Nobody Cares about Tech Support

[Anya Ristow]

Almost ten years ago I found a PC from the late 90's in my closet. It had SCSI drives in it and I no longer had anything SCSI, not even any cables. The only thing on the machine that I cared about (pictures of cats, naturally) was small enough to fit on floppies, but I didn't have any of those in my current machines. The obvious solution was networking, but I imagined getting really frustrated trying to do that and decided to not even try.

I bought an external floppy drive. In 2015-ish. And I was excited to receive it!

 

[Anya Ristow]

I recomend getting a copy of YoutubeDL, and hoarding live concert videos like its the end of times.

Underrated comment. Youtube will eventually bake the ads right into the stream, so you can't remove them. If there are youtube channels you rely on, it wouldn't be a bad idea to download the videos. Music theory, piano lessons, guitar lessons, even drum lessons, I got 'em.

And music videos. Definitely do those.

 

[Anya Ristow]

Any tips or recommendations for backup versus mirroring the boot disk?

Coming from the Mac? You're used to time machine? As far as I know, there is nothing like it on the PC.

Windows has a feature called File History that takes snapshots of your files so you can restore to any point. I've never used it. I used to plug an external drive into my Mac and tell it to do the time machine thing immediately, and then I'd disconnect the drive and not worry about it for a while. I'm going to guess File History will want to be more intrusive than that. Windows can't index the damned files reliably, I ain't trusting it to mess with file versioning. But I bet there's a way to get it to do its thing to a second drive as a backup.

But there's also the basic Windows Backup, which you can find on the start menu. It does immediate or regular backups. I don't use it, either.

My Windows backup solution is drag-drop to internal copy folders, and external backup drives. That puts me leagues ahead of most people, having backups at all, but for a career IT person it is shameful how much I hate Windows and refuse to use it properly lol.

Back when I did important things on Windows I used to have so many drives around that I'd make cloned copies of the boot drive as my monthly backup. In addition to drag-dropping the user files more frequently than that. The cheapest way to do this (this may not still be true) and still get faster-than-flash speeds, if you want to keep your multiple internal drives for regular use and do your backups to external drives, is to put an internal SSD in an empty external enclosure. It's like a bulky flash drive. Very speedy.

 

[Essence Lumin]

Almost ten years ago I found a PC from the late 90's in my closet. It had SCSI drives in it and I no longer had anything SCSI, not even any cables. The only thing on the machine that I cared about (pictures of cats, naturally) was small enough to fit on floppies, but I didn't have any of those in my current machines. The obvious solution was networking, but I imagined getting really frustrated trying to do that and decided to not even try.

I bought an external floppy drive. In 2015-ish. And I was excited to receive it!

If the pictures will fit on a floppy then wouldn't a usb stick be an answer? They're dirt cheap, 64 Gb for $7.00.

 

[Anya Ristow]

If the pictures will fit on a floppy then wouldn't a usb stick be an answer? They're dirt cheap, 64 Gb for $7.00.

Ain't no 64 GB flash drive gonna work with Windows 98. Even in 2015 I had nothing that would work with Windows 98. But I don't remember the details for why I decided even a new flash drive was unlikely to work. Possibly the machine didn't even have a USB port?

 

[Beebo Brink]

But there's also the basic Windows Backup, which you can find on the start menu. It does immediate or regular backups. I don't use it, either.

My Windows backup solution is drag-drop to internal copy folders, and external backup drives.

I went with basic manual backup. I have two 1tb internal drives, so I just drag-drop files/folders from my primary drive to the archive drive.

These days, now that I'm retired, I do hardly anything besides play games. I don't even own Photoshop anymore (sob). The only files I really care about are for The Sims 4. I'll back those up to second drive and occasionally to a thumb drive.

 

[Free]

Porn support.

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

IGN led me to a deal on an HP Envy mini-tower desktop, the TE01-5100t, I configured it with 32GB of RAM, a 1TB M2 drive, and a RTX4060, the processor is a i5-14400f (the f means no integrated graphics). Its a weird 10 core with 6 fast hyperthreaded cores and 4 efficient slower single-threaded cores. I'll add a 2TB second SSD (which has to be SATA) for /home. It's overkill for everything I do, except SL of course.

It arrived early, it was originally supposed to arrive after new years. The second SSD I was going to put in it for /home isn't here yet.

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

My years old HP 1200 laserjet has decided to SCREAM. It all started when we needed to print a return label, so I had to get the printer shared so the other computer (with windows that I do not touch) could print to it. It was shared but not "published", and the IPP ports weren't open in the firewall. Well the first printing, was just a black band so I said reprint, but that ended up 0kb and the printer locked up. Canceled the print job, and unplugged the printer. Plugged it back in and it basically screamed. quickly unplugged it, and have checked for jams....Nothing! have tried replugging it and it still screams.

I hate printers, they're the most evil of peripherals.

 

[Kokoro Fasching]

Sounds like the print drum has locked up, and the drive belt is screaming trying to move it.

 

[Knutz Scorpio]

Try powering it on without the toner cartridge in it, if the sound is the same then it's something more costly like the laser-scanner assem and it's time to shop for a new printer

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

It arrived early, it was originally supposed to arrive after new years. The second SSD I was going to put in it for /home isn't here yet.

OS: Fedora Linux 41 (Xfce) x86_64

Installed and setup. In the terminal my hyfetch Fedora logo is trans-flag colored.

I haven't got Firestorm set up yet, that's next.

      .;cccccccccccccccccccccc;.         Host: HP ENVY TE01-5xxx 
    .:cccccccccccccccccccccccccc:.       Kernel: 6.12.6-200.fc41.x86_64 
  .;ccccccccccccc;.:dddl:.;ccccccc;.     Uptime: 21 mins 
 .:ccccccccccccc;OWMKOOXMWd;ccccccc:.    Packages: 2747 (rpm) 
.:ccccccccccccc;KMMc;cc;xMMc;ccccccc:.   Shell: bash 5.2.32 
,cccccccccccccc;MMM.;cc;;WW:;cccccccc,   Resolution: 1920x1080 
:cccccccccccccc;MMM.;cccccccccccccccc:   DE: Xfce 4.18 (x11) 
:ccccccc;oxOOOo;MMM0OOk.;cccccccccccc:   WM: Xfwm4 
cccccc;0MMKxdd:;MMMkddc.;cccccccccccc;   WM Theme: Wallis 
ccccc;XM0';cccc;MMM.;cccccccccccccccc'   Theme: Quartz Chicle [GTK2], Clearlook 
ccccc;MMo;ccccc;MMW.;ccccccccccccccc;    Icons: Mint-X-Pink [GTK2] 
ccccc;0MNc.ccc.xMMd;ccccccccccccccc;     Terminal: xfce4-terminal 
cccccc;dNMWXXXWM0:;cccccccccccccc:,      Terminal Font: Source Code Pro 10 
cccccccc;.:odl:.;cccccccccccccc:,.       CPU: Intel i5-14400F (16) @ 4.700GHz 
:cccccccccccccccccccccccccccc:'.         GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 
.:cccccccccccccccccccccc:;,..            Memory: 2867.88 MiB / 64045.28 MiB 
  '::cccccccccccccc::;,.

I was previously running an i7-4790 with 32GB of RAM and a GTX1650.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

I hate printers, they're the most evil of peripherals

Speaking as a help desk technician, I share your hatred.

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Oh hells bells, it seems like my HDMI switchbox is failing. My screen has gone blank a few times, and I thought that perhaps the new machine wasn't syncing to the monitor or the graphics card had issues, or perhaps this TV was being naughty. Troubleshooted by turning on other devices, which also didn't show (which is why I was thinking the TV was having issues. Rebooted the TV, which didn't help, and then unplugged the cable from the switcher and plugged it directly into the screen, which worked fine. This is the SECOND one of these switchboxes, from wal-mart, that has failed on me.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Coming from the Mac? You're used to time machine? As far as I know, there is nothing like it on the PC.

Yeh, that was my conclusion too.

I would dearly love to be wrong about this because Mrs Argent is a Windows user.

This is the SECOND one of these switchboxes, from wal-mart, that has failed on me.

I just went through three Displayport switchboxes, one from Amazon, one from Microcenter, and one from Newegg, and had to return them all and give up on sharing my DP monitor because switchboxes have apparently joined printers on Team Asstastic.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

I pick up my new build tomorrow, and I spent part of this evening backing up my documents to an external drive, so I can move them over to the new build in the next day or so. The 1tb drives are ridiculous overkill, but this time around I want to make very sure I don't short myself. And who knows what hobbies I may pick up in the next few years, right? Right?

The 2nd drive is purely for backup of the 1st drive, so I can avoid OneDrive. Any tips or recommendations for backup versus mirroring the boot disk?

In case you want to move your whole system partition including all data take Hasleo Backup, it is free. I used it by myself to migrate a Win installation from one storage to another, booted the new storage up afterwards and it just worked.

 

[Beebo Brink]

In case you want to move your whole system partition including all data take Hasleo Backup, it is free. I used it by myself to migrate a Win installation from one storage to another, booted the new storage up afterwards and it just worked.

Thanks for the recommendation, I'll keep that in mind for next time I move to a new computer. I'm already all settled in to the new build. It will pretty smoothly just using a thumb drive. I had a fresh start with a new OS, so that made the whole process much simpler.

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

My years old HP 1200 laserjet has decided to SCREAM. It all started when we needed to print a return label, so I had to get the printer shared so the other computer (with windows that I do not touch) could print to it. It was shared but not "published", and the IPP ports weren't open in the firewall. Well the first printing, was just a black band so I said reprint, but that ended up 0kb and the printer locked up. Canceled the print job, and unplugged the printer. Plugged it back in and it basically screamed. quickly unplugged it, and have checked for jams....Nothing! have tried replugging it and it still screams.

I hate printers, they're the most evil of peripherals.

I tried fixing it with the help of a youtube tutorial, but no, it has gone to printer hell. It was over 20 years old.

I forgot to mention that because HP doesn't even offer the option for optical drives on many of their computers, including the model I bought, and links to external drives in their support sections, (CC sadface) I picked up an external Asus Blu-Ray/DVD/CD writer. Because I'm old school and rip CD's and like to have an optical drive...just in case. Works just fine in Linux.

My new machine is also silent, when I'm not using SL.

 

[Free]

Austin Corbett (@austincorbett.bsky.social)

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bsky.app

 

[Free]

I'd leave them some cookies, just for safety's sake.