turn it off and on again

[Legendary Silke]

Sometimes I do wonder what happened that made the US take so long to switch to chip-based cards, really.

 

[killer-curry]

Ugh thank god that technology is not that high here.

It would be very annoying for being worry about indentity theft problem.

I would rather bring cash lol.

 

[Legendary Silke]

Guess it is nice to want things... still have a lot of things here that I'd like to get rid of and a lot of things to want to get...

Can't have it all, I suppose. (Especially since I need to get a job before even thinking about all that.)

Also, you get a lot of dust in a few months...

 

[Tsutarja]

Cash is great to have if you often conduct business with a retailer and/or establishment that has a credit card/debit card surcharge.

Also, it'll be two years now that I've owned my Toshiba laptop with no hardware problems to date!

 

[killer-curry]

I would call ten years old computer to be old hahaha.

My family's first computer survive 10 years (1998 - 2008 ) Windows 98, Pentium Pro
Dead due to hardisk failure. the rest of hardware were sold.

Second Computer Pentium 4 2.1Ghz (2003 - 2010 )
Dead due to software problem, we sold it.

Third Computer Pentium 4 3.0Ghz (2007 - 2010 )
We cannot stand the sound of fan and overheats often. Sold it

Surviving Computer Intel Core i5 750 (2009 - now )
This is a mid tier gaming laptop at the time purchasing, GTS 250.
But the card was dead so we replaced it with Radeon 6670 HD which is quite entry level for nowadays games.
The good thing is this machine has oC feature so stressing the system isn't that hard.

 

[Tsutarja]

I'm starting to wonder if our old desktop is starting to have more hardware fail. In the past few days, the desktop has BSOD'd 4 times, and I can't seem to debug it for some reason, and from time to time after rebooting all I get is a beep code, which usually is just it wanting me to reseat the RAM. I tried that today and got it to work, but I'm not sure if it'll BSOD again or not...

Typically when I hear the beeping of doom, I just take out the CMOS battery and put it back in :P

 

[Starry Windy]

I used to deal with this beeping as well, especially when I'm using my old PC at times (it was given to me at around 2004, I believe), to the point that when I heard a certain distinct sound, I know it spells trouble because my harddrive there and OS inside won't respond unless I reset the PC and shut it down, and trying to fix my harddrive's connection cables. Thankfully the problem is no more when I brought it to the PC experts for service several months ago, at least for now.

 

[Tsutarja]

Well in other news, Verizon moved their mail services from their own system to AOL Mail. I'm not really fond of the change (because why bother?), but at the same time, I'd rather keep my email address than being forced to stop using it.

 

[Tsutarja]

Now you can use the "You've got mail" sound effect from the 90s and it'll actually be accurate! xD

Fortunately for me, the POP3 access still works :)

 

[Tsutarja]

That's always good. I'd rather use my own client, but Outlook isn't terrible.

Outlook 2013 is actually what I use for my email. I find it's much better to use than the default Windows 8.1 email app, and of course I'm not sure if I'd be able to run Windows Live Mail either.

 

[Meganium]

https://store.asus.com/us/item/201510AM150007425/A23718

I ended up getting this big baby today at Micro Center. 8 GB RAM, Core i7, and the display is freaking huge. It was on sale too.

 

[Meganium]

I'm not sure I showed this laptop before on here...I was very close to getting it but I was told that the HDD was even SLOWER than the one I picked, and the RAM is not expandable, which sucked. I was gonna pay $100 more on a laptop that has zero opportunities of expansion. I only liked it for the cosmetic.

For the ASUS one I got, the RAM is expandable to 16 GB, which is also what I'm planning to do soon.

 

[Meganium]

Tell me about it...I have an HP printer that lasted less than a year. It's an ink waster and it likes to eat paper. 0/10 never buying one again.

 

[Morkula]

My parents bought an HP printer that literally lasted like two months. The guy at the store said that was pretty common and he'd seen a bunch of them die quickly. It's a shame - the HP we had before that lasted probably 8-10 years.

I had a Canon that lasted 3-4 years, but when that went up I bought an Epson and it's been great. Haven't had any paper jam issues, it sips ink (I've only changed it twice, and I've had the printer for probably 3 years or more), and it's wireless. It got me through a good chunk of grad school and it's still going strong.

 

[Tsutarja]

My HP printer/scanner from 2010 still works. It just needs more ink! :P

 

[donavannj]

My family's all-in-one HP from something like 2002 still works after all these years. We don't use it much, though.

 

[Legendary Silke]

Dang, that's really impressive. Hardware that old usually doesn't work too well anymore unless it's very well taken care of.

So I had to reinstall Windows 10 on my laptop today, but it's really interesting how MSI does it. MSI has a hidden partition with a recovery application on it, and when it's run, it formats the partition Windows 10 is installed on, then FLASHES a copy of a pre-set up OEM copy of Windows 10 to the partition, then reboots the system. It basically installs Windows 10, fully, in less than 20 minutes. It's really interesting how it does that.

I also installed Windows 7 on another partition so that I could have that freedom, and it's going well, although it's breaking on me slowly. I had Windows Update working earlier, but it's not able to grab updates anymore and just gets stuck. I'm not sure what's going on...

A lot of OEMs actually moved to image-based recovery methods from about the mid-Windows 7 era. By the time Windows 8.0 rolled around, pretty much every single OEM machine should be able to do that ;) At least, for laptops. (Especially since the functionality is sorta-built-into Windows itself at that point.)

Have you tried poking around in your Windows 7 installation to see what broke somehow?

(You probably should make an external copy of the recovery image if possible. Just in case the storage fails and/or you want to replace the system drive)

Got my warranty replacement SSD just now. Probably will install it later as an Intel RST/SRT drive if possible... Hopefully I can't screw that up somehow. I'll be paving the OS out, though, with a fresh install. Want it to be as clean as it can be :)

 

[Tsutarja]

Well in unrelated news, I made my first eBay purchase this evening! :P

 

[Tsutarja]

Oh nice, what did you get?

Just some Pokémon merch, go figure :P

 

[Legendary Silke]

Just some Pokémon merch, go figure :P

Hehe :)

I probably should brush up on my CSS skills lately. I probably can make my signature fancier...