Quick [tech] Questions Thread

[Yegolev]

Performance-wise, my config currently is OS on SSD, pagefile on some other 7200 RPM disk.  After I flashed the SSD fw, the boot time and general operation is pleasantly fast across the board.  The C: i/o seems to revolve around constant updates to the system files, so my thought is installing Win7 on a SSD will get you the most performance from it, not by using it as a data store.  I also have 8GB of RAM which has a big impact, reading game data from the platter disks one time being more efficient than ongoing r/w.  So far I haven't done any noticeable paging... I say noticeable because I expect Win7 will page something just to do it.  But the usage is always 1% when I check it.

[Der Helm]

My old 19'' monitor seems to be giving up the ghost slowly but steadily. So I am window shopping for a replacement. Probably a 22''(ish).

I have never bought a new monitor before, I always just used old ones my father replaced, so is there anything I should now about technical details when I buy a new one ?

At the moment I run a Geforce 9600 GT which runs even Skyrim just fine (will see about SWTOR this weekend   ) What would be a cheap upgrade for this one ?

edit to add: Btw, what max. resolution should I be aiming for in regards to monitor and videocard ?

[Engels]

For that vid card, stick to 1920x1080 max. Also, define cheap as far as replacement vid card goes?

With regards to monitors, what's your budget and how picky are you about image quality and viewing angles? That's the biggie, since you have to go from a TN (twisted pneumatic) monitor to an IPS (In Plane Switching) monitor to get that fab Apple monitor type image. If its just for gaming, Asus is probably gonna do more than fine. If you're gonna watch a lot of video, say as a replacement for a TV, then IPS may be of interest, although the pricing is higher.

[fuser]

For that vid card, stick to 1920x1080 max. Also, define cheap as far as replacement vid card goes?

With regards to monitors, what's your budget and how picky are you about image quality and viewing angles? That's the biggie, since you have to go from a TN (twisted pneumatic) monitor to an IPS (In Plane Switching) monitor to get that fab Apple monitor type image. If its just for gaming, Asus is probably gonna do more than fine. If you're gonna watch a lot of video, say as a replacement for a TV, then IPS may be of interest, although the pricing is higher.

Dell is selling a newer 24" e-IPS monitor, as a part of the black friday sales for $299. It's LED and not the normal p-IPS the refresh rate suffers slightly but a good price (review).

[rattran]

I have an answer without a question. I've wanted so simplify my speaker setup for a while, one of my friends is making TinyMix Little stereo mixers for 4 sources through 1 set of speakers, isolated sources, consistent volume. Simple, pricey, works. Now I have 5.1 for my desktop, and use the same fronts for stereo from the server without pops and distortion. Which frees up a  bit of room on my crowded ass desk.

Hooray, and make sure you use the f13Amazon link if you decide to try. Full Disclaimer: I get no kickback or anything for this, just a guy I know irl.

[Salamok]

For that vid card, stick to 1920x1080 max. Also, define cheap as far as replacement vid card goes?

With regards to monitors, what's your budget and how picky are you about image quality and viewing angles? That's the biggie, since you have to go from a TN (twisted pneumatic) monitor to an IPS (In Plane Switching) monitor to get that fab Apple monitor type image. If its just for gaming, Asus is probably gonna do more than fine. If you're gonna watch a lot of video, say as a replacement for a TV, then IPS may be of interest, although the pricing is higher.

Dell is selling a newer 24" e-IPS monitor, as a part of the black friday sales for $299. It's LED and not the normal p-IPS the refresh rate suffers slightly but a good price (review).

Or go with a dell 23" IPS for even less for a bit less resolution.

[Viin]

Is it just me, or have UPS not really improved any over the last 10 years? 1 minute backup time for $180? really? come on ...

[Sand]

So here's an interesting question.
Came into the office today to fire an employee and get some work done.
Computer was running really slow. Hit ctrl-alt-delete to check task manager and I see a program called hki1480834.executive running in six instances. Additionally another program fafIj4cj.com is running in two instances.
Tried Googling both and came up empty.
Booted to safe mode and am running scans. So far nothing more than 19 tracking cookies.

Anyone know what those two programs are?

[Hawkbit]

I'd guess malware, but I'm not 100% positive so don't do anything rash yet!

.com file was a big red flag, as they are similar to .exe files, but are often used by malware creators to confuse users thinking it is a .com internet address suffix. 

There are also types of malware that create random filenames to prevent their filenames from being searched and properly reported.  That's likely why you didn't find those filenames on a search.

Again, I'm not an expert and I can't recommend ripping them out.  But I am suspicious.

[Lantyssa]

Likely random names generated by malware.  They do that so there is no way to "google" an easy solution.

What are you using for a virus scanner?  Likely it's either too new to be in virus definitions, or it turned off or added exceptions to your scanner.  Try downloading malwarebytes.  Great program, though sometimes hard to find now, because the sites that carry it make you jump through a dozen hoops to download.

[Chimpy]

Try downloading malwarebytes.  Great program, though sometimes hard to find now, because the sites that carry it make you jump through a dozen hoops to download.

www.malwarebytes.org is the official site.

[Sand]

I was running Norton's Internet Security 2011. Not sure why it didnt stop it, or even catch it when I booted to safe mode and did a full system scan.

Ended up downloading and running:
TDSSKiller
Combofix

Those two removed it.

[Sheepherder]

Norton didn't detect it because Norton is shit.

[Lantyssa]

Secret IT tip:  Norton doesn't actually do anything but take up a machine's resources.  It's a placebo that makes you think you feel better.

www.malwarebytes.org is the official site.

They've stream-lined the process a lot.  Last time I tried to do it I had to go through a convoluted mess from their front page.  Then there was that time I had to walk my mom through it when I had no internet access, and things were still convoluted...

[lac]

ninite.com is a great way to get people to download and install a couple of malware scanners without effort or confusion.

[Bunk]

Ok, here's my tech dilemna for anyone who wants to take a stab (my IT dept is stumped).

Windows 7 machine at work. Part of a large corporate network. We use a CRM called Onyx which is hosted at another location. I log in to it through IE8. The site for it is in my trusted domains, and is set to login automatically using my network credentials.

Works perfectly fine for months, and then poof, everything explodes. Something in my system is trying to authenticate me and failing, I end up locked out the CRM. It promptly pops up a login window asking for my credentials, which fail. IT department shows me as locked out for "too many failed logon attempts".

Problem is, we can't figure out what the system is trying to log me in to...

 - Nothing in event manager showing failed logons anywhere that I can see; no items in event manager corresponding with the frequency of the issue at all
 - IT has determined the logon attempts are coming from my machine, but can't track what its trying to log in to
 - only PC I have used Remote Desktop to log in to in the past is turned off.
 - only network share is one setup by the system, and even though I am currently locked out of the CRM, I can access that share just fine right now, along with the rest of the local network and the internet - only issue is with accessing anything from a remote site.

It's not specifically the CRM I am being "locked out" of, it's the network. If I log off right now, I won't be able to log back in until they clear the lock.
As soon as they clear the lock, I'll have full access to everything again, CRM, Intranet, etc.
Anyone have any ideas on how to trace what I am specifically failing to log in to?

[Salamok]

We had a similar problem with Dreamweaver accessing subversion using ldap, our passwords expire every 90 days and the only way to update the subversion password in DW w/o locking our accounts was to disconnect from the network before opening Dreamweaver and updating the password.  Apparently on a failed auth attempt DW immediately retries and does this until it times out.  

This probably is not your problem but I am sure Dreamweaver isn't the only well written bit of software out there that does this.  So some program or service on your computer has an old password and is repeatedly attempting to authenticate you with it.  

Try looking at the networking tab in the windows 7 performance monitor for requests to your ldap/authentication server then backtrack whatever processes those are to things you have installed.

Once you have that list of suspects see if you can kill the process/parent process and have IT unlock you account to see if you auto relock again, keep killing processes/having IT unlock you until it stops locking you out, then it will probably be the last process you killed.

Alternatively you can try blowing your user profile away and starting fresh.

edit: you could also try clearing your browser history in the off chance there is a cookie with your old password that some web app is using to authenticate you.

edit2:  I bet if you change your password back to the password you were using when you last did not have this problem it would "work", I wouldn't say it was fixed but it would be working...

edit3:  I am also assuming your IT folks have narrowed this down to a problem with your machine, ie shut your machine down, get your account unlocked and manage to successfully access the CRM from someone else's machine.  If this is not the case then none of the above may be pertinent.

[Engels]

Also, check your system clock, make sure its synchronizing correctly with a time server. Although some authentication will pass without a synced time stamp, others won't let you in.

[Ingmar]

Ok, here's my tech dilemna for anyone who wants to take a stab (my IT dept is stumped).

Windows 7 machine at work. Part of a large corporate network. We use a CRM called Onyx which is hosted at another location. I log in to it through IE8. The site for it is in my trusted domains, and is set to login automatically using my network credentials.

Works perfectly fine for months, and then poof, everything explodes. Something in my system is trying to authenticate me and failing, I end up locked out the CRM. It promptly pops up a login window asking for my credentials, which fail. IT department shows me as locked out for "too many failed logon attempts".

Problem is, we can't figure out what the system is trying to log me in to...

 - Nothing in event manager showing failed logons anywhere that I can see; no items in event manager corresponding with the frequency of the issue at all
 - IT has determined the logon attempts are coming from my machine, but can't track what its trying to log in to
 - only PC I have used Remote Desktop to log in to in the past is turned off.
 - only network share is one setup by the system, and even though I am currently locked out of the CRM, I can access that share just fine right now, along with the rest of the local network and the internet - only issue is with accessing anything from a remote site.

It's not specifically the CRM I am being "locked out" of, it's the network. If I log off right now, I won't be able to log back in until they clear the lock.
As soon as they clear the lock, I'll have full access to everything again, CRM, Intranet, etc.
Anyone have any ideas on how to trace what I am specifically failing to log in to?

Did you recently change your password and forget to change it on a phone or something? 99% of the time when I see this problem it is because of something along those lines. Password change + forgetting to update it on something that is auto-logging you in somewhere.

How sure are they that the failed attempts are coming from that particular machine?

[Bunk]

They've checked twice and keep telling me its coming from my machine, but can't identify what specifically.

Been scanning Resource Monitor, but not seeing anything stand out.

It could potentially be the phone, though if it is I'm going to yell at them about being wrong on the source. Also weird, considering my last password change was at least a month ago. Guess I could have toggled something in wireless settings on my phone recently and not noticed.

Will disable the phone and see what happens...

[Lantyssa]

How do they know the source?  Your account, sure, but the source?

[Furiously]

The call is coming from your house! Get out!!!!

[Bunk]

Yep, sure enough, was my phone trying to access the inhouse wireless network. Makes little sense based on timeline of password changes, but telling it to forget that that access point exists has cleared up my issues.

The IT guy's response to my question about the login attempts supposedly coming from my computer? "Well, your phone was beside your computer, right?"
 

[Ingmar]

Yay, I helped. Takes a little sting off of the 8 hour mail outage I had last night. 

[Chimpy]

Yay, I helped. Takes a little sting off of the 8 hour mail outage I had last night. 

Did you get to watch the no-progress bar while Exchange rebuilt mailboxes?

[Ingmar]

No, 7.5 of the hours were because I wasn't notified. (Backup failed, transaction log drive filled up, stores dismounted.) I should have noticed the backup failure sooner, so still ultimately my fault, but I'm a little cranky that several people didn't open tickets after noticing the outage the night before, I work way better at midnight than at 7 am.

We need way better monitoring too.

[Sky]

No, 7.5 of the hours were because I wasn't notified.

I hate that so much. Daddy doesn't get mad because you broke something, he gets mad because you don't tell him about it.

[K9]

So, AVG has killed my laptop somewhat and I'd appreciate any sugegstions on how I can fix it. The problem seems to be a known one and relates to updates for the AVG2011 program on 64 bit windows machines. As it stands the computer will not boot normally, nor will it boot to the repair facility natively, and if I try to boot it into safe mode it gets stuck when trying to load AVGIDSEH.SYS

The AVG support suggests booting to the command prompt (if you can) and then renaming a bunch of avg***.*** files to different names then reeboting. If you cannot access the command line then they provide a bootable script which you can run from a CD/DVD or USB that renames all the relevant files for you, then reeboots your computer, unfortunately this doesn't seem to work for me and if I try to boot from such a USB I get stuck at a screen with 'Missing operating system_' and nothing else happens.

My laptop is technically a work laptop, running Win7, but they have said it will take a while to fix as they have a backlog, and they'd probably just wipe it and reinstall everything, however I need to get some data off, and ideally want this fixed sooner than they can offer. It's an academic institution so they're not too fussy about people tinkering with their machines.

So I have tried:

1) Repair tool - Doesn't boot, goes to a blank screen
2) Safe mode + Command Prompt - Gets stuck at AVGIDSEH.SYS
3) AVG USB repair tool - Gets stuck at 'Missing operating system_'
4) Win7_64 install CD - Lots of CD activity, then goes back to the repair utility and hangs (however I am not convinced the CD was right since it was a copy, also I didn't set CD/DVD to top priority in the BIOS boot order, which I have since read should be done, so this might still be an option)

Things I haven't tried (yet):

1) Building a Win7 recovery CD and booting from that
2) Booting off a linux install on a USB

If I boot to linux off a USB (which I have never done before) would I be able to access my files? I normally have to log into the computer, and I do not know if I will be able to see documents in my documents folder or on my desktop if I try to go around this with this approach, any comments on this would be welcome.

Any other suggestions, pointers, advice or corrections would be most welcome, thanks.

[Trippy]

You should be able to see your files in Linux if you have an NTFS filesystem driver like NTFS-3G installed.

[K9]

Is that the usual type of filesystem? How should I check?

Do you think booting linux from a usb might be a good solution?

Thanks for the help Trippy.

[Reg]

Did you try formatting the USB as a startup disk?  I may be leading you entirely astray here it's been years since I've done something like that.

[K9]

Not specifically, since I didn't have an available .iso of the startup disk.

AVG have a specific rescue utility which you install onto a USB, which doesn't seem to be quite the same as a true startup disk, rather I think it is just a script which renames all the relevant avg drivers to something else so your system doesn't load them. When I download the .zip or .rar I run the setup utility and it loads the files onto the USB, but when I try booting from it it gives me the 'Missing operating system_' error.

[Sheepherder]

You need to format your USB stick as a bootable drive of some sort if you expect to boot off of it.  It needs a Master Boot Record or GUID Partition Table for your BIOS to be able to read the rest of the shit on the drive.  This application should do what you want and work for any USB drive.

Also, you should set the drive you intend to boot off of as the top priority, else it may just select your primary drive/partition and continue to attempt loading your fucked up Windows install.

[Margalis]

My LCD monitor is flickering like a bad florescent light and the menu randomly comes on by itself. Shot?

[Viin]

Smack the buttons around a bit, maybe some are stuck?