The Computer Thread

Well, that's interesting. Smear job?

edited 14th Mar '18 5:29:26 AM by Fighteer

Probably.

I am planning to reformat my old computer now but what are the dangers of doing this? I don't want the computer to brick and become broken.

Reformatting shouldn't brick anything, unless the system was already about to fail. The challenge will be reinstalling your operating system and drivers, especially if your hardware is old. Before reformatting, you should make an install disc (on a USB drive or CD-R or whatever) that contains all the drivers you'll need for it, along with your OS.

And of course you should also gather all license keys from the software you had installed. If your PC was pre-built your Windows key is usually written into the BIOS and gets automatically entered during the OS installation but it can't hurt to have it written down just in case.

Also do this, especially your Network drivers are important because if your installation doesn't get them you would have to download them from a different machine so better prepare them in advance.

edited 14th Mar '18 1:43:54 PM by Kiefen

Given AMD has been given 6 months warning before and refused to fix until after the information had gone public, it could also be them deciding they want it fixed sooner then later.

Though the shortselling makes that motivation suspicious, it shouldn't discount actual security flaws.

What 6 months? The article explicitly mentions that they had been given only 24 hours instead of the usual 3+ months to work with them and investigate.

Not this time, last time AMD was given 6 months and ignored the warnings until the flaw went public..... so I could very much see people skipping the waiting period after that if the past has shown they wont take there issues seriously.

I can't see anyone with positive motives doing that except in the situation that they're a total idiot. Any sense and a lack of ulterior motives are mutually exclusive; giving only a day to try and address things this complicated—and this many of them—is not something a reasonable person would do.

It is if the company has a history of not addressing them until there public, since the longer they exist the more damage they can do even if not well known, so you can skip right to the public to make them act.

The traditional 3 months is to give them a chance to fix it while putting as few of customers at risk as posible, if they don't fix it there is no point.

They're either malicious or stupid.

"I don't trust them to do this so I'm going to accelerate the problem" is an inherently dangerous path and shows a complete lack of foresight or a complete disregard for anyone that might be impacted between now and a fix.

So a while back I was having problems with the win 10 fall update and it making my internet card not work. Today Win 10 basically forced the update on me as it was ‘to out of date for security updates’ then fucked up the install making me reset the computer and lose the ability to roll it back...

Yay...

On the plus side after 3 hours of searching I did find a fix for my Wi Fi card that actually works. post 108 here.

Now to download the 900 gigs of games I lost in the reset again...

Edit: does anyone know exactly what ‘PCI Lock’ does and will it affect things like my video card? Google gives me gibberish.

edited 23rd Mar '18 6:48:11 AM by Memers

Simply put, I need to record audio from my computer. Stereo Mix is not showing up. Every source I'm able to find says that if I can't use Stereo Mix, I should use a Windows thing called WASAPI instead. Guess what else isn't showing up.

Any ideas? It's 3 AM and I'm not finagling with in/out cables we likely don't even have just for a shitpost.

Ok I have a strange problem. Lately whenever I start up Google Chrome, it hangs, which causes my computer itself to hang. I can't open other programs nor can I force close them. Sometimes rebooting is RNG since either it helps or it does not. I've uninstalled and reinstalled Chrome just now to see it will help.

I've got a weirder one: all streaming videos play the video just slightly slower than the audio, to the point that after a few minutes of watching anything it will have invariably fallen out of sync. It's not a bandwidth issue (everything loads fine in advance and there's no buffering) nor is it remotely one of hardware capabilities, because downloaded videos never have this sort of issue. It's also not localised to a browser or website, as I have the same issue across multiple browsers.

Any ideas?

That could be several issues. Most likely I think is your browsers might have an addon installed that is causing it to lag, check and see if any have anything in common?

The browsers might be doing some hardware acceleration that your system cant handle and your media players are set to not do. If you have Win 10 anniversary update open up the task manager and see how much GPU, CPU and RAM your browser is using, if its like 100% on the first two then you need to turn hardware acceleration off the latter might mean you need to turn it on. Try using the Twitch App and see if it does it as well.

That sounds maybe like a virus, not sure. Have you watched what its doing in the Task Manager when you open it?

edited 27th Mar '18 9:29:41 AM by Memers

I'll check next time it acts up again. So far it hasn't. Perhaps uninstalling it did the trick but we will see!

Finally managed to snag a SAPPHIRE Radeon RX 570 for under 400. I haven't upgraded my GPU in over five years, even after swapping out my motherboard, CPU, and RAM. God I hate crypto-miners.

x3 I don't think they've got any extensions in common aside from Lastpass, which would be an extremely... strange source of video playback lag. And on the hardware front, it's predictably perfectly fine. ^note 1060, Ryzen 1500X, 16GB DDR 4 RAM—if there were hardware limitations on video playback with this, I don't think HD streaming would be so common.

Those are the most common issues with that. uBlock Origin, Adblock Plus, No Script, Youtube downloader and other addons can cause issues like that. You can try Incognito mode which might work.

What about the twitch app's streaming?

edited 27th Mar '18 12:01:25 PM by Memers

Twitch app?

https://app.twitch.tv/

Its a standalone desktop app for watching streams, if it doesn't lag then it is something wrong with your browsers. If it does then probably its your video drivers.

edited 27th Mar '18 12:11:20 PM by Memers

As it turns out, it was an antivirus extension.

Weird source of issues.

It happens. At one point recently the web shield in my laptop's antivirus decided to block all incoming traffic for reasons I still do not understand.

So it looks like Apple is moving away from using Intel CPUs in its desktop and laptop machines.

So that's pretty much killed the Mac platform as a professional tool then.