Quick [tech] Questions Thread

[Salamok]

The asus zen book is pretty cool if you want something light yet powerful, problem with ultrabooks is no cd/dvd drive and no discrete graphics.  If you want something with a larger form factor or discrete graphics I usually recommend getting a Dell Studio or XPS from their outlet, unfortunately the 25% off outlet laptops coupon I had expired on 10/2.

edit - just saw your post about travelling, 1 good thing about using the Dell Outlet is the stuff is available right now so it ships almost same day and you can have it in 3 or 4 days.  The downside is that there can be the occasional lemon in the mix so if you are shopping on the go then leaving the country you may have trouble returning your purchase.  I will say that in my experience Dell has a pretty hassle free refund process, if you don't feel like troubleshooting something that you just bought just return it and ask for a refund.

[Trippy]

Hmmm...

Seems nice, but the problem is that (as per the link) it takes more than a week to ship the thing. I'm only back in the US for 3 weeks, and I'm not even going to be in the same place the whole time - in DC for a week, then on leave for 11 days in 2 locations, then back to DC.

Is it possible to buy something like that at a brick and mortar shop, or is it online only?

If I was going to get that, how good is the video card? I'm not familiar with mobile chipsets.

The 7570M is okay at that price range. You can find relatively rankings of mobile GPUs here:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html

Amazon has a variant of the configuration I linked above available (it has a different CPU). So that may be an option, though it is $100 more expensive.

If you want to buy something at a B&M store print out the ranking of mobile GPUs and see what you can find at a Best Buy, Sony Style or some place like that.

Depending on your schedule and if you are willing to splurge a bit there's this upcoming VAIO S prebuilt model from Sony. I have a customized version of that model cause I wanted an IPS display as I was tired of all the color shifting on my other laptop's crappy TN panel display (at my normal viewing distance the colors at the top and bottom are off from the center no matter what angle I have the display at). The GPU is an NVIDIA 640M LE which is better than the AMD 7570M, though it's not as good as the regular 640M. However there's a readily available firmware patch that let's you boost the clock speeds substantially that people have reported very good success with. I have another laptop that has a better GPU (an NVIDIA 560M) that I game on so I haven't tried it myself yet.

[Sky]

I wanted an IPS display as I was tired of all the color shifting on my other laptop's crappy TN panel display (at my normal viewing distance the colors at the top and bottom are off from the center no matter what angle I have the display at).

This has been driving me nuts the last couple months. I've been doing post-processing on pics of my mini paint jobs using my fiancee's laptop (a dell studio) and GIMP. Driving. Me. Nuts.

[Salamok]

Dell Outlet has a 15.6" XPS for $1400ish and their is a coupon code for 25% off, they are also running a 25% off alienware coupon code as well so you could get a screaming 14" laptop for under 1k but it would be on the heavy side.

It has been a few years but the 3 vaio's I've worked on were all a nightmare.

Base alienware 14x r2:
    Processor: Intel Core 3rd Generation i7-3610QM Processor (2.3GHz up to 3.3GHz,6MB Cache,w/ Turbo Boost 2.0)
    Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium
    Dell Outlet Alienware M14x R2 Laptop
    500 GB SATA Hard Drive (7200 RPM)
    6 GB DDR3 SDRAM 1600MHz (2 DIMMs)
    8X DVD +/- RW Drive
    2 GB DDR5 NVIDIA GeForceGT 650M using NVIDIA Optimus technology

XPS Studio 15 with nvidia 640:
    Processor: Intel Core 3rd Generation i7-3612QM Processor (6MB cache, up to 3.1 GHz)
    Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium
    XPS 15
    32GB SSDR mSATA Card
    750 GB SATA Hard Drive (7200RPM)
    8 GB DDR3 SDRAM 1600MHz (2 DIMMs)
    8X Blu-Ray BD Combo (Blu-ray ROM + DVD+/- RW)
    NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M with 2GB GDDR5 VRAM

some coupon codes:
http://slickdeals.net/f/5318032-DELL-Outlet-Coupons-3-Day-Sale-Upto-25-Off

[Trippy]

Something like this might work for you at ~$800:

Acer TimelineU M5-481TG-6814: Newegg, Amazon

A bit heavier than the Inspiron 14Z and not as nice looking but it has a better GPU (640LE). Not sure on battery life.

Here's also the list of laptops from Newegg under 5 lbs with a dedicated GPU. A lot of them don't have very good GPUs so you'll need to refer to the notebookcheck.net list to see which ones are decent at your price range.

[Azazel]

So it appears that I have a failing HDD. The good and bad news is that it is my games drive, so no irreplaceable software or anything but I really do not want to lose any of my games saves, especially for stuff like Skyrim. So I am wondering if anyone here can point me to some exceptionally cheap (or free!) hard disk recovery software. It is not really worth paying an exorbitant amount for the professionals to recover some game saves. I keep getting an I/O error and a hard drive failure warning but Hardware Manager says the device is working properly. I have pulled it from the case and have it sitting in an external dock.

WD 1TB SATA /64

Thanks!

[Chimpy]

I would try booting into something like Parted Magic and using the various disk utilities therin to copy the data off. You can either use it to mount the filesystem and copy the files or (which I think would probably be best) use disk cloning to put the entire contents onto a new disk and then see what you can recover that way if the drive is failing.

[Raging Turtle]

I cracked the screen on my macbook air today - the computer still works perfectly well, but the cracks spread if I'm not careful when handling it.  Anyone know if there's a way to get this fixed without paying $400-450 (seems to be the going rate)?  I've heard I can order the part and repair it myself, but I'm pretty sure that'd void the warranty for anything else that might happen.

[Trippy]

Repair a screen on a MacBook Air yourself?

*Ahem*

It seems like you would need to replace the entire display assembly. So the part by itself is probably pretty expensive and you won't save much money doing it yourself. However if you want to see what it takes to replace the entire display assembly ifixit.com has the answer:

http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Installing+MacBook+Air+13-Inch+Mid+2012+Display+Assembly/10951/1

[Raging Turtle]

Figured it be something like that.  Thanks for the link.

[Sheepherder]

So it appears that I have a failing HDD.

Parted Magic has ddrescue, that and a new disk is all you need.

Repair a screen on a MacBook Air yourself?

It's possible to just replace the panel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHNtnvzfSzY

Looks like the screen is about $100.  The same people quote $250-$370 to service it, depending on panel type.  That doesn't sound too bad.

[Trippy]

Uh, yeah, that video conveniently leaves out how to glue everything back together without fucking things up or making the new screen look like shit. I've taken apart my share of unibody MacBook Pros but there's no way I would attempt to unglue a panel and glue a new one back in. Replacing the entire assembly, though, definitely looks doable with enough patience and care.

[Sheepherder]

Eh, obviously it was done by someone at some point, but I take your meaning.

Also, this is why I don't do laptops.  I rage when I have to hook up front panel audio and LEDs to those retardedly tiny and tightly clustered pinouts on a standard ATX tower, I'd just utterly lose my shit servicing a laptop.

[Lantyssa]

Working on laptops sucks.  I pretty much refuse.  If the issue is pressed (bosses ), I do my best and pray to the computer gods, while telling the owners it's probably going to never be quite right again.

[Sky]

. I've taken apart my share of unibody MacBook Pros but there's no way I would attempt to unglue a panel and glue a new one back in. Replacing the entire assembly, though, definitely looks doable with enough patience and care.

Agreed, as usual. Way more expensive, but really the only way you'll get a good result.

[Strazos]

So I ended up getting the Dell...seems pretty nice so far, but haven't gotten a game pulled down on it yet. It's pretty sleek, though I wish there wasn't nearly as many odd bloatware programs installed...

[Trippy]

Make the recovery disks if the computer didn't already come with them and then go wild and uninstall as much crapware as you can.

[Chimpy]

First thing to delete is whatever McAfee/TrendMicro bullshit is on there and install Microsoft Security Essentials.

[Viin]

So I ended up getting the Dell...seems pretty nice so far, but haven't gotten a game pulled down on it yet. It's pretty sleek, though I wish there wasn't nearly as many odd bloatware programs installed...

That's how Dell/et all make their money on each laptop these days - what, you expect them to make a profit on just the hardware alone? Pffft.

[Strazos]

Make the recovery disks if the computer didn't already come with them and then go wild and uninstall as much crapware as you can.

How I do this? 

Also, I think it's odd that I have a SSD + HDD...but cannot see it in Explorer.

[Trippy]

Make the recovery disks if the computer didn't already come with them and then go wild and uninstall as much crapware as you can.

How I do this? 

Also, I think it's odd that I have a SSD + HDD...but cannot see it in Explorer.

Check the docs or the Dell specific utilities that are installed. There's usually an app that you run to create the disks. It may be buried within a non-obvious app like a "System checkup" app or the like.

The SSD you have is being used as a caching drive through Intel's Smart Response technology which is why you don't see it. (It's a special mSATA "mini" SSD, not a regular 2.5" SSD). You can if you want disable Smart Response and make that drive available as a regular drive. You could even with a lot of work possibly use it for the OS drive but I wouldn't recommend it cause it would be a really tight fit with only 32 GB available (Windows 7 will take up at least 20 GB by itself).

[Yegolev]

Does someone want to save me time and effort by recommending a method to aggressively rotate/truncate /var/log/messages on Redhat?

[Trippy]

Change what's in /etc/logrotate.conf or add a custom config to /etc/logrotate.d/

[Yegolev]

Good start, thanks.

[Salamok]

Does someone want to save me time and effort by recommending a method to aggressively rotate/truncate /var/log/messages on Redhat?

store them on their own partition, ignore everything and let partition fill up = logs truncated!

or something like they do for the apache logs:
http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2011/07/rotate-apache-logs/

or if you want to throw something in cron that occasionally does a purge.

[Lantyssa]

A chron job that does "rm -f /var/log"?

[Yegolev]

You guys are awesome.  For all the wrong reasons.

Mostly I just needed to get a starting point on how it works in Redhat: needlessly complex, it turns out, but that's linux for you.  There was some sort of rotation going on, since there was a messages.1 file, and since I identified the basic location of things I just changed the general syslog parameters to daily and rotate 90... since I was told we need to keep 90 days of information.  I also added compress, which will hopefully solve mask the problem.  Which is lots of connection messages from a syslog server.  Which I don't know anything about, either.

[Strazos]

Make the recovery disks if the computer didn't already come with them and then go wild and uninstall as much crapware as you can.

How I do this? 

Also, I think it's odd that I have a SSD + HDD...but cannot see it in Explorer.

Check the docs or the Dell specific utilities that are installed. There's usually an app that you run to create the disks. It may be buried within a non-obvious app like a "System checkup" app or the like.

The SSD you have is being used as a caching drive through Intel's Smart Response technology which is why you don't see it. (It's a special mSATA "mini" SSD, not a regular 2.5" SSD). You can if you want disable Smart Response and make that drive available as a regular drive. You could even with a lot of work possibly use it for the OS drive but I wouldn't recommend it cause it would be a really tight fit with only 32 GB available (Windows 7 will take up at least 20 GB by itself).

Trippy - TO THE RESCUE! 

[Lantyssa]

Mostly I just needed to get a starting point on how it works in Redhat: needlessly complex, it turns out, but that's linux for you.  There was some sort of rotation going on, since there was a messages.1 file, and since I identified the basic location of things I just changed the general syslog parameters to daily and rotate 90... since I was told we need to keep 90 days of information.  I also added compress, which will hopefully solve mask the problem.  Which is lots of connection messages from a syslog server.  Which I don't know anything about, either.

Syslogs generate a TON of useless data.  One of our clients requires we collect every bit of data imaginable.  (For a company our size, that much is just useless.)  It generated several gigs of log data a month.  In a database.  And we have to keep 13 months of it at all times.

Thankfully I found a way to extract all that and compress the hell out of it, but it wasn't pleasant with the tools I'm given.

[Yegolev]

The best part is that the messages log is filling with TCP/UDP connection lines to the syslog server.

[Morat20]

The weirdest thing is happening with my PC -- (Windows 7). The volume control on flash videos is...gone. It's just not there. No problems with sound anywhere else, but Youtube? 95% of the time on IE9 I'm just missing the volume control on the videos! (And obviously no sound).

Chrome's fine. But not IE9. And I can't figure out why.

[Chimpy]

Uninstall Flash, then download the package again from within IE (so you definitely get the ActiveX version) and reinstall.

Or you don't actually HAVE Flash and Youtube is giving you the HTML5 versions and IE is borking it (Chrome has Flash built in).

[Lantyssa]

The best part is that the messages log is filling with TCP/UDP connection lines to the syslog server.

At least it's not writing a log for each time it writes a log.  That you've found.

[lamaros]

Can anyone recommend me a decent and free video compression thingo?

[Trippy]

What are you trying to compress to what?