Posts by mrmond

User said he did nothing that explained his dead PC – does a new motherboard count?

Wife dropped me right in it the other day.

20-30 years ago I was "the" person everyone went to for tech support.

Freinds, family, everyone knew that I knew about PC's and how to "fix" problems.

Gradually, as I got older, things quietened down, computers have got easier to use and I rarely get asked except by the in-laws.

Then in a Whatsapp group someone was struggling with something a couple of weeks ago and my wife posted a comment "Oh, you should ask my hubby, he knows all about computers" & someone from the past piped up "Yes, he fixed mine for me"

Since then...Gaaaaagh!

New Outlook marches onto Windows 10 for what little time it has left

We could stay on old Outlook?

I was informed a while ago while still on Win10 that I had been upgraded to the new Outlook after declining many times and then finding that one day it had been switched

Old Outlook isn't on my system anymore. I've checked. Although I have updated to Win 11 recenly and after using the command to remove the "new" Outlook I have no Oulook at all.

When I search for and then run Outlook I'm informed to wait a moment as files need to be updated, then the new Outlook opens again.

If I seach in the store I can find the old Outlook, but after the system prepares files for installing, it just waits, and waits, and waits, but never finishes installing.

At last: The BBC Micro you always wanted, in Mastodon form

Re: Absent friends...

My ZX81 (not my original, bought at a school jumble sale for £3 in '99) still sits under my TV, sadly the keyboard no longer works but it still powers up.

Most people can't believe it's a computer or that we used to spend hours using it.

Microsoft will upgrade Windows 10 21H2 users whether they like it or not

Re: Just give me my Quicklaunch bar back!

ExplorerPatcher

https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/wiki

Former Microsoft UX boss doesn't like the Windows 11 Start menu either

Re: Use the windows key not start button

Well I don't know, I type disk on Win 10 and the 3rd entry down says "create and format hard disk partitions", which I know is part of the disk management tool, and when I open that, oh, the Disk management tool opens up. Sure, maybe not everyone knows that, but I can also just right click the start button and disk management is right there.

Linux Mint 21 hits beta, and it's looking fresh

Re: Used Mint a Few Years

If you want KDE you can install it using a few quick terminal commands by adding the Kubuntu backports repository and updating.

Just choose it from the login screen after it's done.

Dear Europe, here again are the reasons why scanning devices for unlawful files is not going to fly

The legal age is going to be raised to 18 in a new law but as of now it is STILL 16 if you have parental consent unless Gov.UK are really lazy and slow updating.

I married my wife 3 weeks before her 18th birthday (I was 22) and needed parental consent when we applied for the marriage license 3 months before.

That was 33 years ago and still together, 3 grownup kids and 3 grandchildren. Not all teen marriages are failures.

ZX Spectrum, the 8-bit home computer that turned Europe on to PCs, is 40

Re: Upgrading from 16kb version

"The author of the article has a wonky memory of the ZX Spectrum having a 32kB ram pack."

The author might have had or been thinking of the Cheetah 32k ram pack. A very real product that plugged in to expand the ram to the full 48k.

Re: No rampack

There was a rampack for the 16 Spectrum, a 32k rampack made by Cheetah that expanded the memory to a full 48k.

I bought chips thought which plugged directly into sockets inside, no soldering needed nor returning to have the upgrade done by Sinclair.

Zuckerberg wants to create a make-believe world in which you can hide from all the damage Facebook has done

Re: second life vibes

Almost right, Second Life did add support for the Oculus Rift, it never had support for VR before that.

It was support for the Rift they gave up on although a third party viewer at the time already had rudimentary VR support and there is a project that still exists today, FirestormVR that lets you enable virtual reality for headsets such as the Rift, Vive and Quest

Linden Lab created a new World called Sansar which was intended to be their new VR experience and based on entirely new code. It actually does look amazing but never really took off and was later told to another company. The Second Life platform has actually been sold to another company now although while it remains profitable it will stay open.

RIP Sir Clive Sinclair: British home computer trailblazer dies aged 81

"But they were Just Good Enough, and a much larger percentage of those 3 million people could afford to buy one for themselves, or their children, as compared to the luxurious American/Japanese imports or even the British equivalents such as the BBC micro and Acorn Atom."

This right there! My Dad got me the 16k Spectrum, we couldn't afford the 48k model, but friends at school thought we must be rich because we had a computer! Far from it. Had saved pocket money for ages to get a ZX81 and then saved again to get the extra 32k ram kit for the Speccy.

I think a couple of years later, maybe by the time I got to the 6th form nearly everyone had a Spectrum, a BBC or C64 when prices came down even more and the Micro boom really took off.

My ZX81 still sits next to my Xbox

People under 30 can hardly believe I actually used it to program on.

"What do you mean 1K and 16K with a rampack!?"

And from there I upgraded to a 16K Spectrum that I upgraded to 48k. Happy days.

Oh, And I'm still playing Jetpac and Atic Attack on the Xbox with the Ultimate collection.

RIP Sir Clive.

Windows 10 to hang on for five more years with 21H2 update

Re: **allowed** to choose.

"I have an old PC with IDE hard drive that will quit working when the new kernal trickles down to it"

Not quite right, IDE hard drives will be supported using modular drivers based on libata instead of directly in the kernel.

What you need to know about Microsoft Windows 11: It will run Android apps

Re: Only Some Android Apps....

You can sideload apk files.

Source winaero.com, theverge, windowscentral & a lot of other places.

I got 99 problems, and all of them are your fault

Re: Ever done a good deed, only to have it thrown back at you by an angry user

"Just tell them your a bus driver. Its easier that way."

It took 5 years after I stopped being a bus driver before people stopped asking me which bus went where and other time table related questions!

I wish people would stop asking me to help sort out their tech problems!

Netflix starts 30-day video data diet at EU's request to ensure network availability during coronavirus crisis

Re: Good but...

According to Netflix on Twitter lowering the bitrate won't actually affect the picture quality

Netflix UK & Ireland

@NetflixUK

"Hi, this is a technical change that shouldn't affect the quality of the streaming – you will continue to see content in the quality of your plan, 4K in your case (always depending on the connection and the device, as before), so your experience should be the same."

"Members will still get the level of service (4K, SD, etc) they have paid for, but at the lowest bitrate possible."

Re: But Netflix has kittehs!

" At least with Amazon I can delete stuff from my "Watch Next" list, but with Netflix, if you make the mistake of watching a bit of something, it'll be there forever. "

So go to your account activity history and click remove from watch history, it gets removed within 24 hours and doesn't get used for recommendations or as a show you've watched unless you watch it again.

DON'T use the option to hide an entire series in one go. It never works and I've raised the issue with them time and again. You need to remove each show if it's part of a series one at a time for it to work properly.

Sketchy behavior? Wacom tablet drivers phone home with names, times of every app opened on your computer

Re: This isn't even vaguely reasonable

Seems to me that if there are open source drivers for Linux, perhaps someone with the right skills, not me, I possess none, might be able to port the driver to windows?

Perhaps I'm being naive but if it's open source, isn't the source actually available or is it just a binary blob?

When somethings open source they can't stop anyone modifying and distributing it for any platform can they ?

Long-term Linux Mint: 19.3 release unchains the Gimp, adds HiDPI, is kind to your older, less-beefy kit

Re: Mint and latest Gimp

Gimp has preferences and has an option to change themes, light or system will change it to how it was under 2.8. Look under the interface setting.

You can even set the icons to legacy to be more like you're used to.

Re: Gimp

"Only today have I learned that you can't create images in it. Well, that might explain a lot of the trouble I had, then."

I'm trying really hard to understand how 'File- New' doesn't work for you, so much so that I opened up Gimp to check and then chose the image size from the offered menu before being offered a blank canvas to draw on as I've been doing for years.

There are so many tutorials on the Internet that it doesn't have to be that hard.

Well to be fair, there's times it's borked in win10 too, often I plug the lappy into the TV with HDMI and have to manually select the audio output when I get no sound, and it's fine till the next reboot.

Mint (19.3 and replying via that now) seems no better or worse in that regard. On both, sometimes it auto detects just fine and sometimes it doesn't.

Xbox Series X: Gee thanks, Microsoft! Just what we wanted for Xmas 2020 – a Gateway tower PC

Re: RE: ......suggesting Microsoft had learned from its mistakes with the Xbox One.

"The good news is that, if you want, you can use the device in a standard landscape orientation. That said, it's clear how Microsoft wants punters to use the console."

Motorola's mid-range One Hyper packs 64MP cam, huge screen and – ooo – 'Quad Pixel' tech

Can't actually order in the UK yet. I received a promo email this morning and looked at all the flashy info on their website, specs weren't exactly easy to find but much was made of the "fast" processor and great photography features.

After reading the article I think I'll pass which is a shame. I'm looking to upgrade from my Moto G5 which is looking very inferior these days.

Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC: Howdy buck do you get a solid 60FPS in Rockstar's masterpiece?

Re: If a game studio wants my money...

Dual booting is so easy, you could play games on both.

40 million emoji-addicted keyboard app users left with $18m bill – after malware sneaks into Play Store yet again

Gone from the Play store?

Because right now there are several ai.type keyboards listed on Play store.

I thought the name seemed familiar as I'd installed a tablet version years ago for the Nexus 7 because it offered a split keyboard option and had been recommended in one of the android mags at the time.

ai.type company is still on Google play right now with emoji keyboards , themes, add ons. Could there be a genuine company and a rogue app with the same name that's been banned ?

As for why do people install 3rd party keyboard apps? Well I don't feel the need now but years ago the standard Google keyboard app was pretty awful.

BBC said it'll pull radio streams from TuneIn to slurp more of your data but nobody noticed till Amazon put its foot in it

It's a shame because

The BBC Sounds app is so crap.

Then again, TuneIN with it's social media integration is crap too which is why I've kept a much older version installed so I can listen to BBC streams and custom urls, something you can't do so easily with the newer version.

I'll have to check to see if I can still find media links to add BBC streams to VLC or something similar.

Good old Auntie Beeb's mobile app berates kids for being rubbish online

Re: I dunno....

Excellent. Make do with only the apps that come installed on your phone?

One of the first things I tell people that want to be safer online is...

*Be careful* about installing third party apps!

The time a Commodore CDTV disc proved its worth as something other than a coaster

Re: hmm

Doesn't surprise me that much, a few years ago I moved into a new house on a new build estate, the first occupant. We started getting gas bills for someone else who couldn't possibly have lived there before us and kept ringing up to tell British Gas no one had ever lived in the house before us, so please stop sending us bills for someone else (we hadn't even had our own first bill yet)

It took about a year before they sorted it all out.

People of Britain: You know that you're not locked into using the same ISP forever, right?

Not even in the countryside

Try getting virgin to install cables in a housing estate that's classed as private. 47 homes here , 4 years and they aren't interested, bang in the middle of a city surrounded by streets with virgin cable. We are stuck with adsl. Apparently the cabinet is fibre about a mile away but max speed to the house is 29mbps

The first ZX Spectrum prototype laid bare... (What? It was acceptable in the '80s)

Re: Just use emulation

My friends and I used to play it to death! I think we used to complete a screen a day trying to beat each other and got good enough to keep going round and round until we had enough (yes, it started over back at cavern 1 after cavern 20)

UK footie fans furious as Sky Broadband goes TITSUP: Total inability to stream unfair penalties

Re: Ah, Sky logic

With a phone and 4G, 3G, GPRS, a hotspot, a friends wifi, any free wifi at a pub, restaurant, Mcdonalds, ..does McD's count as a restaurant? who cares. Anyway. Loads of ways to check.

It's the lack of updates that was the issue.

In Cornwall at least.

Because It didn't just affect Cornwall but also parts of Devon, and at first when the internet went off in the evening of Saturday night the status page clearly said it was due to network upgrades being carried out between 10pm and 2am in the morning.

Fair enough. So at 6am Sunday this was the same message and it wasn't until 7pm when the phone line opened that first we were told there no faults, then when I rang back because the automated line cut me off I was then told there was a network issue and the woman wanted me to plug my router into a master socket, move a bookcase to do that so she could test the line and discover no fault my end. Not till later was the message changed from Network upgrades to a fibre cable break, which isn't good enough.

I've said here before, I accept things go wrong, any network not just Sky, but the lack of information is what annoys me.

Microsoft's latest Windows 10 update downs Chrome, Cortana

Turned off updates on the tablet...

And discovered I can't update any store apps. Any suggestions how I update those without 1803 downloading again?

Not Chrome specifically.

Chrome and a combination of other apps like Discord plus a combination of any 3D apps.

I've got Intel 620 & Nvidia on the main laptop and thought I'd fixed it by turning transparency effects off, for a little while things seemed ok and then I turned transparency back on and instant lock up again, CPU not even at 50%.

However I tried again on the next reboot with it off and still locking up so I rolled back and things back to normal...BUT...updates downloading again. Other Win touch tablet downloaded and applied update overnight, immediately rolled back as the 25gb free dropped to 15 then even after rolling back and cleaning up install files still only had 18, again, downloading updates!

Somebody stop this nightmare!

If they give us an option to rollback, why do they immediately force it on us again!

Why are we disappointed with the best streaming media box on the market?

Re: What does it do...

Not sure about hi def only working on Win & IE. I press the info button when a program starts streaming and it shows me the bitrate and bandwidth when using Roku on the TV. Usually starts at 480, then 720 and then settles down to 1080 within a minute or two of buffering. I just had to set the right option from my Netflix user profile and it seems to work whatever I watch on.

I don't have a 4k telly so ...meh.

Windows Fall Creators Update is here: What do you want first – bad news or good news?

Re: Inivitably!

Hah! and thumbs down obviously from anyone who doesn't know how to adjust settings to prevent reboots while working on the PC or adjust notifications so they don't get any 'nagging' posted in other comments.

Not a die hard MS fan btw, mine came with WIn10 pre-installed and I also dual boot with Linux. I just can be bothered to find out how to do things.

And it's hardly buried . All setting menu, Windows update (where else?) Active hours

US government sued by 11 pissed-off travellers over computer searches

"Must be typing it in wrong"

For such occasions I once had a device and told officials the password was the entire alphabet in lower case. Then had a few minutes of perverse pleasure as they typed every single letter of the alphabet slowly time and again, explaining they must be typing it in wrong as I'd given them the exact password when they had asked. "theentirealphabetinlowercase"

They never did see the funny side...

Microsoft's Surface Pro 2017, unhinged: Luxury fondleslab that's good...

"In Windows 10 Metro/Modern functions are sucked into a menu which is invisible unless you exit Tablet Mode. So fundamentals like saving your song are invisible. Switch back to Desktop Mode and if you're lucky you'll spot the menu squirrelled away"

Have you tried swiping down from the top edge of the screen to bring the menu up?

Works for me in Music Maker Jam & other apps.

Microsoft ctrl-Zs 'killing' Paint, by which we mean offering naff app through Windows Store

Classic paint & Calculator

Both available from Winaero.com

Silicon Graphics' IRIX and Magic Desktop return as Linux desktop

Fluxbox with Rox filer

oh yeah..and fbpanel.

Don't install our buggy Windows 10 Creators Update, begs Microsoft

" entirely different machines here. One a tablet designed for Win 10 and updated to Anniversary with no problem at all. Had a notification to update to Creators edition after going through some checks. This is an Intel based tables and GPU with all drivers up to date. Complete failure, black screen, hours of waiting and trying to reboot although it showed the login screen fin and would let me enter the password and even bring up the task manager to show running processes. Oddly it never showed explorer.exe as a running process! I rolled that back and when I was offered the option to update my main laptop , as it's AMD/Ati based I thought different architecture, it should be different. To be safe I disabled all 3rd party programs and services like Windowblinds & Rainmeter that usually run in the background or on startup so that they wouldn't interfere.

Same result. The only way I could get any display was to reboot into safe mode. Rolled back and discovered that my main Microsoft account was logged out with no way to log back in so I had to use a local one instead and spent a very long time tracking down a solution to that and fixing other errors to networking. Sharing credentials, user access across local computers on the same network and other things on the LAN all had to be set back up again.

If two entirely different machines running different software get screwed up with the same symptoms ( and no it wasn't something simple like just needing to select the display output) then something is screwed up.

Farewell Unity, you challenged desktop Linux. Oh well, here's Ubuntu 17.04

How times change..

Mark Shuttleworth, Aprile 29th 2011:

"We put user’s first because we committed to test and iterate Unity’s design with real users, and evolve it based on those findings. We’ve documented the process we’re following in that regard, so that other free software projects can decide for themselves if they also want to bring professional design into their process. I very much hope that this will become standard practice across all of free software, because in my view the future of free software is no longer just about inner beauty (architecture, performance, efficiency) it’s also about usability and style."

And most people hated it but no, he was determined it was here to stay.

And now we go back to Gnome

Dying for Windows 10 Creators Update? But wait, there's more!

As long as it carries on working I don't care.

No seriously. I use Windowblinds and Start10 from Stardock. My system looks like Win 7 with the theme I use, I run Firefox with Classic theme restorer so cosmetically it doesn't *feel* like I'm running Win10.

I had problems updating my laptop to the anniversary update and rolled back, never been bothered by it again.

My Chuwu Hi10 tablet is on the AU with no problems but also with Start10.

My phone is Android and I actually find Cortana useful, it gives me notifications of missed calls and texts and lets me type a reply back without fishing the phone from my jacket pocket or wherever I recently forgot to put it down, rather like Google Now does but sometimes better, sometimes worse.

It's the internet, Microsoft & Google have my data already, I lock down my privacy settings on social media to only certain people and use adblock so I don't really care about ads or 'targetted' info.

For the record I also dual boot into Linux, I don't particularly care what O/S I'm using as long as it let's me do what I want to do

Millions of Brits stick with current broadband provider rather than risk no Netflix

Not always

But while you can keep your number when moving from any provider TO Virgin, if you try switching from Virgin/Cable back to BT or Sky etc you'll get told no, can't do it.

Happened to me and lot's of people I know on several occasions.

"But you have the right to keep your number!" you say...

Uh huh, try telling that to the providers, they'll flat out tell you it's not possible when you move back from cable.

Firefox hits version 50

Another vote for Classic Theme Restorer

I don't know why people complain about Firefox changing so much.

Install the extension, set it up how you like it. Done. You can even set it up as part of sync so it works on all your computers. I have it on My Laptop, Linux system and Win 10 tablet and all sport the classic FF look.

We just have to hope the developer keeps on top of it ^^

Official: AMD now stands for Avoiding Miserable Death

Perhaps if they survive longer...

They might rethink Linux support.

My laptop's not much much more than a year old and already the GPU isn't supported by the closed source Radeon driver anymore.

Web meltdown: BT feels heat from angry punters

Rolling my eyes

Zomg! I couldn't get on Twitter, or Amazon, or Flickr or my bank and some other pages for an hour or two from 8am. Slowly they came back online. Netflix was still up and running but I decided to read a book. For a while I wasn't sure if life would be worth living (insert sarcasm)

Get a grip. All ISP's go down occasionaly. I've been with Virgin, Sky, Orange.

It's all running ok now and life didn't end as far as I can tell :)

BT blames 'faulty router' for mega outage. Did they try turning it off and on again?

Didn't affect me, Not had any problems with BT so far in 4 months. Routers basic but fairly reliable.

Sometimes the network goes down. Any network. I don't care who you're with. Sky, Virgin, Talk Talk. They all have outages and I've had them all fail over the years. Do something else for a few hours till it comes back online. The world didn't end. Yet.