the device and set the speaker volume to 100%, then deleted it. downloaded a plugin for VLC that controls the Chromecast Audio now - all is well.

Posted: **Wed Feb 06, 2019 4:18 pm**

Aw, the joys of being the tech coordinator for our district's Taxaide program. One site leader insisted on setting up his computers and printers and on opening day he emails that he has a bad printer, couldn't get a downloaded driver to load. Well, dumbshit, the Win10 image we use already had all the drivers installed. It was, literally, plug and print. So my wife (who is the district boss), brings him a new printer and brings home the old one. I plug the old one into a laptop at home and voilà, it works. I told her to be extra sarcastic when she let him know.

Posted: **Mon Feb 11, 2019 11:21 am**

With a new PC in, I thought I'd try the smaller "Ergo Touchpad" again... Turns out, it STILL has the same problem. it jiggles when my finger did not move, just touched, and when driver was installed, it stopped responding altogether.

Went back to the cheaper Perixxpad. *sigh*

Posted: **Wed Mar 13, 2019 11:14 pm**

When I have a malfunctioning program I want to close it immediately. Not wait three minutes so you can report it!

Posted: **Fri Mar 15, 2019 3:36 am**

working on upgrading the 10-year-old guts of this PC - just had another BSOD today for no good reason. i can probably fix it with a reinstall of Win10, but it's time.

the new parts i already have:

MSi Z2070 Gaming M7 motherboard
8GB of DDR4 RAM (going to upgrade that - looking at sales now)
Samsung 860 EVO 1TB SSD

keeping the case, power supply, GTX 970 video card, Blu-Ray burner, monitor and all peripherals.

Posted: **Fri Mar 22, 2019 6:30 pm**

Oh great. I decided to walk in history and looked up my postings on Anandtech from 2000. I see I was talking about owning a Celeron 633mhz and overclocking it to 950 mhz. I dont even remember owning this! And now I have yet ANOTHER computer to wonder where the heck it is.

And its surprising just how much I knew about hardware back then. I dont even know what some of that I posted is even today. Man.

EDIT: It appears I posted on Oct 17 2000 that in 2 weeks I was ordering a Celeron 633, GORB(golden orb cooler) and a slocket . Neat old stuff.

OMG wait! I think I saw that GORB cooler sticking on a SLOCKET card and cpu the other year in my old pc stuff. I bet I still have that BH6 and Cel 633@950 in there some place.

Posted: **Fri Mar 22, 2019 8:26 pm**

I had to look up slockets

I looked in my old gaming file as well, which I started back in 1995. It includes games and hardware. I also bought a Tandy PC back in the late seventies but I don't remember the model or processor.

1995, 486DX 66Mhz
1996, Pentium P1-133, also a Screamin3D Video Card
1998, another Pentium, P2-400, and a Monster 3D II video accelerator card
2000, a Hewlett-Packard 9780C AMD Athlon 900MHz,
2001, RAM memory upgrade from 128 to 384MB, also a GeForce 2 MX 400 64MB RAM video card (wow, 64 MB!)
2002, another video card upgrade, to a VisionTek Ti4400

And in 2003 I got my first Falcon Northwest and that was my last PC for quite a while.

Posted: **Fri Mar 22, 2019 8:59 pm**

I 'think' my ti4200 was a VisionTek card from Walmart my wife got me.

And just 7 years before in 1994 the standard video memory was a big old 4 megs not even dreaming of that 64 in 2001

Posted: **Sat Mar 23, 2019 11:15 am**

My first X86 PC? Tandy 1000 SL.

Took it back and got a 1000 TL (with a 286) 2 weeks later when they told me they don't have the RAM kit in stock and I need 640K to run a Modula-2 compiler.

Technically I had a TransWarp kit for my Apple IIe before that, had to return the whole kit and buy a real PC.

Was amazed that I can actually run Wing Commander on that machine.

Posted: **Sat Mar 23, 2019 3:08 pm**

i ran Wing Commander on a 286 (8/10MHz processor, 640k RAM, 20MB HDD, EGA video, add-on AdLib sound card). it took several hours to install because the graphics had to be 'redithered'(?) for 16-color EGA instead of the default 256-color VGA. it also took up half the HDD (and no flight stick piloting animation - that required 1MB of RAM.) that PC was pretty top of the line just three years earlier...

Posted: **Sun Mar 31, 2019 6:50 pm**

i helped a neighbor a couple months back with trying to recover her Quickbooks information off her old laptop PC for her business. my mistake was not negotiating the rate beforehand, relying instead on the generosity of strangers - i made a whole $40 for six hours of work. to top that off, this person neglected to follow any of the advice i gave (update to a slightly newer Quickbooks and then import the data into the online version) and continued to use the PC after i got it running, when i had told her that the hard drive is failing and the information NEEDS to be moved off of it ASAP. so today i get a call from her in a panic because surprise! Windows 7 on that PC has crashed again. she was complaining how she took it to a local computer shop and about 'how much money they were charging'. she wanted me to try to get it running again this time (the only compensation she mentioned was she would make supper for me). i turned it down and told her she was on her own.

Posted: **Sun Mar 31, 2019 7:35 pm**

hitbyambulance wrote: ↑Sun Mar 31, 2019 6:50 pm i helped a neighbor a couple months back with trying to recover her Quickbooks information off her old laptop PC for her business. my mistake was not negotiating the rate beforehand, relying instead on the generosity of strangers - i made a whole $40 for six hours of work. to top that off, this person neglected to follow any of the advice i gave (update to a slightly newer Quickbooks and then import the data into the online version) and continued to use the PC after i got it running, when i had told her that the hard drive is failing and the information NEEDS to be moved off of it ASAP. so today i get a call from her in a panic because surprise! Windows 7 on that PC has crashed again. she was complaining how she took it to a local computer shop and about 'how much money they were charging'. she wanted me to try to get it running again this time (the only compensation she mentioned was she would make supper for me). i turned it down and told her she was on her own.

Alas, no good deed goes unpunished. But once bitten, twice shy.

Posted: **Sun Mar 31, 2019 10:54 pm**

Hypothetically running Spinrite on it may give her a few more months. Or maybe not. But people tend to treat tech support people like **** because "everybody" knows computers nowadays.

Posted: **Sun Mar 31, 2019 11:10 pm**

Hey you fixed it once you can do it 15 more times right?

Posted: **Mon Apr 01, 2019 1:39 am**

she wrote back and was clearly desperate. so i said if you pay me [my going rate minus discount-because-i'm so-nice] and that you pay me regardless if my efforts to fix it work or not, i'll do it. she replied 'Thank you so much, my accountant going to see if he can call QuickBooks tomorrow to straighten out the file. I'm sure that won't happen so I will be getting a hold of you soon. Thank you so much'

i dunno why she thinks her accountant(?) is going to make things all better, but whatevs

Posted: **Mon Apr 01, 2019 9:48 am**

hitbyambulance wrote: ↑Mon Apr 01, 2019 1:39 am

i dunno why she thinks her accountant(?) is going to make things all better, but whatevs

It makes sense to me. Do you have any idea how much dentists charge?

Posted: **Mon Apr 01, 2019 11:36 am**

What about that.....VisionTek is still around...but all AMD now.

Posted: **Wed Apr 03, 2019 9:54 am**

My computing history...

Commodore VIC-20 from a yard sale.

Apple IIe (and temporarily, the 8088 "Transwarp" kit)

Tandy 1000 SL (lasted 2 weeks)

Tandy 1000 TL (286) traded the SL back as I need 640K to run compiler for school.

Generic 486 from a local shop.

Replaced mainboard with a NexGen 90 (the clone X86 CPU, remember that?)

Replaced THAT with a Pentium with a 3DFX 1 (Diamond Monster 3D)

Replaced the mainboard with Pentium IV

Held on to that long enough to buy a Dell XPS laptop with Core i7 (1st gen) and NVIDIA GF435M

And the current PC (Core i7-9700K / RTX 2070)

Posted: **Wed Apr 03, 2019 2:14 pm**

Well, my Win10 start menu tile maker died, and it hasn't been updated since 2015. I can't believe that Windows 10 makes such a big deal out of their tiles, but won't still won't let you customize them. If you pin a program to the start menu, you either have to choose a large square with a tiny icon and a name (which looks awful), or a small square with an appropriate icon, but no text. That's not so great when you have 30 programs pinned and have to try to remember what each icon represents (or mouse over each in turn and wait for the tooltip.)

I guess I'll have to research alternatives.

Posted: **Wed Apr 03, 2019 3:02 pm**

Blackhawk wrote: ↑Wed Apr 03, 2019 2:14 pm Well, my Win10 start menu tile maker died, and it hasn't been updated since 2015. I can't believe that Windows 10 makes such a big deal out of their tiles, but won't still won't let you customize them. If you pin a program to the start menu, you either have to choose a large square with a tiny icon and a name (which looks awful), or a small square with an appropriate icon, but no text. That's not so great when you have 30 programs pinned and have to try to remember what each icon represents (or mouse over each in turn and wait for the tooltip.)

I guess I'll have to research alternatives.

Just install Classic Start / AKA Classic Shell / AKA NeoClassic-UI / AKA Open-Shell and customise your Start Menu so that you can be done with all the daft tile nonsense.

Posted: **Wed Apr 03, 2019 3:07 pm**

I like the daft tile nonsense. I find it to be an efficient way to sort a few dozen frequently used applications where I can find and open them in a single click without cluttering up anything else or doing manual workarounds. If I don't need to launch something, I don't have the start menu open anyway, so none of it is wasted space.

Posted: **Wed Apr 03, 2019 3:07 pm**

I had a blind spot for the tiles. Now that I've unpinned everything on them, I'm a bit happier.

Posted: **Wed Apr 03, 2019 3:39 pm**

Work IT finally insisted on upgrading my laptop from Win 7 to Win 10. I'm getting used to the Start menu tiles, after spending some time rearranging everything (with the tiles for a handful of frequently used apps pretty much in the center, and everything else around them either shrunk or removed). I might have to install the Classic Explorer, though - the Win 10 version is driving me crazy

Posted: **Wed Apr 03, 2019 5:27 pm**

Well, I do start by removing pretty much everything Win10 puts in there by default. Game launchers across the top (Steam, Ubi, Battle.net, etc), then a row for game utilities (Discord, GeForce Experience, a sound recorder, etc.) Below that is a row divided in half. Left side is utilities (LibreOffice, calculator, etc), right side is system utilities (system cleaners, malware scanners, etc.) The final row under that is media (Spotify, Netflix, etc.)

With that, 90% of everything I ever launch is one click away and easy to find with big, colorful icons. It's better than desktop clutter or folders and subfolders with tiny rows of text.

/edit - and I shrink it down from the almost-full-screen size to just a little larger than the old start menu.

Posted: **Thu Apr 04, 2019 10:36 pm**

Had a motherboard go bad. Was practically an antique but instead of spending a little more for a new chipset and cpu (probably memory too) I found a brand new compatible board on newegg. I tore down the system, cleaned everything, rebuilt it and am now doing a fresh windows 7 install. The updates alone are taking hours.

On the plus side everything went exactly as it should (well, there were a few issues but tiny ones) and it is up and running. Kind of a miracle actually. Cable management is better than it was, but still not great. CPU temp is pretty stable in a good place.

So, disassembled a PC and built a PC today and everything works. Yay.

Posted: **Fri Apr 05, 2019 2:15 am**

I use Stardocks' Start10, but I've also used Classic Shell. Both are quite good.

Posted: **Fri Apr 05, 2019 8:54 am**

Blackhawk wrote: ↑Wed Apr 03, 2019 5:27 pm With that, 90% of everything I ever launch is one click away and easy to find with big, colorful icons. It's better than desktop clutter or folders and subfolders with tiny rows of text.

I pretty much exclusively use desktop icons, with Stardock's Fences to minimize the clutter aspect of it. Installed games on the left, game platforms on the upper right, random utilities on the lower right and random documents and folders across the bottom. I don't use the start menu for anything but restarting. If I need something that isn't on the desktop (which is exceedingly rare as games and chrome are pretty much it for me on my personal computer), I hit the windows key and start typing.

Posted: **Fri Apr 05, 2019 9:59 am**

The desktop is my to-do list. This PC and Recycle Bin belong on the desktop. Everything else on the desktop is something that I need to take care of.

Posted: **Fri Apr 05, 2019 8:39 pm**

Thanks Blues....

Posted: **Thu Apr 11, 2019 11:58 am**

Dropbox just notified me that I've exceeded my maximum connected devices for my account. Apparently they just released an update that limits you to three unless you have a premium account. I have five. That means that should I ever want to connect another device - say, if I update my phone - I'd have to remove three of them to get back down to two before I could do it.

Bye-bye Dropbox. I guess it's time to check out alternatives.

Posted: **Thu Apr 11, 2019 1:38 pm**

Blackhawk wrote: ↑Thu Apr 11, 2019 11:58 am Dropbox just notified me that I've exceeded my maximum connected devices for my account. Apparently they just released an update that limits you to three unless you have a premium account. I have five. That means that should I ever want to connect another device - say, if I update my phone - I'd have to remove three of them to get back down to two before I could do it.

Bye-bye Dropbox. I guess it's time to check out alternatives.

Huh, that's weird. Maybe I'm a legacy or something, but I use Dropbox on several devices and also my desktop and laptop. Maybe they only count Android and iOS devices?

Posted: **Thu Apr 11, 2019 2:43 pm**

If so I'd only be at two. It was just rolled out, and i've been using it for a few years now.

Posted: **Thu Apr 11, 2019 2:59 pm**

I just got the same Dropbox annoying message. And I'm annoyed.

Posted: **Thu Apr 11, 2019 6:04 pm**

Same Dropbox message here...had to go back and remove the old devices that I don't use anymore (previous tablets and cellphones). After that I, I'm in the clear with just my current phone, tablet, and PC

Posted: **Thu Apr 11, 2019 6:16 pm**

disarm wrote: ↑Thu Apr 11, 2019 6:04 pm Same Dropbox message here...had to go back and remove the old devices that I don't use anymore (previous tablets and cellphones). After that I, I'm in the clear with just my current phone, tablet, and PC

How do you remove devices? Do you have to do it on the device? Because I'm pretty sure I don't even have all the devices I've installed it on anymore.

Edit:

Never mind, I found it in Settings-Security

Posted: **Fri Apr 12, 2019 1:47 am**

I'm going to see whether Google Drive is suitable to my needs.

Octopus Overlords

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