GoRedwings19's Computer Help Hotline

There doesn't seem to be one specifically for general chitchat that I could see? Doubtless will be heavily shoveled-upon if in error in this matter. Anyway, nice update of the 13" Macbook -- now Pro -- today I thought. $100 price cut and FireWire makes a comeback, adds LED backlit display, support for 8GB of RAM, and the new uber-permabattery (OK, not unmixed blessing). Also thought $30 for Snow Leopard upgrade was pretty fair. Leaner, faster and (allegedly) fixed fucking finder would be well worth that to me.

I have Orbi and Asus ZenWifi setups in different places, now I need one for the Michigan compound. Old Apple Airports have gotten us this far. From reviews and best lists, the top contenders seem to be Eero and TP-Link Deco. For what it's worth, here's the main challenge: There are three separate buildings in the compound, the main house with the cable internet connection is down slope from the three story shop/garage/loft set into the slopes and lastly another cottage across from a garage. The in-laws have hard-wired ethernet cables running to two both ends of the main house and the top floor loft in the middle building. The biggest challenge is getting a decent si…

Raising awareness, do your own due dilligence (check your favourite feeds, Internet Storm Center, &c.): VoidLink was detected around 2026-01-13: Cloud-Native Malware Framework; Linux-based; extremely sophistocated; stealthy; modular, adaptive behavior based on detected environment; Go/Zig/C (dammit, now I have to learn Zig); highly in-depth knowledge of Linux internals... As I saw said about about it elsewhere, "targeting Windows, hackers were in the lobby; targeting Linux, hackers are now in the vault".

Basically all in the title... finally cancelled my HP Instant Ink service (what a scam) and would like a normal printer please.

Does anyone have a suggestion for good software (free or otherwise) for cloning a more than half empty 1T windows drive to a smaller (512GM) drive, including the boot stuff, recovery partition, etc?

My newish laptop is eligible for the Microsoft OS upgrade. Has anyone bit on the MS free upgrade? Any war stories? Curious...

A work colleague is travelling to the US in a couple of weeks and is spending a few days in NYC. She has been considering to purchase a new iPhone there since even getting a "free" model capable of working on any phone service provider, she'd be saving like $200-300. SIM cards don't seem to be an issue, nor 5G service, but someone told her that the geolocation services could be. I've done the customary search and wasn't able to find much about it. Since many of you're mostly iPhone users and long distance travellers, you could possibly shed some light on this issue. Thxs.

For those of you playing the home game, my 2015 Macbook Pro went tits up a few months ago. Since then I have been wrestling with the idea of a replacement. Apple's current lineup is ...old and kind of crap. Their recent "California Streaming" event was a massive disappointment (I will not be doing my radio show from a smart phone, KTHX.) More broadly, I'm kinda done with Apple's anti-repair bullshit. I'm not done with MacOS, but I think for the next period of time I'm going to be sticking with stationary Apple products (I still have an iPhone, which I dislike but view as an inescapable evil like taxes and leaf blowers.) I have never owned a PC laptop. I don't…

Stupid question guys: Yesterday a friend on a flash sale bought a new PC based on I9 12900K with a 3080 graphics card. Ok, his old PC is a 7700K/1070 so just for the graphics card it's worth the change We tested it (mode stock, non overclock) and I have the feeling that, except for getting a better score in Benchmarks, for "normal" use (web, mails, youtube, some games...) there really wasn't much difference compared to my 9900K/3080: yes, yes, my 9900K takes a second longer to load some applications, it gets a few FPS less in some games... single core tasks it does seem somewhat superior (such as DCS in VR) but in general, I did not notice a "radical" change.…

The wife needs a new laptop and it needs to be able rot run AutoCAD seamlessly. Since I’m an Apple person, I’m not so aware of the high end Windows workstations. I’m assuming some gaming computers might work well but them may not be optimized for what she does. Also, she probably wants something businesslike (she does game). Any engineer types that could recommend something? Was looking at Dell Precision and Lenovo Thinkpad. Should have a good keyboard, etc.

Well it seems microsoft has done it again to me. For years off and on I have had problems whenever microsoft has done an update and it would screw up everything. This time in early February there was some type of update that FUBARed my whole computer. First I suspected it was the NORD vpn update but I deactivated it and there was no difference. The problems are- I cannot access any apps. The startup icon and search bar do not work, When I hit startup button+R, I can see the HDs with some documents but no apps, MS Office, Windows Accessories etc do not appear on the HD tree, When attempting to pull up saved docs I get error messages which makes me thi…

Might as well start a separate thread for this.

Horrible as their sometimes use may be, after reading this pretty critical article I kinda want to try out "Second Brain" apps/services. Anyone try and have an opinion of Notion, Obsidian, Mem, or other? I'll likely dive in all three, but thought I'd use the collective first. I've gone years using some older software like DEVONthink, The Brain, and even Yojimbo, but generally they've been slow to move to the cloud, so I've dropped all along the way for more primitive organization.

I'm considering the idea of building a very small size RAID box using 2.5" SSD drives, so it probably wouldn't need a fan nor a built-in PS. I'd fit 4 drives for a RAID-1 configuration. Since it'd be in a Mac computer, it's not necessary the box has built-in RAID firmware and it could be either USB-C 3.1 or Thunderbolt for faster performance. My google mojo seems to be really bad for this, everything I find are conventional 3.5" drive RAID boxes (large, noisy and pricey), single drive enclosures or in the best case, those docks that can fit 2 internal HDD drives (I've had one already for four years) but are large for they can hold either 3.5" or 2.5" drives. In the w…

Any Windows Servers experts in here? I need to migrate from Windows 10 to Server and have questions.

I'm the de facto IT guy in my office, and I need to protect our data with something cloud-based that will do an automatic backup every day at a specified time. We have three computers, less than 1 TB in total. I know there are a lot of options, and I don't know what makes each one better or worse than the others. Can someone give me a really quick "get this one, stupid"?

My 2012 i7 Mac Mini is still my main computer as it does pretty much all that I need (16G RAM, 500G SSD + 1T HDD). It is currently on High Sierra due to 32 bit support. Several apps that I use are 32 bit and can't be easily/cheaply upgraded to 64 bit: Eagle ($$$), Office 2011 and 2016 (I still prefer older office versions), etc. My wife uses Turbo Tax and this year the pricks require Mojave as the minimum version. I know that Mojave supposedly supports 32 bit apps, but does it really? Someone suggested that I might want to install it on a separate drive to test before doing so on the main SSD. Any recs for an external drive (SSD?) of probably 2T to use for this …

It makes the bits sound sweeter: https://www.hifiplus.com/articles/english-electric-8switch-streaming-audio-network-switch/ I think I'd save my money for a 10 Gigabit switch instead.

I'm looking to add an arduino to control my dac. I'm not worried so much about writing code as that's already done and proven to work for others. This whole platform is new to me. I can see that the initial scrpt or program is the .ino file and that will contain commands as well as references to libraries but I'm not sure how to put this altogether in Arduino IDE to upload it to the Arduino Due. I purchased this display for the project https://www.buydisplay.com/5-inch-tft-display-arduino-touch-shield-ssd1963-library-for-mega-due There is a download with examples in it here https://www.buydisplay.com/arduino/Libraries-Examples_ER-TFTM050-4.zip …

Having experienced two seasons of fires and one mandatory five minute notice evacuation we realized that among other things we have too many important items dispersed in too many places to adequately accommodate a last minute evacuation. So we've been doing some house cleaning and now have ten fifteen HDs that have been copied to a portable HD and need to be disposed of. There are a lot of recommendations on line but so far I have narrowed it down to either using a demagnetizer or drilling holes though the unit. Do you folks have any better more effective suggestions? Obviously due to the fire hazard, using a blast furnace is out of the question. Thank you.

Our last year resident is finishing next week and the graduation gift is going to be a laptop she needs. The budget is about 900 bucks (800€). These days I'm not that sure that Toshiba is as reliable as it used to be, nor that all HP are bullshit. Things change too fast, specially if you don't pay much attention. I've looked at several options with 15" screen. Other desirable feature is it's available in pink No especial needs of HDD size, RAM, connectivity... Wifi, good screen and lightweight, that's all, she won't be playing games or editing video. These are my candidates in no special order Dell Inspiron 15 7000 (i5, 256SSD, 8GB, ips screen, GeForce® MX150) I thi…

So I checked Windows Update out of curiosity yesterday (actually looking for an Edge browser update) and noticed that the 2004 update has been around since May and Microsoft has been delaying the rollout. Then I looked for 2004 update problems and got a long list... what do you guys think about the latest major update? I'm inclined to delay this for as long as possible on my personal computer. Microsoft's track record with major updates has been truly terrible in the last few years, going from bricked computers to lost data. I'm afraid to estimate how many millions of dollars of productivity and data have been lost from these problems in enterprise and home computing…

So, my wife needs a new laptop. Currently, she (and I) both use Windows-based laptops for home & work, so that is the OS with which she is familiar. However, she has had iPhones since v6 (now on vX 256GB), and also uses an iPad for most casual tasks (web-browsing, e-book reading, etc.). The Windows laptop is used only on-occasion for more mundane tasks. Predominant PC use-cases include iTunes library base/backup, and creating/sharing documents for the local Rotary club (MS Word & Excel files). So, she needs an HD capacity bigger than her phone, as well as the latest Microsoft Office suite. Given her leanings toward other Apple products, she is considerin…

I was thinking about my small, messy CD/SACD/DVD/Blu-ray library and stumbled across this upcoming media format: https://news.panasonic.com/global/stories/2017/49438.html Looks like Sony and Panasonic have been working on yet another optical standard: Archival Disc. They don't plan to sell them in the consumer market, but anyone who lived through the 90s is going to get déja vu reading this article... the same ambition, the same complex, expensive jukebox solutions, the same media/library customers...

I am currently using an AirPort Extreme but I know I am on limited time here. Our house is two stories at around 3500 Sq. Ft. with cinder block outside walls which limit signal strength in the garage and outside. Thinking that a mesh system should be the way to go so looking for opinions as well as any recommendations. I like the software interface on the AE and have really had no problems with the system but unfortunately Apple has parked the bus on this one.