Oh no! More boring computer problems! Oh no!

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lol @ "partition magic"

(thanks fp.)

― ^@^, Tuesday, 27 February 2007 11:02 (nineteen years ago)

actually, wait: google's telling me that partition magic only does fat and ntfs?

― ^@^, Tuesday, 27 February 2007 11:13 (nineteen years ago)

http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

bootable linux rescue that comes with qpartd:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/features.php

― koogs, Tuesday, 27 February 2007 11:23 (nineteen years ago)

i... see.

― ^@^, Tuesday, 27 February 2007 11:25 (nineteen years ago)

I didn't realise gparted could resize NTFS!

Yes, that is a more sensible solution.

― Forest Pines, Tuesday, 27 February 2007 11:26 (nineteen years ago)

resizable partitions = unicorns!!

― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 27 February 2007 11:41 (nineteen years ago)

is there a non-unix solution by chance? i am unitarded. (but i do have access to a pc and a mac, if that helps.)

― ^@^, Tuesday, 27 February 2007 11:57 (nineteen years ago)

so there are definitely no mac apps that can do this right?

― ^@^, Sunday, 4 March 2007 11:24 (nineteen years ago)

Do most new PCs have a firewire port or is it something you have to request from the manufacturer? I ask because I'm buying a digital camcorder that I've been told only connects to a pc by firewire. And if anyone can explain the thing with digital camcorders still having to use tape then that'd be great too!

― NI, Monday, 5 March 2007 02:10 (nineteen years ago)

there are lots of dvdr, hdd and solid state camcorders available these days. i guess there are tape camcorders for the same reason there are still vcrs.

firewire is common on laptops, not so on desktops. (um, that said, the newer desktops here at work have what look like firewire sockets)

― koogs, Monday, 5 March 2007 06:49 (nineteen years ago)

I firewire card is dead cheap anyway. The reason tape still persists for video is that data density is high and disk based solutions are not good at high degrees of shock or movement. The DV codec use don tape is very good and easy to edit after use, DVD based used MPEG-2 IBP which less edit systems can deal with, solid state camcorders are using H.264 and H.263 codecs which are very resource intensive to do anything with.

― Ed, Monday, 5 March 2007 07:32 (nineteen years ago)

okay, here we go:

i have a dell inspiron 8500 pc laptop, exactly three years old. today i was out at a free wifi hotspot, using the battery. this is from the era of crappy dell laptop batteries, where if you do any intense computing for even 20 minutes, the battery is gone. so i checked email, browsed, etc. and after twenty or so minutes the little bubble popped up that said low battery. i clicked shutdown, and then closed the laptop, most likely before the computer had completely shut down. a little later i got it plugged in at a cafe, and when i went to turn it on...nothing. or almost mothing. just a blank screen. no windows startup, no DOS action, just blank. I've taken out the battery, plugged and unplugged the computer, made sure the battery is charged, and still, nothing.

so, what do you all think? is there anything i can do? (short of taking it somewhere...i have no money)

i am kind of freaking out.

thank you.

― jergincito, Monday, 5 March 2007 13:31 (nineteen years ago)

A battery three years old is to all intents and purposes a dead battery. Try running it plugged in with the battery removed, i'm not sure if you did from the post above. If not it may be either the power supply or power management unit that is fucked.

― Ed, Monday, 5 March 2007 13:33 (nineteen years ago)

thank you. will try. i didn't know you could plug it in with the battery out.

― jergincito, Monday, 5 March 2007 13:33 (nineteen years ago)

Thanks a lot Koogs & Ed. Turned out I did have firewire (confusing how it's also called a DV something) and Ulead did a great job of capturing the footage quickly and painlessly to my pc. Can anyone recommend a better video editing program than Ulead 10? It's great for simple quick jobs but I'd like something with more effects and tools.

― NI, Monday, 5 March 2007 18:46 (nineteen years ago)

Very trivial question - when I start up my laptop (Windows XP), RealPlayer automatically opens. I cannot for the life of me find any option in the preferences to stop it doing this. Any thoughts?

― Archel, Monday, 5 March 2007 18:55 (nineteen years ago)

I haven't used RealPlayer in a long long time, I installed Real Alternative instead.

You can look here http://www.chipconnection.com/tips.html there are two sections that may help. Removing realplayer from the tray or the next one "Prevent programs from automatically loading when you start Windows" should do it for you.

― svend, Monday, 5 March 2007 19:17 (nineteen years ago)

was there a mac os x update recently that might have totally fucked my php.ini? because something did, and it wasn't me.

― akm, Monday, 5 March 2007 21:04 (nineteen years ago)

shouldn't it copy the old one to like php.init.something? IIRC it did that for apache?

― JW, Monday, 5 March 2007 21:12 (nineteen years ago)

i don't know, it was using php.ini.default and my regular php.ini file seems to have disappeared, and all the permissions for these things (like pear.php) were changed as well.

― akm, Monday, 5 March 2007 21:16 (nineteen years ago)

ok so my computer problems (with a 3.75 year old dell laptop) were so bad my computer completely and utterly died. i will be getting a new computer in about two weeks. what kind should i get? (basically what i require is that it be fairly light and transportable, have a glossy screen, at least 80 gigs of memory, at least 2 hours of battery life, and be able to run both itunes and windows media player. and, um, the internet and a word processor.)

― Maria, Monday, 5 March 2007 21:29 (nineteen years ago)

ok, here's an easy one: how do i configure a program to automatically load upon startup in tiger?

― ^@^, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 11:58 (nineteen years ago)

right click on dock icon, "launch at login" (or something like that)

― tissp, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 12:06 (nineteen years ago)

System Preferences --> Accounts --> (select account you want to configure) --> Login Items

― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 12:08 (nineteen years ago)

ooh tissp's is better

― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 12:09 (nineteen years ago)

thanks dudes.

― ^@^, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 12:12 (nineteen years ago)

Hi hi,

I want to buy an external hard drive to 1) act as a backup/archive of music, pics etc and 2) enable me to transfer large amounts of files between two PCs. Can anyone advise me as to what would be a good value solution at present? I don't have a phenomenal amount of stuff, maybe 40Gb at present, but I'd like it to last a while.

Thanks!

― Mark C, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 15:15 (nineteen years ago)

320G for £80 at a dixons near you. (seagate toaster looking thing, usb2, runs very cool)

oh, have gone up in dixons, but here's one:

http://www.microdirect.co.uk/ProductInfo.aspx?ProductID=14982&&source=Dealtime

― koogs, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 15:51 (nineteen years ago)

Mr. Jaq got a 500Gb MyBook for less than $200 last weekend. He hasn't done much with it yet.

― Jaq, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 15:52 (nineteen years ago)

Only prob with a MyBook (or at least the one I had) is constant spin up/down for no reason. P!ssed me off in the end; got a 1.6TB NAS. How portable do you need it to be? You may want to try looking at some of the caddied laptop drives out there.

Try here...

― peteR, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 16:38 (nineteen years ago)

I don't need it to be terribly portable - simplicity, reliability and price are the three keys.

― Mark C, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 16:41 (nineteen years ago)

A MyBook would still be the cheapest out there, just about. All of them are simple (i.e. plug and pray). Reliability: have had two MyBooks, and only got rid because of annoying spin up/down thing mentioned above. I've had no such problem with my Maxtor external, which is the only one I've kept as an addition to the NAS. Most of your options are pretty much of a muchness, to be honest.

― peteR, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 16:59 (nineteen years ago)

Hm, I need a music drive....

― JW, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 17:14 (nineteen years ago)

As in? For storage on your pc? As an ipod kind of a thing? Personal recs=NAS (Buffalo terastation) for storing flac files (flac=lossless=good). Alternative to that would be the external drives mentioned above. iAudio X5 as a portable ipoddy thing, as long as you RockBox it quicksmart. You can then convert your flac to ogg, and away you go.

― peteR, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 17:21 (nineteen years ago)

why would you need to rockbox a X5?

― koogs, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 17:22 (nineteen years ago)

Something that can do NAS and usb. Firewire would be nice

― JW, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 17:24 (nineteen years ago)

I though that the firmware was awful. Like, why play ogg that isn't gapless? Plus the icon based gui didn't do it for me. Personal taste, though, I suppose.

― peteR, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 17:25 (nineteen years ago)

JW, this was what I got. Raid 5 ends up at 1.2 TB. I thought that would probably keep me in available space for a while. Not sure about usb/firewire with that, though.

― peteR, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 17:28 (nineteen years ago)

I though that the firmware was awful. Like, why play ogg that isn't gapless? Plus the icon based gui didn't do it for me. Personal taste, though, I suppose.

well, yeah - my m5 does natively 95% of the stuff people rockbox their ipods for anyway (ogg, flac, usb...) so i didn't see a lot of point. (the m5 doesn't have icons, just a list). mine's suffereing from limited battery - after 15 months i get about an hour out of a full charge so i'm looking to buy another, possibly a different make (keep the m5 as a 20G external drive full of mp3s)

the new D2 looks nice though.

― koogs, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 17:57 (nineteen years ago)

Ooh, I didn't see this thread before buying a Western Digital Essential MyBook (250GB) from Amazon for about £60. (Maplin are doing them for a tenner more but have ceased their cheap Seagate deals for the time being).

I'm wondering if I can use it as a backup device from both a Win XP laptop and a Win ME desktop? Would that involve partitioning? I bought it primarily cos we're rapidly running out of space on the laptop and I want to archive a lot of stuff off, but it would be handy to use it on both machines. Is there a file format issue between XP and ME (FAT32/NTFS)? And backup utilities - I think there's one bundled with XP but I'd need something for the ME machine. How do they work - first = full backup, subsequent = incrementals?

― Michael Jones, Thursday, 8 March 2007 13:52 (nineteen years ago)

I have no spin-up/down problems on my MyBook. That sounds like an OS issue rather than a hard drive issue. My OS is Mac OS X 10.4.8. The MyBook is connected over Firewire.

― caek, Thursday, 8 March 2007 13:57 (nineteen years ago)

If Steady Mike has a MyBook, then I shall get a MyBook. Thanks for your help everyone - my ignorance as to what spin-up/down means need never be put straight.

― Mark C, Thursday, 8 March 2007 14:17 (nineteen years ago)

Jeez, don't go thinking I know what I'm doing! My thought process on this went: are Seagate drives at Maplin still cheap? No, but they're pushing WD drives now. Can I get a WD drive cheaper anywhere else? Yes. Are the reviews generally positive? Yes. Where's my credit card?

I guess I'd have to stick with FAT32 on the MyBook if I wanted to hook it up to the Win ME machine - is this right? It was delivered by someone who thought he was doing us a favour (as there was no one in) by shoving the package through the wire mesh above the locked gate that links the garden passage with the car port, which means it fell about eight feet onto concrete. It may not even work.

― Michael Jones, Thursday, 8 March 2007 14:24 (nineteen years ago)

spin down is where the disk stops spinning (because it's not being used and is trying to save energy, which is probably a good thing). the problem comes the next time you want to access it it has to spin up again before it can access the files and this feels lumpy. listen carefully and you can hear it stop and wind up again.

(also, my cd burner would produce coasters if the hdd on the same ide cable span down during burning. took me a while to figure that one out and a simple hdparm command to fix.)

fat32 is fine mike, my seagate is the same and i use it with win98, linux, xp, win2k...

― koogs, Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:00 (nineteen years ago)

as for mp3player battery, it ran out this morning halfway to work which is about 50 minutes in total with a 12 hour dormant period in the middle. charged it up when i got here and set it playing and it was ok for 3.5 hours, which is enough. but curious. lots of forum posts about using ds-lite batteries as replacements so i might try that. or buy one like mike's.

― koogs, Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:04 (nineteen years ago)

Everyone who buys a WD MyBook seems to reformat the bugger to NTFS immediately, but I guess they haven't got flaky 6-y-o PCs with terrible operating systems languishing upstairs. I'll stay fat.

My Samsung thing only recharges in a USB socket, y'know, Koogs.

― Michael Jones, Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:15 (nineteen years ago)

Oh no! I'll have to reformat the thing? I have two XP PCs, one with home and one with pro I think. I don't want it to be complicated :(

― Mark C, Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:19 (nineteen years ago)

Well, no, you don't have to. I haven't even taken it out of its static-proof wrapper (with the lovely silica gel sachet - num), so I don't really know, but I think it's FAT32 out of the box. XP & NT support NTFS and FAT32 but the former is probably what yr internal HDD is and NTFS is better cos the N stands for New and New is always better, roight?

― Michael Jones, Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:23 (nineteen years ago)

mark, you don't need to reformat, it'll do as it is. you might lose some functionality like per-user permissions and stuff that ntfs adds but i doubt that'll bother you. - http://www.anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=63 for details (which doesn't mention the 4G file size limit)

usb socket = ok, mike, i have usb sockets.

― koogs, Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:34 (nineteen years ago)

I guess I should partition this thing too, eh? One chunk for desktop backup, one for laptop backup. Which means I could then convert/reformat one of the partitions to NTFS (I can imagine the 4GB file limit being a problem one day). I presume I can create unequal partitions? 200/50 split would be good.

― Michael Jones, Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:42 (nineteen years ago)

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