Chit-Chat Developers, developers, developers, developers Page 55

Started by Tsutarja August 10th, 2013 5:25 AM
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Tsutarja

Age 28
he / him
Florida
Seen 5 Hours Ago
Posted 6 Days Ago
27,325 posts
13.2 Years
So as soon as I booted up my laptop this evening, I saw this little gem pop up...

Aeroblast

Male
Basement
Seen February 25th, 2017
Posted February 25th, 2017
4,173 posts
9.8 Years
Is that the bug where it's constantly identifying and never actually connecting, to the point you need to disable and reenable the wireless card to fix it?

루기아: If you're able to boot into safe mode, try this: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-system/windows-8-crash-driverirqlnotlessorequal/4d7dc696-2daf-4f88-8f83-3d13437a7f2b

You might be able to pinpoint what is conflicting with your computer and uninstall it, and perhaps be able to boot properly. That way, you may be able to either
a. Keep all your files and Win 8
b. Have proper access to Win 8 to back up all your files before you downgrade
Meh. Just downgraded to win7. Too many issues with win8 for me.

Legendary Silke

You like dragons?

Seen December 23rd, 2021
Posted April 22nd, 2020
5,925 posts
12.5 Years
So as soon as I booted up my laptop this evening, I saw this little gem pop up...

Run powercfg /energy in an elevated command prompt (right-click Command Prompt and click Run as administrator) on a freshly rebooted laptop in idle, let it do its own thing, copy the report to the desktop, and open it. Check the battery capacities.

It's one of these nice things added in Windows 7. When a battery has worn out severely, the battery warning appears. Looks like you are going to have to plan for a laptop soon.

Tsutarja

Age 28
he / him
Florida
Seen 5 Hours Ago
Posted 6 Days Ago
27,325 posts
13.2 Years
One thing I definitely plan on doing when I get back from school this afternoon is just reinstall Windows 7 on my laptop. However, since I have a Windows 7 install disk, I'm not sure if I should install it back to manufacturer's state, or install it from scratch with the Windows 7 install disk. If I install from scratch, I'd at least not have to worry about bloatware, but then I have to worry about reinstalling drivers. I'll probably take a system image as well before I reinstall.

Legendary Silke

You like dragons?

Seen December 23rd, 2021
Posted April 22nd, 2020
5,925 posts
12.5 Years
One thing I definitely plan on doing when I get back from school this afternoon is just reinstall Windows 7 on my laptop. However, since I have a Windows 7 install disk, I'm not sure if I should install it back to manufacturer's state, or install it from scratch with the Windows 7 install disk. If I install from scratch, I'd at least not have to worry about bloatware, but then I have to worry about reinstalling drivers. I'll probably take a system image as well before I reinstall.
Does your laptop manufacturer has the courtesy to provide separate drivers on their recovery media and/or within the default installation? My Toshiba laptop has all the app and driver setup programs dumped in a folder should I need to reinstall or repair any software gone wrong.

Either way, both couldn't hurt - I think I'm more of a fan of restoring from a factory image, then uninstalling anything you won't miss.

Tsutarja

Age 28
he / him
Florida
Seen 5 Hours Ago
Posted 6 Days Ago
27,325 posts
13.2 Years
Crap, now I wonder if my laptop's hard drive is starting to show its age. I'm currently reinstalling Windows right now, but it's going at a slow pace. I wish there was a way in the BiOS to check if it's got any issues like on my desktop.

Tsutarja

Age 28
he / him
Florida
Seen 5 Hours Ago
Posted 6 Days Ago
27,325 posts
13.2 Years
Right now I'm running a CHKDSK scan on my laptop to scan for bad sectors and whatnot. And now I'm curious to see how the results are going to look.

Legendary Silke

You like dragons?

Seen December 23rd, 2021
Posted April 22nd, 2020
5,925 posts
12.5 Years
Speaking of laptops and formatting them, I'm still waiting for my laptop to recover. Eugh. Turns out trying to install from a setup disc is not a good idea.

4 DVDs for a recovery image restoration feels... like when games had to come in multiple CDs :)

Legendary Silke

You like dragons?

Seen December 23rd, 2021
Posted April 22nd, 2020
5,925 posts
12.5 Years
I can't write write-once DVDs twice, can I? They stay the same as long as they aren't too scratched up.

One errant format is all it takes for an external HDD to lose everything (without data recovery).

At least I didn't write them as CDs. That's like asking for the floppy days!

Legendary Silke

You like dragons?

Seen December 23rd, 2021
Posted April 22nd, 2020
5,925 posts
12.5 Years
Unless they're -RW, I don't think you can rewrite them.
I believe that's exactly the point ;)

IE9 holds up surprisingly well on today's web sites. Hmm...

Tsutarja

Age 28
he / him
Florida
Seen 5 Hours Ago
Posted 6 Days Ago
27,325 posts
13.2 Years
That reminds me, I really like how efficient IE 11 is when it comes to playing flash content. In Chrome and Firefox on my machine, playing any sort of flash content causes quite a bit of CPU to be used, while in IE, hardly an CPU is used when I watch flash content.

Tsutarja

Age 28
he / him
Florida
Seen 5 Hours Ago
Posted 6 Days Ago
27,325 posts
13.2 Years
I-- should try that. YouTube gets my CPU up in temperature all the time.
It sucks now though with Chrome because Youtube forces the HTML5 player in Chrome, and I found that out because the flash player shows up on videos if I spoof my user agent string in Chrome to either Firefox or IE.

Have you tried watching Youtube in IE yet? Is it much faster/less consuming on your CPU?

Tsutarja

Age 28
he / him
Florida
Seen 5 Hours Ago
Posted 6 Days Ago
27,325 posts
13.2 Years
Yeah, probably :P

All I have on my desktop is a Pentium dual core, but the desktop is also from 2008, which was before Intel came out with the i3/i5/i7 processors.

Legendary Silke

You like dragons?

Seen December 23rd, 2021
Posted April 22nd, 2020
5,925 posts
12.5 Years
The beauty of GPU acceleration. Most of the time, it's faster to just use your otherwise idling GPU to do stuff that used to be done on the CPU. How times have changed :)

I like how IE9 was a wake-up call for browser makers to start thinking seriously about GPU acceleration and frame times on the Windows desktop browser market.

Tsutarja

Age 28
he / him
Florida
Seen 5 Hours Ago
Posted 6 Days Ago
27,325 posts
13.2 Years
Hmm, so do Chrome and Firefox use GPU acceleration or CPU acceleration then? I'd assume the latter, because I do have an external GPU after all, but I'm just not too sure -_-

But yes, HTML5 in IE is also smooth, and I'll continue to watch Youtube videos in IE until Chrome allows for less CPU usage with flash content.

Legendary Silke

You like dragons?

Seen December 23rd, 2021
Posted April 22nd, 2020
5,925 posts
12.5 Years
Hmm, so do Chrome and Firefox use GPU acceleration or CPU acceleration then? I'd assume the latter, because I do have an external GPU after all, but I'm just not too sure -_-

But yes, HTML5 in IE is also smooth, and I'll continue to watch Youtube videos in IE until Chrome allows for less CPU usage with flash content.
Both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox also use varying amounts of GPU acceleration, depending on the operating system, graphics hardware, and graphics hardware driver. Most GPUs, be it integrated or external, should be able to handle GPU acceleration with aplomb. Heck, your smartphone is probably doing it provided that it's using a semi-recent mobile browser. As long as the GPU isn't way too ancient (think before DirectX 9 and doesn't have a bad driver), it'll automatically accelerate web content as long as you didn't disable it yourself.

Google Chrome doesn't accelerate much on Windows PCs, though, when it comes to general web content (2D Canvas and WebGL are another thing). Firefox should do it the same way as IE does on Windows Vista and newer, utilizing Direct2D on supported hardware, and hopefully can achieve parity with regard to performance.

The fun thing about GPU acceleration is that browsers do have to have a CPU fall-back just in case the GPU is unusable. GPU accelerated browsing can be finicky since GPUs aren't exactly designed to display web content - they usually operate on complex 3D scenes. Chrome and Firefox fall back to GDI+-based rendering (not accelerated at all since Vista; although it's accelerated in XP, it's going to be slower than Direct3D or Direct2D), while IE uses WARP (a software DirectX 10+ rasterizer, effectively providing a "GPU" without a compatible GPU).

You probably won't notice GPU acceleration unless you have a relatively slow CPU. That's when the benefits of GPU acceleration work its magic - even slow, out-of-date single core smartphones can handle desktop sites just fine as long as it's not running out of video and/or system memory.

Google Chrome uses its own Flash player; sometimes, this Flash player can get buggy.

Crunch Punch

fire > ice

Age 25
Male
England
Seen March 18th, 2019
Posted January 16th, 2017
1,374 posts
10.2 Years
Has anyone here done or know someone who have done a Computer Science degree, preferably in the UK? I'm heavily considering taking that path and would love to know any first hand experience on the stuff taught in the course and any other related things. Cheers!
>> paired to gimmepie · last.fm

Legendary Silke

You like dragons?

Seen December 23rd, 2021
Posted April 22nd, 2020
5,925 posts
12.5 Years
Has anyone here done or know someone who have done a Computer Science degree, preferably in the UK? I'm heavily considering taking that path and would love to know any first hand experience on the stuff taught in the course and any other related things. Cheers!
Does part-way through count?

Crunch Punch

fire > ice

Age 25
Male
England
Seen March 18th, 2019
Posted January 16th, 2017
1,374 posts
10.2 Years
Does part-way through count?
Not sure what that means, if you mean stopped half-way for any reason then yeah, any info is appreciated.
>> paired to gimmepie · last.fm

Legendary Silke

You like dragons?

Seen December 23rd, 2021
Posted April 22nd, 2020
5,925 posts
12.5 Years
Not sure what that means, if you mean stopped half-way for any reason then yeah, any info is appreciated.
In this case, I mean as a person that is still doing it right now.

Tsutarja

Age 28
he / him
Florida
Seen 5 Hours Ago
Posted 6 Days Ago
27,325 posts
13.2 Years
I'm also undergoing a computer science degree. Just be prepared for lots of math courses and science courses all throughout your track towards getting one.