That doesn't explain why you're installing XP. Especially if you're going to turn right around and install Win7 over top if it.
[Rant] Tech Whine Like a baby thread
- Thread starter DarkAudit
- Start date
Ah, you might think my 7 is "upgrade-only" but that's not the case. It's because the 1TB was dual-boot XP/7x64, so the 2TB will be, too. Basically when I'm done it'll be the same system but with a HDD that's double the size and double the speed.
--Patrick
Why is XP on there at all? 7 I can understand a bit, but XP? No.
Retro gaming, more lax DRM, compatibility with some older hardware...basically I want to keep a working XP environment around for the eight times a year I need it.
--Patrick
Yes, with limitations. Virtual Machines (VMs) can run XP just fine, but the environment they emulate isn’t usually capable of properly emulating anything that talks more-or-less directly to hardware — mainly things like graphics (DX9). So while I do have XP Mode installed within the Win7 partition to handle boring stuff like Word (the download page for XP Mode calls out that it is specifically meant for “productivity apps”) or most older 16-bit apps*, it will fail miserably if I try to play any game that requires 3D graphics or I run something that needs to talk directly to the sound card or USB port.
As far as emulating something “completely,” we’ve had instruction-level emulation for a while now, but transistor-level emulation is a MUCH more complicated beast.
—Patrick
*Fun fact: even though an app may be 32-bit, sometimes that app’s installer is only 16-bit, leading to a “But it was working fine until I tried to reinstall it!” situation.
Can't get Windows 10 to stop randomly losing window focus on whatever I'm doing. I've googled it, uninstalled things and ended non-essential processes, but still getting annoyed by text fields losing focus mid-type. Some games are utterly unplayable because the full screen will be booted out within 10 minutes or the keyboard/controller changes focus at a critical moment. About ready to try a complete SSD format and reinstall of windows.
It's not just WinX. I'm running Win7 and occasionally run into it as well. My keyboard input will occasionally be redirected to some other app. I don't know why it happens. I assume it's related to things like game overlays and such.
--Patrick
Try unplugging all other devices to make sure it's not some rogue driver problem putting in phantom inputs. That was the problem I had when Winx decided to randomly update the driver for my flight stick to a different, wrong driver
Gigabit Ethernet has been widely available since the Pentium 4 days. If it only has Fast Ethernet, that's because the board maker chose to cheap out on that.
EDIT: Does it have room for expansion?
--Patrick
Last edited:
Dangit, I need new headphones.
My current set (Steelseries Siberia 350) work just fine, the sound quality is good and the mic quality is good enough, but the construction is just awful. The suspension headband peeled apart after only 3-4 months' use, and the insulation on the USB cable itself is shredding and coming apart in multiple places worse than an iPhone charging cord. I've had to mummify it in multiple spots with vinyl electrical tape just to keep it together, especially the last few inches leading up to where they join the cans themselves. Would not rebuy, and they've been discontinued anyway.
--Patrick
My current set (Steelseries Siberia 350) work just fine, the sound quality is good and the mic quality is good enough, but the construction is just awful. The suspension headband peeled apart after only 3-4 months' use, and the insulation on the USB cable itself is shredding and coming apart in multiple places worse than an iPhone charging cord. I've had to mummify it in multiple spots with vinyl electrical tape just to keep it together, especially the last few inches leading up to where they join the cans themselves. Would not rebuy, and they've been discontinued anyway.
--Patrick
figmentPez
Staff member
I hate how the Google Play store will tell you that apps aren't compatible with your device, but won't say what system requirements you don't meet.
When I had an old cheap phone, I was finding the store simply refused to display an app that I knew should be there but turned out I wasn't compatible with. I'd search specifically for it and nothing would come up like it wouldn't exist. It took me a while to figure out what was happening and I wasn't going insane. Thanks for the gaslighting, Google.
figmentPez
Staff member
It still does that. I can't search for the app on my phone.
Intel Ready with 144-layer 3D NAND On its Own
Stop it.
QLC was slow/fragile enough, thanks, but now you want to halve its resilience and speed yet again for a measly 25% capacity increase? Yeah it might mean you have to go with a 2280 or 22110 format instead of a nice, compact 2240 or 2260, but so what? Storage is already shitty enough, stop making it even shittier!
--Patrick
No.
Stop it.
QLC was slow/fragile enough, thanks, but now you want to halve its resilience and speed yet again for a measly 25% capacity increase? Yeah it might mean you have to go with a 2280 or 22110 format instead of a nice, compact 2240 or 2260, but so what? Storage is already shitty enough, stop making it even shittier!
--Patrick
Both CTRL keys on my keyboard have stopped responding.
It might be a hardware issue. Though if it is, it's rather curious that the only two keys that died were the CTRL keys on both sides. So I'm more inclined to think it's a software issue, except I can't think of any possible cause. Also, I've gone through all the software fixes I can find, such as updating drivers or even deleting drivers, but no luck.
Anyway, keyboards aren't exactly expensive so I'm just going to get a new one and see if that fixes it. But it's annoying.
UPDATE: New keyboard works, so I guess it was a hardware issue after all. Still odd though.
It might be a hardware issue. Though if it is, it's rather curious that the only two keys that died were the CTRL keys on both sides. So I'm more inclined to think it's a software issue, except I can't think of any possible cause. Also, I've gone through all the software fixes I can find, such as updating drivers or even deleting drivers, but no luck.
Anyway, keyboards aren't exactly expensive so I'm just going to get a new one and see if that fixes it. But it's annoying.
UPDATE: New keyboard works, so I guess it was a hardware issue after all. Still odd though.
Last edited:
Just gonna update that it DID turn out to be a problem from an input device. My Huion drawing screen was the source. Everything is fine again if I unplug the USB connector that allows input for the pen and just use it as a normal monitor when I'm not drawing. Gonna see if I can find some kind of external USB switch to simply flip it on and off, but eventually I'm probably going to upgrade to a full sized Wacom Cintiq.
We got a lower-end model for our son. It will keep popping up the accessibility keyboard without prompting. Win10 keeps thinking, "Oh, you're a tablet? Let me get that for you..."
--Patrick
My UPS that feeds the main router (an ancient APC BackUPS) just died in the middle of a boss battle. That's bad.
Yay for Prime shipping I guess. For now we run direct from the wall by the seat of our pants. And I have to do the boss battle all over again. Waaahhhhh...
--Patrick
New UPS installed upstairs, old UPS moved downstairs to the routers. Might as well put the fresh one on the larger load, right? They're both the same model...sorta.
Old model: Cyberpower CP1500PFCLCD
New model: Cyberpower CP1500PFCLCDa
I couldn't find any real difference between the specs except for the weight and some ports, and CP has removed the older manual from their site. Whatever, if the power goes out now, our Internet will stay up for at least 2-3 hours now instead of the previous UPS's mere 15min.
BUT I'm here today to rant about my mouse. The left button has started doing the thing where it will sometimes double-click, and there are times when left-clicking it will click and then release even though I'm still holding down the button. Ah well. It was a renewed/open-box item when I bought it, and it has been four years, soooo I guess it's finally time for a new one.
...but the shipping might take a week! Waaahhh...
--Patrick
Old model: Cyberpower CP1500PFCLCD
New model: Cyberpower CP1500PFCLCDa
I couldn't find any real difference between the specs except for the weight and some ports, and CP has removed the older manual from their site. Whatever, if the power goes out now, our Internet will stay up for at least 2-3 hours now instead of the previous UPS's mere 15min.
BUT I'm here today to rant about my mouse. The left button has started doing the thing where it will sometimes double-click, and there are times when left-clicking it will click and then release even though I'm still holding down the button. Ah well. It was a renewed/open-box item when I bought it, and it has been four years, soooo I guess it's finally time for a new one.
...but the shipping might take a week! Waaahhh...
--Patrick
Guaranteed for 60 million clicks? What, they expect you to buy a new mouse every D3 season?
figmentPez
Staff member
GasBandit
Staff member
TIL that, in crestron-land, a serial/analog wave pulse can only be told its duration in logic waves, and not in seconds. It won't throw an error if you feed it "60s" instead of "1d", but if you actually ever want that output signal to go back to low, you have to set the duration to 1d and then put it through a retriggerable one-shot set to 60 seconds.
If only I had learned that BEFORE I had programmed a bunch of rooms the wrong way >_<
If only I had learned that BEFORE I had programmed a bunch of rooms the wrong way >_<
I am apparently a giant dumbass (in this context) and have route deleted the first step of my routing table, to replace it with my VPN's first routing step, which I then turned off, and now am throttling the fuck out of myself. Can anybody help rebuild the routing table for a Spectrum account? So far I've:
route add 0.0.0.0 mask 0.0.0.0 <192.168.1.1> (Spectrum's gateway)
That gave me a first routing step of:
Network Destination Netmask Gateway Interface Metric
0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 192.168.1.1 <my IP> 60
Then, I went into services.msc and re-started Wired AutoConfig.svc, because it was stopped.
Now I have an almost functional internet connection, except that it still doesn't recognize that I'm on a LAN connection, doesn't know that I'm connected to Spectrum, and is slow as fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. Also, I'm pretty sure IPv6 is still turned off. And I still can't get Seedboxes.cc's VPN to successfully establish a VPN connection. I never get VPN interface info in my routing table interface info anymore, and it used to be interface 4. The Metric values on my connection are all different from Aislynn's computer, which hasn't had any of its routing table mucked with.
If I promise never to do something this stupid without researching again, can someone help me out here? This sucks.
route add 0.0.0.0 mask 0.0.0.0 <192.168.1.1> (Spectrum's gateway)
That gave me a first routing step of:
Network Destination Netmask Gateway Interface Metric
0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 192.168.1.1 <my IP> 60
Then, I went into services.msc and re-started Wired AutoConfig.svc, because it was stopped.
Now I have an almost functional internet connection, except that it still doesn't recognize that I'm on a LAN connection, doesn't know that I'm connected to Spectrum, and is slow as fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. Also, I'm pretty sure IPv6 is still turned off. And I still can't get Seedboxes.cc's VPN to successfully establish a VPN connection. I never get VPN interface info in my routing table interface info anymore, and it used to be interface 4. The Metric values on my connection are all different from Aislynn's computer, which hasn't had any of its routing table mucked with.
If I promise never to do something this stupid without researching again, can someone help me out here? This sucks.
Couldn't find anything that wasn't just "reboot your machines."
But this article has a printout from what I assume is a default routing table, might help you get back to the default if you can't restart?
--Patrick
Oh, I've restarted plenty. I've even shut down, walked away for a minute or two, come back, and powered up from "scratch." It just hasn't done me any good. I think I'm mostly OK now aside from my connection still not knowing that the name of the network is supposed to be "SpectrumWifie0-5G" instead of "Network Connection," but that's a step up from "unknown ethernet connection, no internet access." I'm wondering if I can "route change" all of my entries and just change the metric scores to match the ones on Aislynn's machine, by I'd hate to screw myself over even more, because it looks like those values determine the speed of the connection, and you can accidentally throttle yourself down to, for example, Metric 60 (which I have right now) which determines the speed for IPv4 transport and sets it to greater than or equal to 10Mb but less than 20Mb, according to this chart of IPv4 Metric Values from Microsoft Support.
The only time I've ever messed with stuff that even remotely looks like what you're doing, I was having to telnet into my router to change the max number of simultaneous open connections. I've never had to edit the routing table beyond the exercises I did for my certifications ages ago, and now when I want to do that kind of stuff I just do it at the router level.
--Patrick
--Patrick
Yeah, in the future if I want to make sure I'm not leaking any traffic around my VPN or TOR, I'll just buy a raspberry pi 4 and set up TorBox and use that for when I'm not browsing the brightest sectors of the net. I've also re-installed the driver for my ethernet card. I'm pretty much just beating my head against Google's search results at this point, hoping that something will stick and wishing I'd never messed with these settings. I even read the directions and then stupidly did exactly what they said not to do, because I didn't understand them clearly enough.