I assume we're talking about Windows, right?

I use Mac, with the built in Time Machine function. So easy, set up once and forget about it until you need a new computer.

To be honest, the most important thing for me is not the computer settings or even the applications, but the files. And I have iCloud for that. When I set up this iMac two years ago, I didn't even restore from a backup of the old one, even though I had it. I just connected it to my iCloud account, redownloaded the most important apps (like ESO, and Minion) and hooked this computer into my iCloud and I was off and running in next to no time at all.

I do have a Windows backup of the old Mac, but when I set up Boot Camp on this one, I just started over from scratch. The way I see it, things change so much that it's kind of stupid to keep old stuff going - I mean, you can't even get software on CD anymore, it's all downloaded. And while I care about my old toons, like Julian, they live on in my heart and in my writing, so I don't really feel the need to keep playing with them. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but moving Julian from Oblivion to ESO, for example, allowed me to explore new aspects of her personality. So in some ways it's freeing to just Let Go . . .

Backup Windows 7 computer has been updated.

*More RAM (which was reflected in both Oblivion and Fallout 3)
*Advanced Systemcare and Windows Defender updated and searches have been done
*Most recent savegames transferred
*Most recent IRL pics transferred
*Youtube extension added and working


Conclusion: Sweet!

Woot, back online!!!!! Phone & Internet went belly-up around 0915 last Friday morning. As can be seen, all's well now. Had a five-day wait cos I'm flagged as a repeat offender, having needed AT&T tech service more than once within the past thirty days. Of course that earlier use was them converting me to fiber, which they said was mandatory. (Either that or find a new provider.) To add insult to injury, the problem turns out to be an error on their part at a local junction box, not anything to do with my home equipment. Be that as it may, I now have the pleasure of weeding through roughly seven-hundred emails. (I will be surprise if more than twenty aren't political junk mail.)

WOO HOO!!! So glad to see you back on here!!! How frustrating that is for them to flag you as trouble when they caused it! I'm just really glad you are back now, WHEW!

I'm super glad I voted early. Being as this is US election day, had I not already voted I'd have needed to postpone repairs until today. Being without internet on a major election day would be frustrating and nerve racking.

I was wrong. There were 28 non-political emails in my in-basket. Of those four are truly important. The rest I'll look at as I have time.

That's an awful lot of junk mail.

Not an issue, but...

You might recall that, after assembling my current primary PC mid 2017, I wanted to build a movable platform-on-casters for it, to get it off the carpet and make it easy for an old-fart to drag out from its nook for cleaning, testing, etc. I luckily had the wood I needed, and an old set of casters that would serve.

You might also recall that assembling the PC triggers a severe case of "tennis elbow" limiting use of my right arm.

It was three-fourths year before that arm was up to any projects involving lifting/moving objects weighing more than a couple of pounds. By then I'd lost interest in the project.

No, I haven't revived it. I suspect it's beyond me now. But...

The other day, out of the blue, it came to me to simply place what would have been the platform's base on the floor beneath the computer. That would at least get it off the carpet and improve power supply intake airflow. Took all of five-ten minutes to locate/dig out the wood and slide it beneath the PC.

In other PC news, I still haven't gotten used to the 'new' keyboard. I'm better at it, especially in the left hand, but not where I want to be.

I've been on an organizing frenzy since the end of breakfast until breaking for lunch, then for a short time afterword. Part of it was not computer related and is here ignored.

The PC portion began when I decided to at last disassembled the MS Ergo 4000 keyboard, install the one tiny part I overlooked when last disassembled, reassemble it, and place it with other worthless PC items sitting on the living-room floor awaiting next year's city spring odd-item garbage pickup. That done, I returned to the computer room for its box. It was near the bottom of a jumbled tall stack of old PC items and/or their boxes on the upper shelf of my PC room closet. Had to remove almost the entire stack to reach it, so decided to do a little spring-cleaning. In the process I found lots of stuff I have no business keeping. Here are highlights:

1) An 8" floppy drive cleaning disk. Oddly or not I decided to keep it. While it holds no nostalgic value, I never owned an 8" floppy, it doesn't take up enough storage space to matter.

2) Two identical smallish Final Fantasy XI themed mouse pads. Again, no sentimental value. I'm not sure how I got them. Probably a free game-store handout when they didn't reserve enough copies to give away all 'bonuses'. I kept them. They take up no room.

3) A Vesa-Local-Bus IDE drive card in its box. This went in the living-room trash pile.

4) A Number-Nine ISA-bus graphics card dated 1994!, in box. It goes all the up to 1280x1024...in 256 colors. (800x600 is need for full color.) Living-room trash pile.

5) A beige metal base for a very long gone computer. Trash pile.

6) Assorted beige case drive-bay covers for long gone computers. Trash pile.

7) Old AT-connector keyboard. I thought about keeping this as replacement for a not-quite-so-old ergo whose F/J positioning ridges have worn again. Alas, those ridges are worn off on this keyboard too. Trash pile.

8) A no-longer-needed old-style alarm clock. Trash pile.

9) Not in the computer room but instead near the bottom of a stack of boxes in the kitchen, my final ink-jet printer, boxed. Worthless crap. Stopped working not a month after its warranty expired. Before then, it cost me an arm and a leg in ink-cartridge replacement. Trash pile, and good riddance.

I still lack the guts to dispose of my large floppy-disk collection. Well, I got rid of some of it years ago. Much remains. My old third PC has a 3.5" floppy-drive. I can in theory transfer some floppies using it. Not much I can do about 5.25" floppies. It's likely that nothing on those floppies is worth keeping. If there had been, I'd surely have transferred them long ago. On the other hand, it's quite possible there might be something on those disks I want erased before tossing.

Oops... wrong thread ...

So, youtube extension on FF doesn't work again. Get this json.txt box that asks me if I want to open the file with a text editor which of course I don't. I just want to watch the video. Saki said it had to do with Java but updating won't do much good, I reckon. Think I tried it last time with no luck.

As this thing goes I have to wait a week or so and then somehow it works again and I can enjoy the old youtube layout once more until next time. But I wanna stop this from happening. Any thoughts?

Probably can't. The site updates a lot and updates break extensions.

Win10 announced another update-to-2004 attempt on my secondary PC. As with the first, failed attempt it took ages. Then...bingo, success. At the end it wanted me to configure all sorts of stuff I ignored, though I did need to re 'personalize' my taskbar color scheme afterward. I ought to fire up the third PC so it too can update. Man is it behind. I doubt it's been turned on for over three years. Old as it is, about all its good for is sluggishly browsing the web.

Having a real good start to 2021: trying to run ESO locks up my machine. Trying to repair ESO locks up my machine. I'll have to try uninstall / re-install which won't be quick.

Urg. Sorry, ghastley. I hope the uninstall/reinstall fixes things for you.

Now add: trying to re-install ESO locks up the machine.

Nothing useful in the system logs, as the lock-up prevents logging the error, too.

Ugh. That sounds incredibly bad. Can't even reinstall?

Is it possible that you are using that previous defunct launcher? Remember we had to delete and totally reinstall the game several months ago; and after that the old launcher was unusable?

Also, may want to check to make sure something that the game requires to run/install hasn't quit working (memory, hard drive, graphics card, etc).

I'm currently working on the theory that it's a bad piece of disk. PTS runs OK, and that's essentially a copy of the same thing, running against a different server.

It does sound like a hardware issue; so that would make sense. Wow, the PTS is running? We can all join you there if you need running mates, of course = but yeah; has to be an awful thing to wake up to!

This just keeps getting better. I've successfully re-installed the launcher, s now it doesn't know I have PTS, and won't launch that. The re-install of ESO itself keeps locking up.

One step forward = two steps back.

Urgh!

ESO is finally re-installed. Still get the random lock-ups, bu I'm managing a bit of play in between.

Re-install was seizing up at 7% regularly until I minimized the launcher and didn't look until it was way past that point. PTS was just a case of the default "hide' when the launcher was re-intalled.

So Friday's meet is back in the "possible" column, but I expect to drop out often. I still have no idea what component is failing, and when it will give up completely. But this system is over ten years old, so it's due for replacement anyway.

I saw that you were in game on the guild roster and smiled. Sorry things are still acting up for you though.

The lock-ups appear to be the symptoms of a dying video card. I have a pair of GTX680's in SLI, so it could be either or both. I may try to run with just one, assuming I can tie the failure down to the other. The good news is that I can use my games machine for anything except games, without problems. So on Friday, I may be there ion Discord only, as an in-game appearance will lock me up.

That is some progress, ghastley, that certainly helps with troubleshooting. I sure hope you're able to pin it down so you can fix it. Perhaps a new graphics card but, hey, could be worse I suppose.

Ongoing plot-thickening situation at this moment in time: Opening up the case and pulling one card leaves me with the same failure. Swapping the single card with the pther one gives me the same failure. So either both cards have the same issue, or it's not the video cards.

However, I do have a video problem, as I get the "black rock" symptom shown here So it might be the card slot, not the card?

At first glance I scratched my head over why you would complain about such a nice image. Then I spotted the rock. The Black Rock. When I've had things like that it's always been faulty in-game objects, or a graphics driver issue. I suppose hardware can't be ruled out, especially if black objects in question are known to be issue-free, and you've not done any recent graphics driver updates.

Overheating? Have you blown out any accumulated dusk on the GPU's fans and innards? Old as those 680s are, they might need a good 'airing'. The CPU and PSU too.

This machine runs Win 7, so nothing has been updated on the software side for some time. Much dust was indeed shoveled out, and melted down to make new bunnies, and I've checked the GPU fan motor is not burned out. Some setting changes have eliminated the black rock, but the random hang-ups remain.

It's about time for a replacement, but I wish I had a fall-back machine to use. I'll have to see what I can cobble together around the other GTX card.

Gah! Had an unexpected adventure this afternoon. Didn't get home until suppertime. Maybe 30min ago I launched YouTube and played a video. (duh!) At its end, and much to my surprise, a second video began to play. What the...? Did auto somehow turn itself OFF again, as happens occasionally? Who knows? The OFF-ON switch had vanished! I checked settings and found no reference to a toggle. I eventually searched online I discovered that yes, this is a newly implemented change. No more autoplay toggle at upper-right There is, however, now a toggle embedded within the video window. I found it easily enough and again disabled autoplay. Huzzah!

Awhile back I began getting screen-tearing in TS2021. It bugged me to no end, as you might imagine. Some days later, to make it easy to close the game when frozen (the game, not me), I changed from Full Screen mode to a borderless full-screen window. To my happy surprise, tearing disappeared! I would have thought full-screen mode better than windowed mod for running games. Guess not?

I probably should not say this too loudly, but after a re-re-flash of the BIOS, my freezes appear to have stopped. I think the first attempt regressed to an older version than I had been running. I put the second video card back in and re-established surround and that works, too.

And the inside of the case is a lot cleaner!

The downside is that I don't get an upgrade yet.

*mALX silently raises the "V" (victory sign) and then hurriedly lowers it; then creeps out quickly before luck changes ... *

Great news, ghastley! Now you can upgrade on your schedule instead of your puter's schedule.

I've a dilemma of sorts. I need more computer storage. More free-to-use computer storage, to be exact. Thanks to YouTube video creation. My various partitions are filling with raw footage and rendered final output. I've now limited free space anywhere, with more videos to come.

External hard-drives are relatively cheap. I saw a Western Digital 6TB external for around $130 the other day. But. I don't know that I trust external traditional drives, fragile as they can be when moved, which an external drive will be subject to. SSDs are a far safer bet, but there we're looking at $100 for 1TB, minimum, on a good day. What to do? <sighs>

And now, today, I all of a sudden can't find where I keep my DFU footage, either raw or finished product. Finished product isn't where it ought to be. That sub-folder is empty. Can't find hind nor hair of my DFU raw footage. Yet it exists. It has too. It's being used by my Video Editor to render a new YouTube episode as I type this. Where the heck is it?

This wasn't an issue when I could store all footage on one partition. I knew where everything was, and had to be, back then. Poor, pitiful Decrepit. So understood.

ADDENDUM:
Woot, found my DFU video folders!!!!! I caused my own problem. I labeled that folder Daggerfall Unity, rather than Daggerfall Unity Videos. All other video-related folders on that partition are properly labeled "such and such Video". Too, that partition also holds Daggerfall Unity and DOS Daggerfall game backups. Due to my mislabeling, I assumed what was in reality a DFU Videos folder was instead a game backup folder.

Which doesn't answer my need for more storage space.

Yesterday I updated my second backup Win7 and today I updated my primary backup with images and savegames. I also updated all three flashdrives, one that was since October 11th last year and one that was from December 7th 2019!

I also defragmented the C: drive on my primary.


Edit: Can someone say why this happened for me on youtube? Look up right, the top part is cut off
And yes, it's scrolled up all the way, I don't know why this suddenly happened.

Hmmm.... that's odd for sure. When did it begin, and what might you have changed at that time? Do they cut off like that when viewed full-screen? Firefox? My Firefox is displaying videos fine, as always. Have you tried opening them in an alternate browser?

Actually, it works fine now.


It just randomly happened as I was watching a video, I saw it jump up and cut off the top portion. It might have to do with a Firefox update not taking effect properly. I closed the browser and restarted, it installed updates and from then it has worked.


No idea

I done it! Just ordered a 5TB WD Black external USB 3.0 hard drive. I regret not going SSD, for added reliability and longevity rather than speed, but storage size won out by a nose. It's tentatively scheduled to arrive Feb 25. I'm almost dead in the water as for as capturing video footage goes. I've enough room for intro and outro clips for an upcoming Scenic Excursions episode, so long as I don't make 'em overly long. That's it. To be fair, I've free space on several partitions, but those are dedicated to other purposes.

Yay for more storage space!

I have a WD Elements 1 TB external I use for storage. I also didn't save my YouTube vids after I uploaded them, because of space constraints.

I have a 1TB spinner drive in my PC as well. Videos get huge though and I delete them when I'm done with them.

As mentioned in a different thread yesterday, my PC crashed to desktop in two game, several times each. In TpF1, it occurred as soon as I took the game off pause to begin play. In TpF2, it occurred while riding in one of my trains, after maybe four or five minutes of play. In addition, TpF2 displayed random small colored circles on screen a few seconds before each crash. (TpF1 did not.)

TpF1 seemed okay after reverting to an earlier save. TpF2 crashed again after doing that.

This morning I cleaned the PC's innards via a strong air-blower, specially purchased for the purpose. The Graphics Card looked clean prior to treatment. In fact, the entire PC had no more than a thin layer of dust. No more that would accumulate after a couple of days without dusting. I therefore wasn't expecting much.

With the PC reassembled and booted, I first ran Heaven Benchmark, letting it complete twice without interference. No issues. Temps never rose above 76C, though they stayed there fairly consistently during the second run. What little research I've done says that 85C is the danger point. TpF2 isn't acting up now either, though I've not ridden a train since cleaning the PC.

My worry is that maybe the graphics card is going bad. This is a horrid time for it. The only current card that appeals to me is the RTX 3080, with an SRP double what I'm used to paying for GPUs. What's more, they sell for hundreds more than that, when they can be had at all. Same goes for the entire RTX 3000 line. The new AMD's are likewise hard to find and overpriced, not that I'm much interested in them.

My hope is that yesterday was a fluke. Time will tell, I reckon.

Sorry, Decrepit. Blowing things out can't hurt so I'll keep my fingers crossed for you that your puter holds up okay until your coin purse and a desirable graphics card can reach an agreement.

The folly of PC gaming; constant upgrades and replacements.

And speaking of, Khajiit just ordered a new PSU. It’s an 850w that I found on Amazon for $99. Hopefully it will be ok and not a “get what you pay for” situation. Nothing ventured, nothing gained I suppose, and returns are super easy with Amazon these days anyway, so I feel pretty good about it.

I will say that this is the first component that I’ve had to replace since I built the system back in 2016, so “constant” may not be the best word to use when describing the frequency of buying upgrades and replacements.

Khajiit knows what I mean

My primary PC's PSU is 850w, as if that's relevant here. It's been a good unit, so far as I can tell. Never gives me a lick to trouble. An irony is that one reason I decided on the unit I bought is that it has a super quiet fan, which turns on only when/if the temperature rises beyond a certain level. Naturally, it was right at that time when my hearing to a noticeable plunge. I suspect the PSU could be appreciably noisier than it is without me noticing. Which wouldn't have changed my mind. As I recall, the 850w unit was on sale for the same price as its 750w equivalent at the time.

My current PSU that is giving me trouble is a Corsair Bronze rated 750w. The new one is from a company called Segotep and it’s a Gold rated 850w that actually costs less than what I paid for the Corsair. It has pretty good reviews, though only about 80 of them.

Mine is an EVGA Supernova G3 series 850watt Gold. It's the first non Corsair I've bought in some time. Suprising, these nearly four years later it's still sold on Amazon. Either it or some later lookalike namesake. Over 1000 reviews, 91% five-star, Significantly more expensive that what I paid! Good to know it seems to have withstood the test of time, unscathed:

(link) Amazon EVGA Supernova GS series 850w PSU (link)

(I don't recall mine having the 10yr warrant the Amazon sold unit does, but don't rule it out.)