E-Chat Quick Question Thread

[scottsdad]

3 hours ago, German Jag said:

Click on the chart, press Ctrl C, open Paint and press Ctrl V. Then save into whatever graphic file format you need.

That's what i thought, but my computer has paint 3D which seems far more useless than the original. 

[BFTD]

4 hours ago, scottsdad said:

2 sim cards, eh?

Now, I'm not saying that only sex fiends and drug dealers use two sim cards. Others might, but not me. 

I'm innocent, guv.

I just connect the drug dealers on one line with the sex fiends on the other. What they get up to is none of my business!

[German Jag]

1 hour ago, scottsdad said:

That's what i thought, but my computer has paint 3D which seems far more useless than the original. 

After the Ctrl C, press the Windows button, and type Paint. If you‘re lucky the old Paint might still be somewhere on your computer. 

[TxRover]

On 01/10/2023 at 07:29, BFTD said:

Alright, I guess the answer is no - my iPhone 5s is almost as useless now as when I first got it  

Here's another question though - I've got two SIMs in my current phone, which I've been using as a modem for the last few months. When I use the Vodafone SIM, I can do internet banking without problems, but trying to log in when using the Smarty SIM just punts me back to the login page 99% of the time. If I do get logged in, it'll kick me back again within seconds.

Obviously the answer is not to use the Smarty SIM for banking, but I'm curious about what the two connections do differently that causes this (but not enough to bother the bank's tech support). Any ideas?

Smarty SIM apparently doesn’t support “short codes”, which can cause some issues as larger banks and such use these to avoid getting screened as spam. How that might impact your ability to login is beyond me, but this issue (not supporting short codes) is causing headaches recently.

[BFTD]

5 hours ago, TxRover said:

Smarty SIM apparently doesn’t support “short codes”, which can cause some issues as larger banks and such use these to avoid getting screened as spam. How that might impact your ability to login is beyond me, but this issue (not supporting short codes) is causing headaches recently.

Nice - I wasn't really expecting an answer to that!  

I presumed it was likely something to do with them being cheap as chips. I'm not going to complain too much about a rolling £16/month for unlimited internet.

[TxRover]

1 hour ago, BFTD said:

Nice - I wasn't really expecting an answer to that!  

I presumed it was likely something to do with them being cheap as chips. I'm not going to complain too much about a rolling £16/month for unlimited internet.

It’s that they apparently use short codes to authenticate sometimes, and if the SIM doesn’t support it, it might just fail to work. You mentioning the price makes it clear why they aren’t gonna have any frills.

[Iminavest]

Looking at getting myself a laptop mainly for watching fitba/streaming on my travels and gaming but no idea where to start. Fairly open budget wise but preferablyaround the £4/500 area.

Any recommendations?

Edited October 19, 2023 by Iminavest

[BFTD]

5 hours ago, Iminavest said:

Looking at getting myself a laptop mainly for watching fitba/streaming on my travels and gaming but no idea where to start. Fairly open budget wise but preferablyaround the £4/500 area.

Any recommendations?

You'll need to be more specific than "gaming" - what are you planning to play?

I got an HP 17-cp0021na (8GB RAM, Ryzen 5625U) a few months back for £399 and I've been very happy with it for the purposes you mentioned. I've only been playing the Quake 2 remaster, XCOM, Not Tonight, This War of Mine, and Sunless Sea, and it's handled them flawlessly, but I don't know how it would cope with more recent/demanding titles. Really like the IPS screen on it too, although the ones I'm used to are at least five years old now, but check you're getting IPS as apparently cheaper models use a poorer-quality panel.

Had a couple of pretty mediocre machines in the years prior, so it's been a bit of a relief to have a laptop that hasn't had any annoyances!

[Iminavest]

On 19/10/2023 at 15:46, BFTD said:

You'll need to be more specific than "gaming" - what are you planning to play?

I got an HP 17-cp0021na (8GB RAM, Ryzen 5625U) a few months back for £399 and I've been very happy with it for the purposes you mentioned. I've only been playing the Quake 2 remaster, XCOM, Not Tonight, This War of Mine, and Sunless Sea, and it's handled them flawlessly, but I don't know how it would cope with more recent/demanding titles. Really like the IPS screen on it too, although the ones I'm used to are at least five years old now, but check you're getting IPS as apparently cheaper models use a poorer-quality panel.

Had a couple of pretty mediocre machines in the years prior, so it's been a bit of a relief to have a laptop that hasn't had any annoyances!

Would probably end up getting the xbox game pass so a bit of a mixture of games.

Had a wee look at recommendations on that and most seem to be coming out around the £800+ mark.

[BFTD]

My laptop started randomly crashing on me earlier in the year (the one I mentioned above!) - I was too busy to deal with it at the time, but it seemed like a memory issue, so I got some replacement RAM and figured I'd swap it out before the warranty expired so I'd have time to send it back if that didn't fix the problem. Then I forgot about it.

Just remembered and the replacement memory didn't solve the issue, so now I've got a knackered laptop that's out of warranty. Occurred to me that it might be an issue with the cooler as it seemed a bit loose, so I took a look at it and whoever built it dumped a huge dollop of thermal paste on the CPU and the other components around it. I've cleared all that shit up and applied a more sensible amount, so now it's fingers crossed that was something to do with the issue, as I really don't have a clue what else it would be and I'll need to use it again soon  

Just in case, anyone got any suggestions? Laptops are fucking awful to diagnose when they develop intermittent faults. It wasn't expensive, but it's a nice wee machine.

[itzdrk]

3 minutes ago, BFTD said:

My laptop started randomly crashing on me earlier in the year (the one I mentioned above!) - I was too busy to deal with it at the time, but it seemed like a memory issue, so I got some replacement RAM and figured I'd swap it out before the warranty expired so I'd have time to send it back if that didn't fix the problem. Then I forgot about it.

Just remembered and the replacement memory didn't solve the issue, so now I've got a knackered laptop that's out of warranty. Occurred to me that it might be an issue with the cooler as it seemed a bit loose, so I took a look at it and whoever built it dumped a huge dollop of thermal paste on the CPU and the other components around it. I've cleared all that shit up and applied a more sensible amount, so now it's fingers crossed that was something to do with the issue, as I really don't have a clue what else it would be and I'll need to use it again soon  

Just in case, anyone got any suggestions? Laptops are fucking awful to diagnose when they develop intermittent faults. It wasn't expensive, but it's a nice wee machine.

Yeah, mine refused to connect to anything recently, Bluetooth WiFi etc and I was at it for hours until I stumbled across a fix.  

[BFTD]

Balls, it's still crashing. From what I remember, Windows was recording a different type of error virtually every time it crashed a few months back, so I'll have to leave it running and see what the logs say.

The annoying thing is that it's completely random when it crashes - doesn't matter if I'm using it or if it's idling, and it could happen during boot or after I've been using it without problems all day. It almost certainly won't be worth sending away for repair as it only cost £400. Kicking myself for forgetting to test it.

[itzdrk]

2 minutes ago, BFTD said:

Balls, it's still crashing. From what I remember, Windows was recording a different type of error virtually every time it crashed a few months back, so I'll have to leave it running and see what the logs say.

The annoying thing is that it's completely random when it crashes - doesn't matter if I'm using it or if it's idling, and it could happen during boot or after I've been using it without problems all day. It almost certainly won't be worth sending away for repair as it only cost £400. Kicking myself for forgetting to test it.

What kind is it? 

[BFTD]

1 minute ago, itzdrk said:

What kind is it? 

HP 17-cp0021na. Nice wee cheapo machine, and it looks like I got a pretty good deal on it at the time, as a replacement would cost more  

[itzdrk]

1 hour ago, BFTD said:

HP 17-cp0021na. Nice wee cheapo machine, and it looks like I got a pretty good deal on it at the time, as a replacement would cost more  

Some really weird stuff happening to those laptops.  You reset the bios? 

[BFTD]

3 hours ago, itzdrk said:

Some really weird stuff happening to those laptops.  You reset the bios? 

Shame, as I was quite happy with it. Nice screen too.

I reset the BIOS, and I just noticed that there's been a new revision since I last used it, so that's installed and I'm just waiting to see if that makes any difference. I've got a horrible feeling it's a hardware issue though, as I never had a problem with it until I had it playing YouTube videos in the background one day and it suddenly locked up - everything froze. After that, intermittent crashes.

If it keeps happening, maybe I'll try booting from a USB stick and see if I get the same issue.

[Forest_Fifer]

Anyone seen odd issues with the YouTube Android tablet app recently? For the last couple of days, I can play a video but the right hand pane of the screen where you'd normally see other videos, comments, live stream chat is completely blank.

Using the same account to access YouTube on Chrome on the same tablet is fine.

Using a different Google account on my Android phone app is also fine.

Tried force stopping, clearing cache and data, no joy.

 

[Soapy FFC]

My Acer laptop has random crashes, sometimes once or twice a day, sometimes nothing for weeks. It seems to be mainly when I'm playing an online game in a web browser. I'm thinking it might be a graphics driver problem but updating drivers haven't helped in the long run. I'm thinking I need to wipe it and reload windows from scratch without using any Acer supplied software to see it that helps, but as yet I've not got round to doing it. 

[palmy_cammy]

If either of your laptops are bluescreening when they “crash” you can run BlueScreenView then fire the error codes into Google to find possible causes.

Always worth doing general housekeeping such as installing Windows and driver updates and running a System File Checker (SFC) scan.

https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html
 

https://www.howtogeek.com/222532/how-to-repair-corrupted-windows-system-files-with-the-sfc-and-dism-commands/

[BFTD]

Update: not had time to do much else in the past few weeks, but I've used the laptop a couple of times for a few hours. First time it bluescreened once, second time I used it for three or four hours without issue, including a bit of gaming.

Something that occurred to me is that I don't think it's bluescreened when on battery power. Probably means nothing, but I'll bear that in mind when I get round to testing it properly. Got a wee list of things to try now.