The Computer Thread

Fellow Windows 8 users:

Did you get the DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION Blue screen (which led to the computer restarting? If so, how the hell did you solve it?

I've never got it, but from what I hear it's caused by a problem with a component.

Try updating all your drivers. If that doesn't stop it, try disabling/uninstalling software which controls components (like graphics cards utilities).

There was an Ars Technica article about the FTDI update thing that entertained the possibility that it wasn't intentional to begin with, though they couldn't think of a scenario where that would have happened accidentally aside from some wacky code collision between stuff meant for their authentic chips vs how the knock-off chips processed it, the designers presumably lacking the inside knowledge of how FTDI might intend their drivers to work with the chips in the future.

Didn't they admit that it was intentional?

Anyway, As I understand it, the way the code works is by trying to set the PID to 0 (which will cause computers to not recognize it). The real FTDI chips aren't able to change PID, so the code has no effect and they still work but the knockoff chips will obey the request to change PID. Can you think of a legitimate reason for them to write driver code that intentionally calls functionality that their chips don't have? I can't.

On another note, does anyone know how to simulate lower RAM on a computer for profiling purposes? I'm interested to test to see how much RAM affects different workloads, but I'd rather not have to open up the case and physically add/remove RAM. I've heard the OS uses unused memory for filesystem caching, so ideally, I'd need a solution that makes the OS pretend to have less RAM for caching purposes too.

Ghetto way? Run a bunch of stuff in the background.

Technical way? dunno

Run this, or multiple instances of it.

For something that simple, I think I'd rather just write my own. All you need to do is write a program that maps X GB of memory and then touches it to make sure it's actually backed. The bigger issue is how to prevent it from being swapped out. Not sure if setting swappiness=0 is a good idea here.

So, my mom's hand-me-down Toshiba Satellite laptop is running at a slow crawl in Windows 7. My first instinct is "It's a 7 year old laptop", but I'd rather fix it than get a whole new one. Any possible causes I should look for short of a hardware failure of some sort? I'm tooling around with a couple of Linux Live C Ds running whatever diagnostic stuff I can find (waiting for a Knoppix memory test to finish right now) but I'm mostly just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.

Probably going to grab a copy of Clonezilla to make a backup image before I really start futzing around with it.

Bi: Yeah, guess I'll do that. Thanks!

Did some of the ram go bad? And has it run windows 7 at full speed before?

255 Terabits/s: Researchers demonstrate record data transmission over new type of fiber

What does this kind◊ of polygonal chart of◊ RPG character stats◊ usually get called? And how does one go about creating one without manually drawing every single line with unrealistically exceeding precision? Can it be done via MS Word, PowerPoint, or Excel?

edited 27th Oct '14 10:35:46 PM by MarqFJA

They are called Radar charts. You can make them in all three (Word, Excel, Power Point) of them.

edited 27th Oct '14 11:23:08 PM by entropy13

Holy shit that is freaking amazing.

HTML5 reaches 'Recommendation' status

Calculating encryption schemes' theoretical security guarantees eases comparison, improvement

I'm surprised HTML 5's not already an official standard. Browsers have supported it for years.

HP announces Sprout—a truly innovative workstation

So my two external hard drives are nearing max capacity. I'm planning to buy a new hard drive soon, so I'm open to any recommendations for either specific brands or places where I can get reliable recommendations or reviews of products to base my final decision upon. I'm using Western Digital's MyPassport (one 1TB and one 2TB), BTW.

A separate important question, however, is this: Each drive has several top-level folders (each with its own tree of subfolders, naturally). Is there a way for me to get a pie chart that shows just how much of the drive space is taken up by each top-level folder, as a percentage of the total drive space? Manually comparing each folder's size is very tedious.

edited 2nd Nov '14 4:02:25 AM by MarqFJA

http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/

Alright this is an recurring problem for me. My Windows 8 Toshiba PC that I've had for around 3 years keeps randomly crashing/freezing on me when I use Internet Explore (I think I'm using IE 10). It just happened to me about 4 minutes ago. Yesterday, I just nuked an Trojan with my AV scanner and I'm starting another scan as of this post. So any ideas on how to fix this?

edited 2nd Nov '14 3:23:52 PM by RabidTanker

If the crashes started after you removed the trojan, you could try doing a system restore to before you did it?

Google going where no search engine has gone before: Amit Singhal

Updated to Windows 8.1 today. Well, I say "updated", because actually I didn't have a choice. Typical fucking Microsoft nannying.

You can always downgrade back to 8 by refreshing your computer if you don't want 8.1. That's what I did. Fair warning though that while you do keep all your files all your applications will be uninstalled and you'll have to reinstall them.