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POST COMPUTER PROBLEMS IN THIS THREAD ONLY

Started by Nobody Soup, February 08, 2013, 12:41:30 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

Large Noise

Had a weird thing happen there.

Was trying to watch Robocop on my chromebook on one of them dodgy streaming sites. Clicked play, kept getting popups, so just abandoned it. A few minutes later I check my iphone and there's a popup from that site there too, but I hadn't been on there with my phone!

It said something about "Your ISP can see what you're watching. Install a VPN today!"

Anyway, my question is, do pop-ups on two devices like that mean they've been hacking (or whatever) my router? I'm pretty confident that the chromebook won't have a virus, but I'm kind of worried about how they managed to get to other devices on the network.

Twed

They're just setting some shitty kind of cookie. It's big business to identify two separate devices owned by the same person to really target those ads.

It would be a really peculiar kind of hack that just showed the same ad on two devices. I think you're safe.


BeardFaceMan

No point starting a thread for a quick question so I'll just ask real quick, I'm looking for a 4tb external hard drive, what are some good cheap and reliable options?

Gradual Decline

Quote from: BeardFaceMan on August 20, 2018, 07:41:27 PM
No point starting a thread for a quick question so I'll just ask real quick, I'm looking for a 4tb external hard drive, what are some good cheap and reliable options?

Got one of these, pretty solid - Seagate 4 TB

BeardFaceMan


hedgehog90

I have 2 internal harddrives - a primary 500GB SSD and a 2TB HDD which just contains music and video.
Every so often the second one spins up, completely unprompted and the everything freezes.
I know this because I can hear the bastard when it happens.
It almost never happens when I'm actually using the harddrive, 90% of the time it's when it's completely idle.

Why the fuck does the OS prioritize this pointless job so that everything else has to pause until it's finished spinning up the harddrive, which is fucking idle anyway?
No doubt it's some Windows 10 feature that I'm failing to understand the brilliance of... but anyway, how do I fix this?

Dusty Gozongas


Uncle TechTip

I get this with a similar setup, I think the second disk is just power saving as it always kicks in when I attempt to access it. Maybe look if there are any options you can change around drive power saving. I put up with it and hope that it's reducing wear.

New Jack

Windows 10 -> Control Panel -> Power Settings -> Edit Plan Settings -> Change advanced power settings

Check the setting there, and no, changing it to "never" shouldn't break owt!


Zetetic

I think the more important point is:
Quote from: hedgehog90 on August 22, 2018, 02:33:58 PM
everything else has to pause until it's finished spinning up the harddrive

What is both accessing the hard drive and blocking until it's done so?

hedgehog90

Quote from: Uncle TechTip on August 22, 2018, 04:51:37 PM
I get this with a similar setup, I think the second disk is just power saving as it always kicks in when I attempt to access it. Maybe look if there are any options you can change around drive power saving. I put up with it and hope that it's reducing wear.

That's correct. It's spinning up because it's sleeping to save power.
I assume that most programs use synchronous disk ops, preventing the next line of code running before the harddrive wakes up, but for some reason almost every program freezes.
Maybe this is simply the way Windows handles disk access, it hits the brakes on everything  (maybe only those programs handling open streams to a local disk) until the disk can be accessed for this one program, but it's very noticeable because my harddrive sleeps too often and is slow to wake up.

What prompts it is probably some background check, indexing or AV scan.
I do store some game installations on there, but otherwise there is no other installed software on there that could be running. Maybe some registered DLL I'm not aware of.

I should mention this is not some awful problem, it's a mild annoyance at best, but it would be nice if I could make it a bit better.

MojoJojo

Quote from: hedgehog90 on August 23, 2018, 10:36:42 AM
I assume that most programs use synchronous disk ops, preventing the next line of code running before the harddrive wakes up, but for some reason almost every program freezes.
Maybe this is simply the way Windows handles disk access, it hits the brakes on everything  (maybe only those programs handling open streams to a local disk) until the disk can be accessed for this one program, but it's very noticeable because my harddrive sleeps too often and is slow to wake up.

I'd guess it's priority inversion. I think you might be able to track down the process that is accessing the using Process Explorer or something similar, but it's been awhile since I've used it so I'm not sure.

Twed

Quote from: hedgehog90 on August 23, 2018, 10:36:42 AMI assume that most programs use synchronous disk ops, preventing the next line of code running before the harddrive wakes up, but for some reason almost every program freezes.
No, that's unlikely. Your entire system freezing is down to a driver/hardware issue, buses being throttled and other low-level things. Windows is putting the brakes on things. And are you using a lot of swap file because you've run out of RAM? If the system needs to page some memory off of disk it's going to freeze processes.

hedgehog90

Quote from: Twed on August 23, 2018, 05:22:06 PM
And are you using a lot of swap file because you've run out of RAM?

16GB. I've never seen it get close to the limit in task manager, so I doubt this is it.

I appreciate the help but this is not a problem worth spending any more energy on, it's too infrequent and minor to justify setting up monitors or investigating further. I just wondered if there was a simple explanation/solution.

JesusAndYourBush


AsparagusTrevor


Blumf

Quote from: hedgehog90 on August 22, 2018, 02:33:58 PM
I have 2 internal harddrives - a primary 500GB SSD and a 2TB HDD which just contains music and video.
Every so often the second one spins up, completely unprompted and the everything freezes.

Have you checked the SMART status on the drives?

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/hard-disk-drive-health

JesusAndYourBush

Quote from: AsparagusTrevor on August 24, 2018, 01:46:00 PM
Where was it?

Options -> Status Format.

(In my original post I'd changed something in Soundforge when a menu popped up for a fraction of a second and I'd inadvertently changed something, so instead of displaying time in seconds and milliseconds it was displaying it in seconds and 'frames'.  I had a lot of audio to edit and was doing my nut because I'd ruined Soundforge and couldn't work out what the hell I'd done.  Then after posting I had one more look and found the right setting.)


BeardFaceMan

I'm on a windows 10 pc, you know when you do the safely eject hardware thing to unplug an external hard drive but it says the drive is in use, even though it clearly fucking isn't? Are there common processes that do this I can shut off to stop this happening? There's literally only video files on the drive and none of them are being used. I tried turning off my anti-virus software, that didnt work and I don't have anything else running. I don't want to have to shut my pc down every time I want to swap some USB cables around.

AsparagusTrevor

Quote from: BeardFaceMan on August 26, 2018, 12:27:33 PM
I'm on a windows 10 pc, you know when you do the safely eject hardware thing to unplug an external hard drive but it says the drive is in use, even though it clearly fucking isn't? Are there common processes that do this I can shut off to stop this happening? There's literally only video files on the drive and none of them are being used. I tried turning off my anti-virus software, that didnt work and I don't have anything else running. I don't want to have to shut my pc down every time I want to swap some USB cables around.

Often it's Windows Explorer itself doing some background shite. Try looking at something like USB Safely Remove which can force-close whatever's holding up your hardware.

NattyDread 2

Anybody know of a decent free file recovery program? My shitey windows phone has managed to delete some photos from the sd card.

Cheers

Wilbur

Quote from: NattyDread 2 on September 07, 2018, 02:26:58 PM
Anybody know of a decent free file recovery program? My shitey windows phone has managed to delete some photos from the sd card.

Cheers

https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva

NattyDread 2

Thanks Wilbur. Seems the files are completely gone. Ah well.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

It looks like I might need a new CPU cooler. Are liquid cooled ones worth the extra money, or are they shit for cunts?

Wilbur

Quote from: Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth on September 17, 2018, 11:56:51 PM
It looks like I might need a new CPU cooler. Are liquid cooled ones worth the extra money, or are they shit for cunts?

Not really unless you are into overclocking/gaming/video editing  and even then not so much these days as processors get more efficient.

Z

I just bought a Thinkpad X220T hybrid, I don't know why. What are some kind of neat things I can do with it before I inevitably gift it away? Wacom pen support and apparently works as a hackintosh okay so there's a good bit of room for possibilities here. Could it be useful for learning Adobe/Sketch/some shit?

MojoJojo

Are there different types of Micro-USB cable? I was trying to get a scanner working at the weekend and was getting nothing. Then I remembered that we had a leapreader pen that would only charge with the micro-usb cable it came with and tried that - and big surprise the scanner sprung into life with some horrible grinding noises.

So what's special about that lead?

(this isn't really important as the scanner's going in the bin. I'm about 60% sure the problem is the timing belt has gone, but since the only replacement I can find is £15 and new scanners are around £60. Grrr.)

NoSleep