The Vent and Rant Thread

[Rumpelteazer]

That's a very scary situation indeed. I hope everything turns out okay and you'll get the good news quickly (my father was once bitten by a junkie who claimed to have AIDS, that was a very anxious wait for good news).

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

Yeah, W.T. He was. They just got home. He was crying and asking if he was going to die.

Poor kid. A scary situation all around.

[Rumpelteazer]

I just discovered a teeny tiny pin prick in my trusty Paperwhite 2. It's only visible up close an not even from all angles, but I know it's there.

The big question is now if I shall buy a Paperwhite 3, which should fit in the PW2 case for €140. Or shall I shell out €255 for a Voyage with origami case. I like the idea of a flat front, without crumbcatcher, but is it worth over 100 euros extra?

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Rumpelteazer

The big question is now if I shall buy a Paperwhite 3, which should fit in the PW2 case for €140. Or shall I shell out €255 for a Voyage with origami case. I like the idea of a flat front, without crumbcatcher, but is it worth over 100 euros extra?

If you're bothered by a tiny pin-prick in the light layer, I'd recommend going for the Voyage instead of another paperwhite. Since it has a glass front, it is less likely to sustain pin-prick type damage to the light layer.

I am very pleased with my new voyage, although less pleased with the non-leather origami case (which has sharpish plastic edges, so not wonderfully comfortable to hold.)

[covingtoncat73]

Thanks, all. My little nephew is good so far but will have to be tested regularly for awhile.

[Dazrin]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I am very pleased with my new voyage, although less pleased with the non-leather origami case (which has sharpish plastic edges, so not wonderfully comfortable to hold.)

I have the leather origami case and it had very sharp edges too, my solution was to run run my fingernail along the edges, pushing very hard, to soften them up. It worked "ok" but the edges have continued to soften and are now very nice. For a plastic one, I would think a similar solution could work but you may need to use something harder than a fingernail like a large coin or something else hard that has a smooth edge that won't catch on anything and possibly tear/damage the case. Or maybe a fine tooth file.

Edit: The more I think about it a nail file may work very well for this on a plastic (non-leather) case.

[cromag]

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

Thanks, all. My little nephew is good so far but will have to be tested regularly for awhile.

Silly question, I guess, but were they able to test the needle for anything?

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

Had to take it somewhere, Cinisa, if I want to keep a couple of RW friendships intact. I have blood in my mouth from biting my tongue so badly (metaphorically speaking).

I do a fair bit of virtual tongue biting.

My pet peeves are the folks elsewhere who elevate paranoia to an art form. Like the folks quite sure Microsoft left back doors in Windows to let the NSA snoop on their PCs.

Clinical paranoia is a defense mechanism. What the paranoid is really terrified of, on a level they can't consciously admit, is that they don't matter and nobody cares about them. If you can buy into a paranoid view, hey! You matter!. You're important enough that someone is trying to get you.

All I can say to the folks I mentioned is "You wish you were important enough that anybody could be bothered to snoop on your PC. Your worst nightmare is true. You aren't important. You don't matter. Nobody cares what you think! Deal with it."
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

I finally upgraded to Windows 10 on my desktop. My SO had upgraded her Windows 7 Home laptop to Win10 with no issues. (She basically said "No" to all of MS's suggested actions.) I upgraded a friend's Win 8.1 Home laptop with no issues. I upgraded an older Win 7 Home laptop used as a travel machine with no issues. (I'm writing this on it.)

It was time to upgrade the desktop. I'd held off because I dual boot Windows and Ubuntu Linux, and wanted to be sure that wasn't an issue.

That wasn't. The upgrade process didn't affect dual boot at all. The fun started once I had.

The desktop is a refurb Dell Small Form Factor box, with a 2.4 ghz quad core Xeon CPU, 8 GB RAM, and an ASUS 5450 low profile graphics card with a GB of video RAM replacing the built-in Intel graphics. Windows and Ubuntu live on and boot from a Crucial MX-100 SSD. The original SATA HD is still in place as a data drive. (And Win7 is still on it.)

The Win7 installation was fast and stable. Win10 is the opposite. Anything I do is guaranteed to hang and require a power cycle to get the machine back. I went through and uninstalled various things I thought might be issues (and which work fine on the other upgrades) to no avail. I'm at the point of reverting back to Win 7.

My biggest gripe is that I have no idea what the underlying problem is. I've run Windows since the 3.1 days (and MSDOS before that.) I can usually figure out what the problems are and address them. This has me pounding my head against the wall.

Time to boot into Ubuntu and use that while I do some research about what Win10's problem might be. As a rule, weird issues I've seen in Windows tend to be video related, even if video wouldn't seem to be involved. Next step might be to pull the video card and revert to built-in Intel graphics to see if it helps.

I've had fun before. This isn't it.
______
Dennis

[cromag]

Yeah. My brother -- who is reasonably computer literate -- had no trouble upgrading his computer.

Then he helped Dad with the upgrade. The computer was so hosed up it wouldn't boot.

W7 does everything I need a Windows computer to do, and I have the Linux computers for most daily tasks, so I think I can wait on Windows 10.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by cromag

Yeah. My brother -- who is reasonably computer literate -- had no trouble upgrading his computer.

Then he helped Dad with the upgrade. The computer was so hosed up it wouldn't boot.

W7 does everything I need a Windows computer to do, and I have the Linux computers for most daily tasks, so I think I can wait on Windows 10.

Up in Firefox under Ubuntu now.

There are two problems with passing on Win10 and remaining with Win7.

The first is that Win7 is out of support, and will no longer get critical security upgrades.

The second is the free offer of Win10 expires In June, I believe. If you want to upgrade without charge, you need to beat the deadline.

The first isn't a concern here. I still have a netbook running WinXP (that can't run something later - 1.5GB RAM just won't do for Windows after XP), and an ancient notebook running Win2K (and which used to XP when I got it, and took 8 minutes to simply boot. XP needs 512MB RAM minimum. The notebook has 256MB. Win2K will run more or less acceptably.) I use a layered approach to security, beginning with "Don't use IE. Ever.", and don't care about not getting patches. None of the ones I looked at recently patched things that might bite me. The low hanging fruit has been harvested, and current patches tend to fix vulnerabilities that require hardware and/or software I don't have to exploit.

The second is a concern. I prefer to stay reasonably current, and as time passes more software will require Win8.1/Win10 to operate.

I actually like most of what Win10 brings to the table (like finally building in support for virtual desktops). I'd love it if it ran on my desktop without issues. I'd settle if I could at least figure out what it's current problems are.
______
Dennis

[Rumpelteazer]

Originally Posted by Dazrin

I have the leather origami case and it had very sharp edges too, my solution was to run run my fingernail along the edges, pushing very hard, to soften them up. It worked "ok" but the edges have continued to soften and are now very nice. For a plastic one, I would think a similar solution could work but you may need to use something harder than a fingernail like a large coin or something else hard that has a smooth edge that won't catch on anything and possibly tear/damage the case. Or maybe a fine tooth file.

I'll probably get a Fintie case at first and after that save up for the Premium Leather case.

[Katsunami]

You and your cases having sharp edges. Shit. Now I can't get this image out of my head. Thanks guys.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

You and your cases having sharp edges. Now I can't get this image out of my head. Thanks guys.

I just finished "Zero Day" by David Balducci, and in the last chapter:

Spoiler:

Puller has the edge of his iPod filed razor sharp to use as a weapon.

So there's that.

Here's some humor analysis (like frog dissection, I know): The last small print line on that sign weakens the joke. I like the version with out it:

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Time to boot into Ubuntu and use that while I do some research about what Win10's problem might be. As a rule, weird issues I've seen in Windows tend to be video related, even if video wouldn't seem to be involved. Next step might be to pull the video card and revert to built-in Intel graphics to see if it helps.

And (crossing appendages), it may just be I fixed things.

Poking around on line returned a couple of suggestions. One was disabling hybrid shutdown, which you do from power management. Since this is an always on desktop plugged into an outlet, power saving is not a concern, and attempts to do it are pointless. That let me shutdown, and restart, which required power cycles the past day or so.

The other was changing Win10's disk properties. I boot from a Crucial SSD. It appears I needed to go into Device Manager, select the drive under Disk Drives, select Properties, and turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing. That seems to have fixed the application hangs that were requiring a power cycle.

I'm up under Win10 at the moment, in Firefox, and tried a couple of other things, including re-installing a couple of things I'd removed as potential trouble sources. Thus far, no issues.

That my woes were SSD related is not really a surprise. One thing I did on Win7 was turn off automatic defrag of the SSD (which can reduce drive life and is unnecessary on an SSD in any case.) That some standard Windows 10 disk handling should be disabled on an SSD makes sense.

If that actually fixes my problems, I'm a happy camper.

(And while I was in Ubuntu, I took the opportunity to upgrade to the 16.04 LTS release, so it wasn't exactly a waste of time. )
______
Dennis