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Post by JoeP on Jul 13, 2013 17:54:18 GMT
or at least it feels like it.
Doing a system upgrade, and something got confused along the way and it aborted.
Now I have no wireless (and ethernet only if I move downstairs and manually enable it). And my video driver has got lost so I'm stuck at a low resolution. It feels very odd.
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Post by Alvamiga on Jul 13, 2013 19:11:29 GMT
At least it sounds like a software failure. I had a hardware failure the other week and had to rebuild and repair my hard disks that it had corrupted.
Do you have backups or any way to back out of the update?
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Post by JoeP on Jul 13, 2013 21:38:24 GMT
I had to get net access using the ethernet (enabling WPA-protected wifi is quite tedious without the NetworkManager app working). Then all that was necessary was completing the upgrade. All is restored! I knew this would probably work out. I just wanted to grumble
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Post by Alvamiga on Jul 14, 2013 8:33:30 GMT
I always find almost anything to do with WiFi to be tedious so I've never bothered with it. I worked out how to share my Mac's internet over the WiFi connector, but it only works if the Mac is switched on in which case I'd use the Mac to do whatever anyway! It's been off ever since and I don't miss it at all.
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Post by JoeP on Jul 14, 2013 10:15:27 GMT
Wifi is great once it's set up (and as long as you don't have poor signal coverage or hardware that causes problems).
My mother checks her emails on her laptop on the bench halfway down the garden. Not going to find an ethernet cable there.
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Post by Alvamiga on Jul 14, 2013 10:49:33 GMT
I have got round that by not getting into the "must be online all day" mentality. If an important e-mail does turn up, my phone gets it. I can reply on there if I have to, but 99% of it will wait!
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Post by JoeP on Jul 14, 2013 11:09:49 GMT
Ah. But my mother cannot receive emails on her phone. And I'm not suggesting she feels the need to check often, it's just that when she does, she can do it in the sitting room or the breakfast room or in the garden.
And all the tech-savvy visitors with their iPads and iPhones and Galaxys and so on can hook into the wifi - and automatically get on the next time they visit as well.
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Post by JoeP on Jul 14, 2013 11:32:02 GMT
On another note ... which could equally go in the "It's hot" thread ... I further broke my computer for a while this morning. After switching off, it wouldn't switch on again properly - shut itself down again after displaying the BIOS messages but before booting. I think it was complaining that it was too hot. And this is something that this computer seems to have developed over the past few months ... I think it's dying ... may need a new one.
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Post by Alvamiga on Jul 14, 2013 11:39:36 GMT
That is one of the biggest problems with computers... they always run them too close to the line to get the most speed out of them that's possible. Can you limit the clock speed so it does not run so hard for the present? If it has started to fail, then it could keep it going for some time if you do it sooner, rather than later.
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Post by Alvamiga on Jul 14, 2013 11:42:12 GMT
On a similar note (could also go in the It's hot thread) I had to block more content from the BBC's servers as it was causing my computer to work seriously hard again and sit here, pumping out heat, which adds to the problem! Even though the CPU is down to 50% again, the fans have still not wound down anything like they would in decent weather conditions.
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Post by JoeP on Jul 14, 2013 11:49:38 GMT
I might have a look at underclocking. But I want more RAM and a bigger drive - possibly a solid-state drive - and the machine is rather elderly - so I think I can justify thinking about a new one!
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Post by Alvamiga on Jul 14, 2013 11:59:50 GMT
I looked at SSDs a while ago as I assumed they'd be quieter and use less power, but it seems they often use more power and they are still comparatively very expensive. I run permanently about 10 years behind with hardware as I never really need that much computing power for anything I do and most stuff I either get free or at least about 80% less cost.
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Post by JoeP on Jul 14, 2013 12:06:13 GMT
Prices are coming down, and they are *much* faster. Plus I'm quite keen on the quieter aspect.
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bill
Senior members
Posts: 891
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Post by bill on Jul 14, 2013 16:42:59 GMT
Whatever.
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Post by Alvamiga on Jul 14, 2013 19:22:13 GMT
I have a Raspberry Pi computer. It is almost totally silent, except for the 500GB hard drive hanging off of it. It is very power efficient and, as it is plugged into the TV, I can use it to watch my DVD collection. ...due to the heat I decided to do a load of updates on it and now it won't boot, so it's currently reorganising the drive which should hopefully sort it.
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Post by Alvamiga on Jul 14, 2013 21:04:43 GMT
...it didn't! Now I have to spend about a week getting it all back to how it was.
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Post by tangent on Jul 14, 2013 22:07:06 GMT
Am I right in thinking dual processors shut down one of the processors when it's not needed?
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Post by Alvamiga on Jul 15, 2013 8:04:48 GMT
They don't normally turn off, although with the number of processors now in some machines I would not be surprised if they started to consider it. Stopping and starting cores is more complicated than it seems because of the pipelining (where a CPU is pre-emptively starting work on the next instruction before it gets to it). It would also make the management more complicated and slow it down.
What newer computers can do is what is referred to as scaling, where they actually change the speed they run at. This saves a significant amount of power.
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Post by JoeP on Jul 15, 2013 8:24:22 GMT
Uh oh. Hope recovering it is speedy, alva
CPU frequency scaling with its power saving has been supported by all the machines I've used in the past few years, and all modern OSes afaik ... just not sure about windows XP.
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Post by Alvamiga on Jul 15, 2013 8:33:35 GMT
I think all of my computers predate scaling, but the OSes I use mostly know about it. I don't think XP does, but when I run that it's for games and so on, so it's doing 100 most of the time anyway.
Single core machines can save power if they ever get the chance to run IDLE instructions, as these cause the least activity, but operating systems such as Windows never seem to give the machine a chance to stop any more. I honestly cannot work out what the machines find to do when absolutely nothing is apparently being done. I know there are background updates and so on, but not all day!
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Post by tangent on Jul 15, 2013 9:13:38 GMT
I seem to remember my laptop reduces its power either by stopping one of its processors or by reducing the speed but it's a long time ago that I looked into it. It's five or six years old and it runs XP.
An interesting aside, my iPad seems to correct a missing apostrophe from 'its' but it does it on the fly depending on the context. I can't work out how it does it before I've typed the next word.
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Post by JoeP on Jul 15, 2013 11:05:47 GMT
Windows never seem to give the machine a chance to stop any more. I honestly cannot work out what the machines find to do when absolutely nothing is apparently being done. I know there are background updates and so on, but not all day! Are you familiar with Sysinternals Process Explorer? I insist on running this on Windows machines. It can show a systray icon with current load, and in its window a history of load overall and per-process so you can see which processes are chewing up the CPU. Generally you can find out how to fix them.
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Post by Moose on Jul 15, 2013 17:53:33 GMT
Treat yourself to something Jazzy Joe. You only live once. And so do computers
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Post by Alvamiga on Jul 15, 2013 22:23:00 GMT
Heh, I didn't mean I couldn't find the processes wasting the resources, just couldn't work out how they took so much of them to do what they do!
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Post by tangent on Jul 16, 2013 9:55:58 GMT
Are you familiar with Sysinternals Process Explorer? I've not met that.
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Post by JoeP on Jul 16, 2013 11:05:28 GMT
I'm reassured that you are in full mastery of your systems. It was your comment "all day" that got me ... mine run at close to 0% cpu unless I know something's going on. My most recent fight was with some .NET framework updates that appear to complete as far as Windows Update in concerned, but then run supposedly background assemblies with a whole sequence of separate mscorsvw.exe (if you care) processes running for ages.
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Post by JoeP on Jul 16, 2013 11:07:00 GMT
Are you familiar with Sysinternals Process Explorer? I've not met that. Process ExplorerNeat, lightweight, worth knowing about
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Post by tangent on Jul 16, 2013 11:52:10 GMT
OK, thanks, I've downloaded it. Yet another thing to learn *sighs*
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Post by Alvamiga on Jul 16, 2013 19:53:13 GMT
I'm reassured that you are in full mastery of your systems. It was your comment "all day" that got me ... mine run at close to 0% cpu unless I know something's going on. My most recent fight was with some .NET framework updates that appear to complete as far as Windows Update in concerned, but then run supposedly background assemblies with a whole sequence of separate mscorsvw.exe (if you care) processes running for ages. This is part of the problem though. So many things running without any idea what they are for, if they are necessary or if they are malicious. Unless you spend huge amounts of effort, Windows just ends up full of dozens of pointless jobs, including the "quick start" ones and updaters that slow down your start up and run irrespective of it you really need the application very often or not. If things were better written, all this rubbish would be unnecessary!
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Post by JoeP on Jul 16, 2013 20:09:11 GMT
So true ...
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