Topic: Techy Thread *no requesting or giving out cracks* *no Windows activation stuff please*

[Lfbarfe]

Thanks Lfbarfe, I appreciate your help. I will experiment with this ASAP. Is this typically the process used by youtubers posting clips from films (to your knowledge)?

It's the way I do it, although I use Nero Recode, which is already on my machine and is DVD Shrink by any other name.

[HappyTree]

You probably all know this tip, but someone just told me about this and I think it's great. Easiest way to download Youtube videos is to play the vid you want to keep, then go into the address bar and change the Y in www.youtube.com to a 3 so it looks like this:

http://www.3outube.com/.........

You get a page asking you if you want to download flash or MP4 formats.

I'm using this to convert HD vids I took with my camera into a very well-rendered SD version that will play on my iPod. The converter software I have gives a very bad result, but Youtube does it for me brilliantly. Just upload your HD vid to Youtube, let it process and then play the SD version, do the "3 thing" and download your perfectly converted SD version in MP4 format. Et Bob est ton oncle!

[wherearethespoons]

I didn't know that, thanks.

Fat Man On A Beach, here I come.  B. S. Johnson - Fat Man On A Beach Part 1

[Ambient Sheep]

One further question about the situation with my friend's laptop.

Does anybody have any idea what kind of repair bill she'd be looking at if she takes it back to PC World?  Obviously they'll charge labour, but on the other hand they won't have to charge themselves £35 for the Recovery Disk, and I wonder how it might balance out in the end.

<sub><sup>The diagnosis seems to be confirmed, by the way.  I went and splashed out £3.99 in Maplin's for one of these, stuck the suspect drive in my desktop PC, and although it spins up, and the BIOS can see that something is there as it tries to auto-detect it (which it doesn't with the other two still-spare SATA connectors), it eventually concludes that nothing's attached.  I tried it on all four connectors, and all that changes is the number of the channel it tries to auto-detect it on.  :-S

An Ubuntu Live CD v9.04 comes back with:
   [13.164005] ata3: SRST failed (errno:-16)
   [23.172004] ata3: SRST failed (errno:-16)
during the boot process, and then denies there's any drive present, which was pretty much the same as it did on the laptop.</sup></sub>

[purlieu]

Although I'm sure I won't understand the answer in computery terms, can anyone explain why download speeds vary so much?  I'm watching utorrent now to check if I'm losing a load of seeders or not but nothing seems to be happening, yet I'll have a download going at a steady but pathetic 25k/s (annoying), then it'll rocket up to 120k/s for 30 seconds, exciting me, before dropping down, and sometimes it'll just float around 1.0 or even peter out all together.  Like I say, the number of seeds and peers seems to be pretty constant so I don't think it's that.
This is largely out of curiosity more than a major problem, although if there are any solutions they'd be lovely.  Also, can anyone ask it to speed up please?  Thanks.

[Uncle TechTip]

Are you allowing incoming connections? In utorrent you can check this in the status bar. Triangle in exclamation mark indicates problem. Also if there are not many peers you'll see this behaviour, the big speeds are generally achieved when you have lots of people connected. If not many are connected you'll get a big burst of speed then it will die as the peer sends data to someone else.

[purlieu]

Big green tick where the exclamation point occasionally is, hundreds of peers and seeds.  I'm running at a steady 35 now, which is still awful for my connection but I'm dealing with it.

[Ambient Sheep]

Most ISPs tend to throttle P2P (i.e. Bittorrent, eMule, etc.) connections during evenings and weekends so that they don't bork other people's casual browsing, YouTube watching, etc.

For example, on my BT (British Telecom, that is) connection, it's throttled between 00:30 and 16:00 during weekdays, and 00:30 and 09:30 at weekends and school holidays.  (I think it might actually be 01:00 and 09:00 for those on faster connections, but mine's quite slow anyway (2Mb/s) so I probably see its effects less than most people.)

It's a progressive thing, it ramps down through a few speeds on the way (e.g. on recent weekends it's been going 09:30 = 176kB/s, 10:00 = 112kB/s, 10:30 = 90kB/s, 11:00 = 56kB/s, 12:00 = 36kB/s, 12:30 = 30kB/s, isn't the chart in uTorrent great! :-)), and back up again at the other end, but between about 18:00 and 23:00 it's throttled to the low single digits.

Different ISPs have different policies on these things.  Some let you run at full speed, but if you download more than a certain amount per month in the evening time slot - or with some ISPs, at any time - then you'll get punished.  To be honest, if I was getting 35kB/s during the evenings, I'd be grateful!...unless I was signed up to an ISP that promised not to do that sort of thing, that is.  Even then, depending upon the exact sort of connection you have, there can be congestion at the exchange.

That's the idea of the uTorrent scheduler, so you can set these things going in the middle of the night and not annoy your ISP and/or other users by letting them run during the evening.

Hope that kind of answers your question.

[HappyTree]

Might your ISP be limiting the speed?

[Baxter]

I've got good results by setting utorrent to only connect to encrypted peers and rotating the port that Bittorrent connects on, the downside of this is you're only able to connect to a subset of peers who support encrypted connections, which although increasing and subject to a published standard isn't nearly a high as the unencrypted method.

[Ambient Sheep]

Some ISPs just throttle any encrypted traffic the same way though, in order to prevent people doing just that.  Hell, apparently some ISPs throttle anything that isn't straightforward HTTP, the buggers.

Worth a try though, if you don't mind ruining other people's evening browsing...

[Baxter]

On the subject of BT nosleep had warned me previously of the heightened wear and tear to a drive caused by bitorrent downloads, and a few days ago my bitorrent drive failed, or rather it's sectors that could not be read or reallocated to spare space spiked and the read times went through the floor, if anyone happens to use closed communities where there is a focus on leaving to seed for ratio or has a extensive collection of Urolagnia films, using a separate drive for the bittorrent and keeping an eye on the S.M.A.R.T statistics with something like Speedfan is advisable.

[Ambient Sheep]

Indeed.  My system drive is in a terrible state now (522 reallocated sectors and climbing, but that's only about 25% of the way to the Warn value, I think); luckily using Speedfan let me see the reallocation count starting to rise and I hurriedly moved my torrenting onto one of my external drives as a result, buying me some time to save my pennies for a new main hard drive, which I'm about to get.

I thought I would be safe as both Bitcomet (which I used to use) and uTorrent (which I use now) make big play of the intelligent disk caching they have to save the wear and tear on your drive, but it's obviously not enough.  I would go as far as to say that if you do significant amounts of torrenting, NEVER use your system drive for it.

I would have thought seeding-only shouldn't be too bad though, as reading is less stressful than writing, generally speaking.  It's probably the power-on hours count that's as responsible as anything else though; Speedfan's online analysis tool said that my drive had been on far longer than most of its particular model in their database, which is presumably because it's been left on all night (and all day) for most of the last four-and-a-half years - the power cycle count is just 706.

It's a Maxtor 6B300S0, in case you were wondering, which you probably weren't.

[All Surrogate]

So, basically, what would you recommend sticking on a new PC? Important programs, interesting software, helpful (and possibly illegal by the sound of it) softgrams and proware?

Even FireFox extentions. Which FF plug ins/add ons do you consider to be a "must have"?

Some suggestions ...

Software
μTorrent - Bit Torrent client
Auslogics Disk Defrag - Disk defragmenter
CCleaner - System cleaner
FLAC - Audio compressor
foobar2000 - Audio player
GIMP - Image manipulator
Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware - Malware remover
MPlayer - Video player (ugly, but handles what VLC can't)
Mozilla Firefox - Web browser
Notepad++ - Improvement upon Windows Notepad
OpenOffice - Office suite
PeaZip - File (/de)compressor and archiver
Recuva - File undeleter (never used this, but I thought it best to install before any mishap, rather than potentially install over the file I wanted to recover)
Revo Uninstaller - Uninstaller
SumatraPDF - PDF viewer
VirtualCloneDrive - Virtual ODD program
VLC Media Player - Media player

Firefox Add-ons
Adblock Plus - Advert blocker
British English Dictionary - Dictionary
BugMeNot - Registration bypasser
ChatZilla - IRC client
Copy Link Text - Hyperlink text copier
Flashblock - Flash blocker
Download Statusbar - Download window tidier
DownThemAll! - Download manager
gTranslate - Translator
Linkification - Text to hyperlink converter
Menu Editor - Firefox menu customiser
Neo Diggler - URL manipulator
NoScript - Script blocker
Organize Status Bar - Firefox status bar customiser
PDF Download - PDF tool
SkipScreen - Download facilitator
Tab Mix Plus - Tab manipulator
Video DownloadHelper - Video downloader
WebMail Notifier - Email account tool
Xmarks - Bookmark and password synchroniser

[Dusty Gozongas]

I believe there's still an unfixed bug in Firefox that causes problems when using both NoScript and Flashblock (or was last time I looked, which wasn't too long ago). Best option is to use NoScript alone as it also blocks Flash.


[edit] aye, 'tis true: http://noscript.net/faq#qa1_3

[purlieu]

Well I've tried some tips on speeding up, and it seems you chaps are right about capping speeds, as it's running at a healthy 200kb/s now.  Still baffling how it went this fast on a few occasions earlier, however.

[Lfbarfe]

Yep, it's because it's the middle of the night. It'll speed up off-peak.

[purlieu]

I've never witnessed it this extreme before, however, even back in the days of using Virgin Media.  A 30k/s download eating my entire bandwidth is pretty awful.  I just wish those 120kb/s moments in the mid-afternoon would happen more often!

[Lfbarfe]

I've never witnessed it this extreme before, however, even back in the days of using Virgin Media.  A 30k/s download eating my entire bandwidth is pretty awful.  I just wish those 120kb/s moments in the mid-afternoon would happen more often!

Your download speeds might also be affected by your upload speeds. If your uploading is going at full pelt, it can limit download bandwidth. With BitTorrent, I've always found out what the maximum upload speed of my connection is and set the upload limit about 10KB/s under that.

[Ambient Sheep]

Still baffling how it went this fast on a few occasions earlier, however.

If it's applicable to your ISP, maybe those times were before you'd used up your evening allocation and so you're now on the naughty step and get throttled during the evenings.

Certainly there was a time with BT a year or two ago, where after every time I got a new IP address (generally when the BT Home Hub crashed, as it often did), I'd be able to torrent 24/7 for about a day or so before they applied throttling to me.  I don't think it works like that any more, but then I don't torrent anything like as much as I used to, and never in the evenings, so I might just have not noticed it.

Your download speeds might also be affected by your upload speeds. If your uploading is going at full pelt, it can limit download bandwidth. With BitTorrent, I've always found out what the maximum upload speed of my connection is and set the upload limit about 10KB/s under that.

Sound advice.  That's very important.  I have a standard 448kb/s upload, and I always used to set my upload limit to 36kB/s.  Anything much more than that, and I found that browsing got a bit borked.  Now we have more than one PC in the house (courtesy of a free laptop), I tend to run it at 32kB/s to avoid upsetting anybody else as well.

[Huzzie]

Thanks everyone for all your help! Really, really appreciate it!

Much stuff here that I didn't even know existed, never mind used. Well, that'll keep me busy for the night.

Thanks again!

P.s. I just saw a PC World advert, advertising my laptop for nearly 200 quid more than I paid for it. I did get mine second hand (though you wouldn't know) but that still cheered me up a bit.

EDIT: Wowzers! All Surrogate, you are an absolute star! Thanks so much for all that!


(I'm kind of going through the posts backwards at this moment, so I apologise if I haven't answered a question or thanked anyone directly. I just haven't seen the post yet.)

[Lfbarfe]

Looking at A_S's excellent list, Revo Uninstaller is a must. The standard Windows uninstaller leaves a lot of stuff behind in the registry. Revo clears it away safely. Choose 'moderate'.

[rudi]

Choose 'moderate'.

[tag]Louis launches political career[/tag]

[purlieu]

Torrents have been working ok today, not many lurches in speed and fairly decent going, until I restarted my computer an hour ago, since when nothing's been working at all with uTorrent.  The fun comes in the form of:
[DHT] Inactive
[Local Peer Directory] Inactive
[Peer Exchange] Inactive

Did a Google search and found others with a similar problem, but most of the threads have been ignored, and the only advice posted is 'uninstall uTorrent' (tried a few times, still comes up the same) and things relating to routers, which I don't have.

Any ideas?


edit: oh, it started working again.  Any idea what that was about?

[HappyTree]

Does anyone know why I can post in the quick reply box but if I press "reply" to get the reply box I can't input any text into it? I get the white box but clicking on it doesn't make the text cursor appear. When I type Firefox just does a search for the text in the page, it doesn't input any text into the box.

I have No Script that blocks some things, but the only two disallowed scripts on the input page are from zanox-affiliate.de and netaffiliation.com.