Mad IT Skillz and 733tness

[Lsuoma]

Here's the place for IT arguments that are going to bore lots of Pitters, since they always to go on forever, and nobody will ever back down.

[gargamel]

Everyone knows Maclindows is the best for computers, and AndriOS is the best for phones and tablets. The thread is now officially over. We're done here.

[spiffigt]

It may not be public knowledge that Julian Assange of Wikileaks fame used to be a BSD user. He even had some commit-privileges in NetBSD (proff@NetBSD.org).
He seems to have mostly fallen off the charts mid to late 2000. He imported Surfraw into pkgsrc in August 2000 (commit message). Two or three messages in total in 2001-2002.

He surfaced again for one message on the regional Australian list in 2006 where he stated that he would be in Melbourne for a few weeks in case someone wanted to meet up. Post.

He has quite a few entries in the NetBSD slogans file for the fortune(6) program.
See netbsd and netbsd-o.

http://docs.freebsd.org/doc/2.2.2-RELEA ... ok328.html
Here he is listed as an "Additional FreeBSD Contributor" for FreeBSD 2.2.2. (May 1997)

See also: http://blather.michaelwlucas.com/archives/443

[goddamn 'nym]

It may not be public knowledge that Julian Assange of Wikileaks fame used to be a BSD user. He even had some commit-privileges in NetBSD (proff@NetBSD.org).
He seems to have mostly fallen off the charts mid to late 2000. He imported Surfraw into pkgsrc in August 2000 (commit message). Two or three messages in total in 2001-2002.

Well the kernel architecture sounds appealing from a security point of view.

[Nec_V20]

Computer Power Supply: PSU or IED?

Why is there such a difference in price between various Power Supply Units which purport to do the same thing?

The secret is known as "cost down".

What happens is that a design for an absolutely perfect PSU is created, then there is a round of eliminating components to save cost. If that works then another round of elimination is started and tested until there is a design which no longer works - one then goes back a step to the absolute bare minimum which did work.

So that's it? Not by a long shot. Now that there is a bare minimum of components which will work the next phase of "cost down" is put into effect. In this round the high quality components (such as capacitors) are replaced by lower quality ones. This is then tested and if it still works then those lower quality components will be replaced by even worse quality components. This continues until the PSU once again fails and then the process is taken one step back to the design which did still work.

So that's it then rock bottom has been reached?

Not quite; now that the design has been minimised and the components have been "cost downed" the focus is on the safety of the device itself. Do we really need all of them? Of course not, so various safety components are eliminated or replaced by cheaper alternatives until they can technically say that they are in compliance with safety standards without actually lying outright.

How can you tell a PSU from a potential IED (Improvised Explosive Device)? Simply by picking it up. If you pick up a PSU and it feels like all it needs is to be sealed and have some helium added to it to make it fly away then you are dealing with an "AL-Q Taliban Special" (AQTS). Another indicator would be the presence of a switch on the back of the PSU around the power switch where you can choose between 110 volts and 230 volts. If one looks at the label on the PSU and it has an entry for "-5V" on it then it is an IED candidate. If you look at the Amps with regard to the various voltages and the "+3.3V" and "+5V" are higher than the "+12V" then again you are dealing with an AQTS".

Last but not least there is of course the price. If a deal looks too good to be true then in the case of a PSU it most certainly is.

What are the typical "features" of an "Al-Q Taliban Special" IED? One of the main "features" is that this type of device will generally use your hardware as a fuse to defend itself against detonating. It is only logical (well in the minds of the designers) that the PSU has to be defended against damage by eliminating the cause of the threat, namely the motherboard and/or some other offending parts of your hardware.

If you are lucky then all that will happen is that the AQTS will just not turn on. Not so lucky if if it makes large "bang" noise and/or issues magic smoke. Unlucky if the "bang" noise and/or magic smoke results in the PSU catching on fire, and you can see the results of something like that here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11...vs_reg_reader/

Of course the worst luck is if it catches fire and you are not there (or asleep) to put it out before you lose your home and/or your own life and life of your loved ones.

Another "feature" of the AQTS is that although it is rated at a certain wattage it will never attain that performance in real use. Generally one of these devices will be "good" if they can actually put out half of the rated wattage. One thing you can be certain of however, if you buy a "700 Watt" IED then you will NEVER, EVER, be able to run 700 Watt worth of hardware from it - not even close.

One should not expect any kind of efficiency from an AQTS and the only "80+" energy rating is the writing on the box. What this means is that within a year (if it lasts that long) the AQTS will have ended up costing you more in wasted electricity than buying a proper PSU in the first place.

The most trivial of the "features" of the AQTS is the absolute dearth of connection cables issuing from it. Not only will there be a lack of those cables but the ones that are there will also be much too short.

The cheap price of the AQTS is also offset by its short lifespan. If it lasts for more than a year of normal use before it dies (and hopefully does nothing else) then the person who bought it can consider themselves lucky.

So what can you expect from a PSU that costs a bit more money? Safety features for one (for both the PSU and the attached hardware), they will also perform to their rated wattage and also have a priority for the "+12V" rail over the other two. Really high quality PSUs (like the Corsair AX860i) will happily run ABOVE their rated wattage. For instance the AX860i has been tested and showed no signs of wear running at almost 1,000 Watts: http://www.kitguru.net/components/po...60i-review/11/ If anything goes wrong with a real PSU then it will quietly shut down, that is it will go out with a whisper rather than a bang. You can also expect the PSU to last and do its job for years.

In conclusion next to pouring a bucket of water over your running computer the PSU has the potential to do the most damage to your system. If you have a neighbour downstairs who is considering building his own computer and you see him eyeing advertisements for an "Al-Q Taliban Special", offer to give him an extra $30 or so towards buying a decent PSU - it might just save your life.

[Nec_V20]

I really cannot state it in any lesser terms than I have in the title of this thread.

The risks involved in RAID0 (RAID Zero) far outweigh any "gains". With SSDs, because of the lack of TRIM support (and yes I do know that Intel has brought out TRIM support for a very narrow band of Motherboards supporting RAID0 http://www.anandtech.com/show/6161/i...rds-we-test-it) your SSDs rapidly decrease in write performance over a relatively short period of time.

Sequential writes to the RAID0 using SSDs will initially be faster than to single SSDs however random writes to a RAID0 are rubbish from the get go and that is even without figuring in the degradation of performance due to lack of TRIM support I mentioned above.

Yes reads from the RAID0 will be faster but not really by all that much subjectively. And when I say "subjectively" it has been shown repeatedly that for something in computing to be actually realised by the user to be faster, it has to be at least 20% faster.

What exactly is the risk? If one drive in your RAID 0 configuration fails for any reason then you will lose EVERYTHING. Now this is not subjective, it is very objective, completely factual, and it is very fatal. That is just not worth it and I would really like to hear the arguments of anyone who thinks it is.

Now conceivably two 120GB SSDs in RAID0 could be backed up and restored in a reasonable time, but what about two 4 TB harddrives?

And don't give me this tosh about, "I have been using "xyz" in a RAID0 and have never had any problems". That's like someone saying, "I (or my dad, or grandfather) fought in WWII and didn't get a scratch, so wars are safe and can't hurt you".

I was Senior German Engineer for Enterprise Disaster-Recovery Tech-Support and I am more than well aware of what happens when people approach their systems with more optimism than sense, when things to horribly wrong.

[Nec_V20]

OK here's the deal, you have overclocked your processor and the game you are running doesn't really get the performance boost you were hoping for.

Here is a bit of really OLD knowledge which those of us who used to work with SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessing) machines knew but it seems to have been forgotten since SMP machines have become single die "cores".

With this simple little trick you will - depending on the game - get a hell of a lot more performance (even without overclocking) and it may even cure a games propensity to crash to desktop (CTD).

Since Windows NT one has had the ability to not only adjust the priority of a process but with multi processor machines one could also set the affinity.

Getting to the point you first of all have to turn off hyperthreading in the BIOS

If you open the Task Manager and you right click on a process you will see the option "Set Affinity". What this does is it fixes the process to run off one of the cores in your CPU, and stay there.

Now you could do this manually but the pain is that when you reboot all the settings are gone. So there is a nice utility where you can store profiles and load them to automate this process. The utility can be found here:

http://www.koma-code.de/index.php?optio ... &Itemid=93

You are thinking to yourself, "Why the hell should I do this?"

The reason is that Windows left to its own devices will mess you and your game playing session around. The main acceleration to your processing power comes from your L2 Cache - a bit of super fast memory between your processor and your RAM.

Now what happens is that you have your game running quite happily on one of the cores of your CPU but Windows decided to swap the game over to another core which it deems to be underutilised. This will of course wipe the L2 Cache and it will have to be filled again from the incredibly slower RAM.

Also Windows works on the basis of pre-emptive multitasking, which means that processes (your game for instance) get a certain time slice on any one of the cores and then it is another processes turn - again this mucks about with your game and the L2 Cache.

So what you do is boot up your system and when it is up and running, start CPU-Control and assign all of the running processes to CPU 0. Now some games take well to multi processors and some games not so much or at all. You will have to do a bit of research on the game engine to determine that.

If you have found that the game can only run on one processor then load the game and allocate it to one of the remaining cores. If the game can use multiple processors then simply assign the game to the other three cores (on a quad core CPU).

Assigning a game that really only runs on one core to three cores is counterproductive and you will not get the acceleration you were hoping for, so you have to do your research on the game engine.

Probably the best bet is to just allocate the game to one free core, see what kind of performance you get and then allocate it to two cores and see if the performance increases.

It is not unusual to find that games which were unplayable all of a sudden feel very comfortable on your machine if your computer has a weaker CPU.

It is more of a "go faster stripe" than any overclocking will ever give you, that's for sure.

[Nec_V20]

If the virtual memory (pagefil.sys) gets corrupted it can result in all manner of weird behaviour. A case that I dealt with consisted of the sound subsystem not working. Uninstalling and reinstalling the driver did no good, and so the acquaintance brought his laptop to to the pub with him.

I checked to make sure that the volume was turned up, but no joy.

So as a first step I went into the virtual memory and changed the settings to custom with the lowest and highest values the same. This deletes and recreates the virtual memory file (essentially scrubbing it). Lo and behold, when I rebooted, without doing anything else, the sound was back. If it is already custom size then just make it smaller or larger and that will have the same effect.

It wouldn't take you much time to try this and it could work for you. It is always my first port of call when anyone comes to me with a problem (or I have one).

[Nec_V20]

So you have 16 or more gigabyte of RAM in your system and have found out that you didn't really need any more than 8 GB. What to do with the rest?

How about creating a RAM Disk and consigning the virtual memory and browser cache to it.

The software I use for this is available for free, unlimited in functionality, and is called "SoftPerfect RAM Disk". It allows one to create the RAM Disk at boot - which is of course essential if one wishes to place the virtual memory (pagefile.sys) there.

SoftPerfect RAM Disk used to be something one had to pay quite a lot for, but since the version 3.3.3 they have made it freeware. The good thing about it is that one can set it up with the NTFS file system straight away unlike other RAM Disk software which one would have to leave RAW and then format to NTFS separately.

Of course, every reboot, the garbage which would normally have accumulated on your hard drive or SSD is wiped out; also the chance of the virtual memory becoming corrupt and causing you all kinds of problems is also essentially eliminated.

[Nec_V20]

When you look at RAM for your performance PC you will see the likes of "1866", "2133" or "2400" and of course these have to be a lot faster than "1600" modules.

Well let's take a closer look at the specs of the 1866 RAM, and we will see something like "CL10". Now we look at the cheaper 1600 RAM and we see "CL9". What does this mean?

The 1866 RAM is about 16.5% faster than the 1600 RAM - so the choice is a no-brainer.

But wait, at CL10 vs CL9 the 1866 RAM is 12% slower than the 1600 RAM.

Let's do the arithmetic, (1866 / 10) / (1600 / 9) *100 = 104.625%

This means that you are paying quite a bit more for a a measly 4.5% performance gain.

As it says in the Bible (and every EULA - never mind "Warranties"), "The large print giveth and the small print taketh away".

For the purposes of overclocking, RAM "speed" is the least performance enhancing factor. I would defy anyone to run a system with settings at 1600 and then at 2400 and tell me they notice any difference. If you save the money for the "high performance" RAM and stick that into a processor which has 2MB more cache then you will get a hell of a lot more of a performance boost for your money.

Let's take an example, 2*8GB 2400 RAM will cost you about £70 ($105) more than 2*8GB 1600 RAM, whereas you could save that £70 ($105) and buy an i7-4770k Haswell processor instead of an i5-4670k Haswell processor.

Now given the same motherboard which do you think will be the higher performance machine for the price? A system with an i7-4770k and 1600 RAM or the system with an i5-4670k and 2400 RAM?

The whole RAM "speed" hype is essentially a con game. On any benchmark you would like to use which is not RAM specific (and even on many that are) the difference in the results will be about 1%-2% at best (in most cases however it will simply be non existent). Considering the amount of money one is asked to fork out for "overclocking RAM" this result is pathetic.

Increased RAM speed does not (at all) translate to higher system performance in the way a higher clocked CPU with 33% more Cache does.

My advice for building a performance PC would be to buy 1600 CL9 RAM and the money you save compared to buying the "super-duper" 2400 RAM, that effectively gives you bugger all, you can invest in a higher performing graphics card or CPU.

So don't be stupid and don't be fooled. The only people who are excited about faster RAM are either ignorant, salescritters or marketdroids (members of the latter two categories pretty much presupposes the first category in my professional computer experience).

And don't even get me started on the idiocy of so-called "heat-spreaders" placed over the RAM which in many cases actually INCREASES the heat of the RAM because they essentially insulate the RAM and because of the proximity to each other in the RAM slots they won't even allow for effective ventilation of the heat-spreaders themselves (hint if you cannot get your overclocked RAM to run stably try prying off the "heat-spreaders" and you could well find your problems going away).

I wrote the above about a year ago, but the principle still applies. "High performance" DDR3 RAM is still a waste of money.

[TiBo]

I'm still running Q9400+DDR2/800+AMD7850+SSD am still perfectly satisfied.

The birth of LGA775 was somehow a turning point in PC history.
Up to that point, OS, apps, and games were usually so demanding that you had to spend a lot of money building a reasonably fast system. Software was always in some way ahead of consumer hardware. With 775, its cheap multicore CPUs, its multilane PCI-Express boards, the game changed. Consumer SSDs gave an additional boost, leaving the VGA manufacturers to be the last who had to bring their game to the same level.

Good thing.

[Nec_V20]

I'm still running Q9400+DDR2/800+AMD7850+SSD am still perfectly satisfied.

The birth of LGA775 was somehow a turning point in PC history.
Up to that point, OS, apps, and games were usually so demanding that you had to spend a lot of money building a reasonably fast system. Software was always in some way ahead of consumer hardware. With 775, its cheap multicore CPUs, its multilane PCI-Express boards, the game changed. Consumer SSDs gave an additional boost, leaving the VGA manufacturers to be the last who had to bring their game to the same level.

Good thing.

In case you were wondering, my name "Nec_V20" refers to the first hardware upgrade I ever did for myself from a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 to a staggering 8 MHz NEC V20 CPU. This included my having to learn to solder to replace the quartz oscillator. I also managed to get a special BIOS created by the German computer magazine "C't Magazin".

I am inclined to agree with you, but for a different reason.

For myself I am having a feeling of, as Yogi Berra said, "It's déjà vu all over again". Back in the day I upgraded from the NEC V20 system that I had to a 8026 system (I think it was 10 MHz) over the time I upgraded that board (and soldered in different quartz oscillators) to the point where I had upgraded it to a Harris 286 25MHz.

Why not an 80386 you may ask? This is where the similarity to today comes in. Because the prevalent OS of the day was the DOS based Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and was 16 bit the 286 I had actually ran faster than even the 40 MHz AMD 386. The reason for this is that the 386, a CISC CPU, was a 32-bit CPU and had the 32-bit instruction set arranged "in front" of the 16- and 8-bit instructions. This meant the DOS based Windows, for every instruction had to go through the whole redundant process of going through the 32-bit instructions before it found a match in the 16-bit instruction set.

For years I had no incentive to update the whole system and that did not change until I eventually built an 80486 DX50 system for myself.

Fast forward to the present. Games, which are the resource hogs on a computer system needed ever increasing CPU power. Unfortunately however the game engines could not (and to an extent still cannot) handle more than one CPU (or Core as it is now called). The game manufacturers changed from making their products CPU hogs to programming them to use the GPU in the graphics card instead (taking advantage of the multi lane PCI-express bus you mentioned).

The bottom line is that if you have a reasonably potent CPU in your system and games are not performing as you would like then a Graphics Card upgrade would do more for you than upgrading the whole system to a new CPU.

I will be doing another post with regard to SSDs. That is unless you guys find my posts a waste of time, in which case I will stop doing them.

[Nec_V20]

There are, without ANY anti-virus software, six clicks within Windows to make you immune against about 75+ percent viruses.

The thing is, why should I bother to create a longish post (it has to be detailed) when no fucker reads this thread.

Sure if there is some feedback I will make the effort, otherwise, happy crashes.

Seriously folks, if you can't be fucked then neither can I.

[KiwiInOz]

There are, without ANY anti-virus software, six clicks within Windows to make you immune against about 75+ percent viruses.

The thing is, why should I bother to create a longish post (it has to be detailed) when no fucker reads this thread.

Sure if there is some feedback I will make the effort, otherwise, happy crashes.

Seriously folks, if you can't be fucked then neither can I.

I've read it, but I still have no fucking idea what you are talking about.

Give me an ecosystem any day.

[Nec_V20]

There are, without ANY anti-virus software, six clicks within Windows to make you immune against about 75+ percent viruses.

The thing is, why should I bother to create a longish post (it has to be detailed) when no fucker reads this thread.

Sure if there is some feedback I will make the effort, otherwise, happy crashes.

Seriously folks, if you can't be fucked then neither can I.

I've read it, but I still have no fucking idea what you are talking about.

Give me an ecosystem any day.

I won't bother then.

Of course you won't find your own answer so funny when your system crashes or worse your online accounts get compromised as a result of you not being bothered to learn about six simple mouseclicks.

It's no skin off my nose mate.

[Nec_V20]

I thought about it and it isn't really fair to allow someone like KiwiInOz to annoy me into withholding information which could save the rest of you a lot of grief.

Going back to Windows NT 4.0 EVERYTHING is controlled by what is called "Windows Explorer". Whatever is set there is the set for every other program running on the Windows platform.

Microsoft however screwed up with one default value.

Why is this important? Why should you even bother reading any further?

Because of this screw up most of the worst threats to your identity (such as your PayPal account and password) are put on your system unwittiingly because of this mistake by Microsoft which, although people such as I have been after them about it for two decades now, they have not rectified.

The problem is that there is a default in Windows Explorer which states:

"Hide extensions for known file types"

Known file types are anything which have been registered in Windows, such as "exe", "com" or "cmd". Anything ending in .EXE (dot EXE) is a program.

Where the problems start is if you have a file whose real name is "holiday.jpg.EXE" and the default is activated. All you see is "Holiday.jpg" (the .EXE being known is not shown).

You think it is a photo, so you double click on it. Nothing appears to happen, but in reality you have just installed a virus or a trojan or some other form of malware onto your system.

Here are the six mouse clicks to avoid this problem

1) Click on "Start"
then hover the cursor over "all programs)
2) Click on "Accessories"
3) Click on "Windows Explorer"

In Windows Explorer

4) Click on "Tools"
5) Click on "Folder Options"
6) Click on "View"

Now scroll down a but and take the checkmark out beside "Hide extensions for known file types"

If you start Windows Explorer and you do not see the toolbar with "File", "Edit", "View", "Tools" and "Help" then:

1) Click on "Organize"
2) Click on "Layout"
3) Click on "Menu Bar".

and then go to step 4) mentioned above

You have now made yourself immeasurably more secure than you were before.

[another lurker]

Don't worry about it Nec. Helpful information is always appreciated around here.

And Kiwi only speaks one language, the language of tits. If you had provided citations, he would have understood

http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/ ... e58a2b.jpg

[another lurker]

For the record, after scrolling up, I think that I prefer the language of titspeak over 1337speak.

[sinister]

There are, without ANY anti-virus software, six clicks within Windows to make you immune against about 75+ percent viruses.

The thing is, why should I bother to create a longish post (it has to be detailed) when no fucker reads this thread.

Sure if there is some feedback I will make the effort, otherwise, happy crashes.

Seriously folks, if you can't be fucked then neither can I.

have you ever plugged a new XP box into the internet unpatched? Give it maybe 30 mins at most and I guarantee you have a zombie on your hands. Who needs to get people to run viruses when worms will do all the work for you? Win7 is a bit more secure, but not by a lot.

Sorry, I saw people nerd talk and figured maybe there was another grey hat out there. We'll see.

[Nec_V20]

have you ever plugged a new XP box into the internet unpatched?

That was a rhetorical question, right? Do you really want me to dignify it with a reply? Note to self - time to dust off the LART again methinks

Give it maybe 30 mins at most and I guarantee you have a zombie on your hands.

Well if you are so much of a numpty that you would not patch your system, then you pretty much got what you deserved. On that note, if you had a barely sentient"friend" build a computer for you because at least he knows where the power switch is (or you bought that too-good-to-be-true system) and it caught fire or your system suddenly turned into a rock; no, viruses cannot cause that - a dirt cheap power supply unit (PSU) on the other hand is almost guaranteed to do so.

You have however reminded me of Jim, the bane of my computer techie existence.

A sample from the chronicles of Jim.

I had built and set up a computer for him. After two weeks he called me to tell me that the computer was acting weird. I asked him if he had been on any dodgy sites and he swore blind that he had not. So I went over to his place and when I looked at the desktop it was full of porn dialers. Now I don't mind someone lying to me - but not to this extent.

Jim is not above taking initiative - unfortunately.

After having been weaned off the idea that "Free Pr0n Sites" were a bad idea, his anti-virus software reported that it had discovered something suspicious but could not delete it.

Fast forward to the phone call I got from him stating that his system no longer responded. He did tell me about the message his anti-virus software had given him. When I got there, right enough about 30 seconds after I turned his system on it became totally unresponsive. If one moved the mouse it took quite a long while for the cursor to react. When I asked him what he had done he of course replied, "Nothng".

Anyway I rebooted and managed to get into the Control Panel and the installed programs. I found there not one, not two, but SEVEN anti-virus programs running and of course they were ALL doing real time scans. That'll do it, that'll turn a working computer into a bit bucket. So I had fun and games getting rid of them.

I also found out that he did not have a virus, but rather something benign that AVG had thought was "suspicious" - did I mention that I hate AVG?

Of course Jim has also had "hardware issues". Another phone call to me had Jim saying that his computer would not start. Knowing Jim I asked if it was plugged into the socket. He said, "Of course it is, what kind of idiot do you think I am". I refrained from an answer because based on my experience of him it would have been a very long monologue on my part.

I got to his house and sure enough everything was plugged into the four-way power strip. Also the power plug was inserted into the computer. The power lead from the power strip was also plugged into the wall socket.

The switch of the wall socket was however turned OFF.

Actually Win7 or any other OS is only as secure as the person operating the computer. It's humans who need to be rebooted - preferably with steel toe-capped boots - or at least defenistrated.

[another lurker]

This is interesting...AppleID hack
http://www.wired.com/2012/08/apple-amaz ... cking/all/

[Nec_V20]

Ah yes, the joys of Jim, the gift that keeps on giving.

A couple of years ago I managed to get a really good deal on an external 2 TB harddrive for him. I put a load of stuff on it for him such as the complete works of Mozart. I also placed a complete backup of his system onto it. And then I made the fatal mistake - I actually handed it over to him.

I heard nothing more about it until he came over and asked me if I had some more things I could copy for him. I said yes and if he brought the harddrive down with him I would copy the stuff over. He said he could not find it.

Anyway fast forward and he told me he had found it but could not access it.

He brought it over and right enough although the drive was picked up on my system I could not copy anything over.

How did this happen?

I have my suspicion which seems to have been borne out by the surface scan I have done of it. I have now made it useable again although with reduced capacity.

The problem I think lies in the fact that he had placed the drive upside down on his desk and this can easily be fatal. The external drive is also badly designed because it is flat on both sides and if you don't know about the fatal weakness of harddrives it is easy to make the mistake I suspect he has.

Harddrives consist of spinning platters and heads which read those platters. If one looks at a bare harddrive it has a flat surface and a surface which has a PCB (Printed Circuit Board) we will call the former the top and the latter the bottom of the drive.

When the harddrive is in operation the heads float above the surface of the platters on a cushion of air. Being a precision instrument the heads have to be in close proximity to the platters but not touching them. Of course there is also gravity to consider. The heads on the bottom of the platters are being drawn away from them by gravity and the heads on the top are being drawn towards them.

If you place the drive upside down then the heads which were supposed to be on the bottom and designed to work against gravity are now on the top and thus it is a lot harder for the wind cushion to keep the heads from touching the patter whilst the drive is in operation.

A headcrash (that's when a reading/writing head touches the platter whilst it is rotating at high speed) is therefore more likely and in such an occurrence the magnetic surface of the platter will take damage.

The takeaway for the rest of you is that if you have an external harddrive it is vital that you always operate the drive the right way around. The drives will have rubber feet on the bottom and even though the external housing may have two flat sides you should always make sure that you pay attention to how you have the drive oriented before you plug it into the USB port.

[Nec_V20]

Here's a little tip for you upon how to get more performance out of your USB 2 external hard drive or memory stick.

Systems now come with USB 3 ports as standard. USB 3 is backwards compatible to USB 2. More than this however. When USB 3 was designed the USB 2 compatibility portion had a lot of the overhead of the original USB 2 specification removed.

The upshot of this is that if you attach a USB2 external drive to a USB3 port you will get more performance out of that drive.

These are tests I conducted and the results:

Flash Drive

USB3
Writing speed: 16.8 MByte/s
Reading speed: 33.2 MByte/s

USB2
Writing speed: 16.3 MByte/s
Reading speed: 31.4 MByte/s


USB Hard Drive

USB3
Writing speed: 28.4 MByte/s
Reading speed: 33.4 MByte/s

USB2
Writing speed: 25.5 MByte/s
Reading speed: 32.4 MByte/s


Micro SD Card

USB3
Writing speed: 4.63 MByte/s
Reading speed: 18.1 MByte/s

USB2
Writing speed: 4.63 MByte/s
Reading speed: 17.8 MByte/s

In each case it was the same USB2 device, the only difference was that I tested them alternately on the USB3 and USB2 port of my system.

As you can clearly see the performance was significantly improved on all USB2 devices when they were attached to the USB3 port. The surprise for me was that it made a difference even on an intrinsically a piss-poor performing Micro SD card where I would have thought that there would be no difference whatsoever - it wasn't much of a performance gain, but it was there.

[piero]

I thought about it and it isn't really fair to allow someone like KiwiInOz to annoy me into withholding information which could save the rest of you a lot of grief.

Going back to Windows NT 4.0 EVERYTHING is controlled by what is called "Windows Explorer". Whatever is set there is the set for every other program running on the Windows platform.

Microsoft however screwed up with one default value.

Why is this important? Why should you even bother reading any further?

Because of this screw up most of the worst threats to your identity (such as your PayPal account and password) are put on your system unwittiingly because of this mistake by Microsoft which, although people such as I have been after them about it for two decades now, they have not rectified.

The problem is that there is a default in Windows Explorer which states:

"Hide extensions for known file types"

Known file types are anything which have been registered in Windows, such as "exe", "com" or "cmd". Anything ending in .EXE (dot EXE) is a program.

Where the problems start is if you have a file whose real name is "holiday.jpg.EXE" and the default is activated. All you see is "Holiday.jpg" (the .EXE being known is not shown).

You think it is a photo, so you double click on it. Nothing appears to happen, but in reality you have just installed a virus or a trojan or some other form of malware onto your system.

Here are the six mouse clicks to avoid this problem

1) Click on "Start"
then hover the cursor over "all programs)
2) Click on "Accessories"
3) Click on "Windows Explorer"

In Windows Explorer

4) Click on "Tools"
5) Click on "Folder Options"
6) Click on "View"

Now scroll down a but and take the checkmark out beside "Hide extensions for known file types"

If you start Windows Explorer and you do not see the toolbar with "File", "Edit", "View", "Tools" and "Help" then:

1) Click on "Organize"
2) Click on "Layout"
3) Click on "Menu Bar".

and then go to step 4) mentioned above

You have now made yourself immeasurably more secure than you were before.

Excellent tits! er, tips!

I do this all the time when people ask me to have a look at their computer (I'm not an IT expert, but I know just a bit more than the average user). And I leave it like that when I finish, even against their wishes. It just seems stupid to hide the extensions. What were Microsoft engineers thinking? Unless they are able to come up with an amazing AI for their operating systems, making them more "user friendly" just means "attractive to idiots".

[Nec_V20]

(I'm not an IT expert, but I know just a bit more than the average user)

I've been in the game now as a techie for over thirty years and one thing I can assure you of, there are no experts. The reason for this is simple, just when you know you are getting a hang of things everything changes. Thus "Permanent Scholar" is about the highest you can aim for.

[Nec_V20]

Here's a little tip that some of you might find useful.

To set the scene, I am notorious for misplacing USB cables that I use to connect my tablet or camera to my PC. Or, I need to free up a USB slot so I take one of the USB cables out and when I am finished I invariably had to hunt for the cable.

In the photo below it is my external SATA connection that I use when someone brings me their harddrive to take a look at.

I suppose one can use velcro with a sticky back or duct tape, but it is not all that easy to remove and get rid of the sticky residue and it doesn't look all that nice.

What I do is I take four 5mm ball magnets and when I attach them to the side of my computer they make a really nice arch that I can slip the cable through. I use N52 "buckyball" magnets which are a bit hard to get (you usually find them sold as an expensive magnetic puzzle) however if you look around you should be able to find some on offer somewhere.

As you can see from the photo of the side of my system they hold the cables nicely and of course I can move the magnets around to suit my needs.

The other thing I have found is that they are really good for holding screws when I am taking someone else's computer apart.

http://i1064.photobucket.com/albums/u36 ... Magnet.jpg

[Sulman]

I'm still running Q9400+DDR2/800+AMD7850+SSD am still perfectly satisfied.

The birth of LGA775 was somehow a turning point in PC history.
Up to that point, OS, apps, and games were usually so demanding that you had to spend a lot of money building a reasonably fast system. Software was always in some way ahead of consumer hardware. With 775, its cheap multicore CPUs, its multilane PCI-Express boards, the game changed. Consumer SSDs gave an additional boost, leaving the VGA manufacturers to be the last who had to bring their game to the same level.

Good thing.

The growth of consoles also constrained game development massively. A 2008 PC is still competitve today, as long as you stay on top of the GPU. Prior to that you always needed to stay on top of development.

Heck, my desktop is basically 2009 vintage, and it runs just about everything (with a modest GPU and RAM upgrade).

Some newer Intel stuff is actually going backwards in the name of efficiency. The I7's of the last couple of years are absolute monsters, and still peerless.

[TiBo]

Wanted to ask around:

How many of you use VPNs or Proxy connections when browsing the net (or for doing things you wouldn't want others to see)?

[Lsuoma]

Yo.

[mike150160]

of course