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Author Topic: Quick [tech] Questions Thread  (Read 1186215 times)
Merusk
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Reply #3990 on: April 21, 2017, 06:49:09 PM

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/feature/software/how-edit-pdf-for-free-3653069/

I've tried PDFpro and PDFx-change at cheap companies before and they both had problems. Still, free is free.

The comment in that page seems doable, though. I just tried it and wasn't able to insert pages but could edit a text/ vector PDF:

Quote
For me, this also worked well:

1. Upload pdf in google drive.

2. Right click the pdf in google drive & open with google docs.(This will create another copy of the pdf in google-doc format)

3. Edit the file in google docs & then download as pdf

If you need to do anything like marking-up those PDFs you can not beat Bluebeam. It's fucking amazing. Sure, it was designed for the AEC industry but it's so easy to use and has a ton of features. Price is probably steeper than you'd like at $350, but the maintenance is cheaper than Adobe at $99 per year.

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Reply #3991 on: April 21, 2017, 08:36:16 PM

The last couple of posts remind me that I need to put in my $9 yearly "Home Use Program" order in at the U for Creative Cloud.  Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?

'Reality' is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.
Hawkbit
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Reply #3992 on: May 03, 2017, 02:17:06 PM

Any recommendations for non-Adobe photo editing tools? I dislike their pricing schemes and wonder if other options like Affinity are almost as good.

Forgot to qualify: I'm not a pro, I am starting to get back into hobby photography and need a way to manage and minor edit.
« Last Edit: May 03, 2017, 02:20:01 PM by Hawkbit »
Sky
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Reply #3993 on: May 03, 2017, 03:38:32 PM

The last couple of posts remind me that I need to put in my $9 yearly "Home Use Program" order in at the U for Creative Cloud.  Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?
hate you so much
Morat20
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Reply #3994 on: May 06, 2017, 11:42:31 AM

So quick question: I've got u-verse, and I can't really move the wireless router from it's current position. I've got a fairly small house (under 1500 sq ft) but there's a lot of dead spots, mostly because the router is at one corner of the house -- so two of the other corners get shit signal strength.

So I'm looking at repeaters and found those, some things called mesh extenders, etc. No idea what I really need here, never had to bother with it.

Basically looking for a solution that'll play well with U-verse so I don't have to figure out whatever dumb-ass system they have and increase signal strength to the back half of the house without, well, much effort on my part.

As close to plug and play as possible is ideal. I just want to plug them into a wall in one or two places and get more even signal strength, and not spend six hours cussing out U-verse and dealing with technical support and digging through forums trying to find answers on obscure settings.
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Reply #3995 on: May 06, 2017, 11:42:27 PM

The mesh shit is pricey but i believe the best one is still the Netgear Orbi.
apocrypha
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Reply #3996 on: May 07, 2017, 03:37:48 AM

Standard wifi repeaters create a new wifi network for each repeater and you just connect to whichever one in the room you're in has the best signal. For instance in my house our main wifi network is called Nebulous and we have two extenders that create Nebulous_EXT1 and Nebulous_EXT2, which both connect to the same network but are actually separate wifi networks.

A mesh system extends the same network throughout it's coverage, so we'd just have Nebulous everywhere in the house. Mesh is still very expensive since it's really aimed at businesses, but it's getting cheaper all the time.

If you can cope with separate networks then the standard extenders work fine and are a lot cheaper, and most devices these days are smart enough to just automatically connect to the best signal. I'd love to have mesh because some things have to be manually told which network to connect to when you move from room to room which is a pain, but it's not cheap enough for me yet.

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SurfD
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Reply #3997 on: May 07, 2017, 07:13:45 AM

Question for all you networking types out there:

I am trying to track down an issue that is driving me up the wall with my home network setup.

I rent from someone who lets me use their home internet system.  My current setup is basically my PC and other devices hook into my Netgear router, which then hooks into their home router (unsure of model, but I can prob get the info pretty easy), which has the direct Network feed.
My issue is that for some reason I have been unable to isolate, I am getting annoying connection issues with what may be DNS lookups or something similar.  For example, when I load a website, there is about a 50% chance that half the images on the page simply do not load at all, or that the page itself just fails to load.  I can re-fresh the page a few times and suddenly everything loads fine.

As far as i can tell all my drivers and firmware are 100% up to date on my end, so I am wondering if there is just some kind of bad handshaking going on between my router and theirs.

If anyone has any suggestions as to things i could try, that would be great.

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Chimpy
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Reply #3998 on: May 07, 2017, 09:18:18 AM

Double-NAT is always a recipe for weird shit to happen. Is there any way you can test without your router in the mix?


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Morat20
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Reply #3999 on: May 07, 2017, 09:28:10 AM

Thanks. I think mesh is what I want then -- I'd prefer not to have one network piggybacking off another, as the "Why can't I connect to X" followed by futzing with ports is already annoying enough. (Although, thankfully, a lot less common than it used to be). Doing it through two routers seems nightmarish.
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Reply #4000 on: May 07, 2017, 10:57:25 AM

Question for all you networking types out there:

I am trying to track down an issue that is driving me up the wall with my home network setup.

I rent from someone who lets me use their home internet system.  My current setup is basically my PC and other devices hook into my Netgear router, which then hooks into their home router (unsure of model, but I can prob get the info pretty easy), which has the direct Network feed.
My issue is that for some reason I have been unable to isolate, I am getting annoying connection issues with what may be DNS lookups or something similar.  For example, when I load a website, there is about a 50% chance that half the images on the page simply do not load at all, or that the page itself just fails to load.  I can re-fresh the page a few times and suddenly everything loads fine.

As far as i can tell all my drivers and firmware are 100% up to date on my end, so I am wondering if there is just some kind of bad handshaking going on between my router and theirs.

If anyone has any suggestions as to things i could try, that would be great.
Enable the network debug panel in your browser (e.g. Network tab in Developer Tools in Chrome) and watch what happens when you visit/reload a page. If you see "stalls" on individual URLs do an nslookup using a shell on that host name to see if there's a delay in DNS lookup.
Sky
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Reply #4001 on: May 08, 2017, 09:51:30 AM

I am trying to track down an issue that is driving me up the wall with my home network setup.

I rent from someone who lets me use their home internet system...I am wondering if there is just some kind of bad handshaking going on between my router and theirs.
Any way you can wire into their modem directly and run a parallel router and cut out the issues trying to run a serial setup?
MahrinSkel
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Reply #4002 on: May 08, 2017, 01:11:02 PM

I am trying to track down an issue that is driving me up the wall with my home network setup.

I rent from someone who lets me use their home internet system...I am wondering if there is just some kind of bad handshaking going on between my router and theirs.
Any way you can wire into their modem directly and run a parallel router and cut out the issues trying to run a serial setup?
Should be possible to set up the router as just an AP, without the double NAT, still have your own wifi SSID but use the house system for NAT/DHCP/DNS. That's how mine is set up here.

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Trippy
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Reply #4003 on: May 08, 2017, 03:13:50 PM

Yeah you can set your router to "bridge" mode.

However double-NATing / adding an extra router in the chain will not by itself cause connection "hangs". Most people probably don't realize that today's wireless cable "modems" are actually routers and not strictly modems, so if you hook up your own router to one you are already double-NATing unless you explicitly set one of the routers to bridge mode.
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Reply #4004 on: May 09, 2017, 12:15:50 PM

Assuming that Uverse is Uverse, since I can't even see the wireless network that my receivers use, and you have to do that "press button and run to the other room without dying" thing, I'm terribly suspicious that I can't use an off-the-shelf extender.

I await the full story.

Why am I homeless?  Why do all you motherfuckers need homes is the real question.
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Trippy
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Reply #4005 on: May 09, 2017, 12:19:14 PM

You can get a utility to detect "hidden" SSIDs if you really want to know what your receivers are connecting to.
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Reply #4006 on: May 09, 2017, 01:24:56 PM

They are connecting to a wifi endpoint that connects to the gateway via ethernet, but the mystery is if I can extend that wifi using off-the-shelf equipment.

Actually that was only a question since I read Morat's post.  The wifi works well enough, especially compared to coax.

Why am I homeless?  Why do all you motherfuckers need homes is the real question.
They called it The Prayer, its answer was law
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Morat20
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Reply #4007 on: May 12, 2017, 09:59:27 PM

Well, my wife's laptop has shit itself in the most godawful way.

To sum up:

1. I foolishly attempted a Windows update. It...did not work. (Got stuck downloading updates). Rebooted. Couldn't even START downloading updates.
2. Attempted to reset the windows update service, per the MSN "Our Windows Update Shit fucks up all the time and gets stuck".
3. Explorer crashes right after I restart the services.
4. On reboot, everything normal -- log into profile -- black screen with cursor. FUCK.
5. Fail to get into safe mode.
6. Get into OS recovery, attempt to reset OS.
7. Hangs at 3% for hours.
8. Gets rebooted. Now can't get into OS recovery (bootinit.exe exception).
9. Boots back to main. Starts scanning/repairing HD. Stuck at 63%. FUCK.

I'm about 95% sure the hard drive is fucked. Nothing else should be able to fuck up the OS recovery shit. A lovely growing hard drive failure, however, could.

Under warranty, but fuckit...so much data lost.
Torinak
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Reply #4008 on: May 12, 2017, 10:14:09 PM

My partner had a laptop hard drive fail with similar symptoms. It turned out that only a small number of sectors were bad, but they were in the critical places for the Windows 10 kernel and bootstrap loading files. It looked like Windows thought the corrupted files were the "right" ones so it'd helpfully clobber whatever we replaced the usable ones with (manually or through Windows Update) and re-corrupt the drive until it wouldn't boot at all. We moved the drive to another computer and were able to get 99%+ of the data off of it. So, all may not be lost.

You may have to buy a (cheap) drive chassis depending on the connection used by the laptop's drive and what you have available on other systems. We were fortunate in that we had a spare SATA to USB cable that worked just fine for data and power.
Morat20
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Reply #4009 on: May 12, 2017, 10:22:55 PM

My partner had a laptop hard drive fail with similar symptoms. It turned out that only a small number of sectors were bad, but they were in the critical places for the Windows 10 kernel and bootstrap loading files. It looked like Windows thought the corrupted files were the "right" ones so it'd helpfully clobber whatever we replaced the usable ones with (manually or through Windows Update) and re-corrupt the drive until it wouldn't boot at all. We moved the drive to another computer and were able to get 99%+ of the data off of it. So, all may not be lost.

You may have to buy a (cheap) drive chassis depending on the connection used by the laptop's drive and what you have available on other systems. We were fortunate in that we had a spare SATA to USB cable that worked just fine for data and power.
I have one of those, but I'm honestly not sure how the hell to get the drive out of this thing. It's a pretty new laptop. I couldn't even locate the battery. (Admittedly, I just turned it over and said "Where's the battery" and then said "Fuck it, it doesn't matter" and went about my day".

As it's under warranty, it's pretty much shipping it to them for a new one and writing off the data. There isn't much, thankfully --  she's had it less than a year and hasn't really done much with it.

If it's still stuck at 63% in the morning, I'll use the boot menu's diagnostics to check the drive. It's a three hour process for what I thought was a low-likelihood event. Now I'm thinking....pretty likely.
« Last Edit: May 12, 2017, 10:25:15 PM by Morat20 »
Chimpy
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Reply #4010 on: May 12, 2017, 10:32:37 PM

leave it plugged in, let it run that shit until it finishes.

My mom's computer spent like 9 hours running the chkdsk verification/auto-repair shit during a set of updates on windows 10 and now it works fine.

'Reality' is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.
Morat20
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Reply #4011 on: May 12, 2017, 10:40:49 PM

leave it plugged in, let it run that shit until it finishes.

My mom's computer spent like 9 hours running the chkdsk verification/auto-repair shit during a set of updates on windows 10 and now it works fine.
Yeah, it finally powered through that and is now offering me options. I'm mulling between rolling back to a restore point or resetting the OS.

Edited to add: Dell is a fucking dick. They've got their own damn OS restore shit in there that makes finding safe mode a nightmare of random guessing. And I can't get far enough into the login cycle to tell it to reboot into safe mode.

Minor success. After way too many hours, I managed to convince it to boot to safe mode. Managed to log into a profile (lots of messages about how a system restore didn't complete. Yes, I know). Managed to get chkdsk to freaking run. Restarted computer, now running chkdsk. When it finishes that mess, I'll just have to figure out where the log files are....

Going to bed. I suspect chkdsk will be running awhile.
« Last Edit: May 12, 2017, 11:39:58 PM by Morat20 »
Morat20
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Reply #4012 on: May 13, 2017, 05:01:01 PM

Success. No bad sectors, just a ridiculous propagating corruption caused by Windows update. Corrupted something important looking. Managed to get it repaired enough to reset the OS entirely.
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Reply #4013 on: May 14, 2017, 07:05:05 PM

Windows Updates take either 10 seconds or 18 hours.

It's fun.

Dell's in particular are a hot fucking mess. My Surface Book is pretty flawless and fast with updates though.
Morat20
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Reply #4014 on: May 19, 2017, 03:57:12 PM

Windows Updates take either 10 seconds or 18 hours.

It's fun.

Dell's in particular are a hot fucking mess. My Surface Book is pretty flawless and fast with updates though.
I spend most of my time with Dells unfucking them. Like...right out of the box it's "Remove all this shit".

Also, McAfee is fucking malware, not a virus scanner.
Sky
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Reply #4015 on: May 20, 2017, 07:37:39 PM

Just in case you guys haven't come across it yet, don't buy Office pre-installed on a Dell. I don't but in a thread on the topic of MS's awful new authentication for retail keys, a ton of people are complaining about basically all keys on Dells being pirated. Assumed that it's the Chinese stealing them before they hit the water.
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Reply #4016 on: May 21, 2017, 12:21:09 PM

Honestly, if someone asks me about Office for their home PC these days I just recommend that if they want the genuine MS deal and don't want to deal with LibreOffice's differences they should just get a personal Office365 sub.

Of course, most of the people I give PC advice to these days get it through the Home Use program through their employer's VLA so it doesn't come up often.

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Reply #4017 on: May 23, 2017, 12:19:17 AM

Inspiration for what to say to people with PC problems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow0lr63y4Mw

Why am I homeless?  Why do all you motherfuckers need homes is the real question.
They called it The Prayer, its answer was law
Mommy come back 'cause the water's all gone
Strazos
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Reply #4018 on: June 14, 2017, 10:16:56 AM

Here's an odd one - if a PC has been totally unhooked for about a year, sitting in its box, should I be expecting any issues when I go to boot it back up?

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Merusk
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Reply #4019 on: June 14, 2017, 11:00:56 AM

It's possible the battery on the bios may have died. Other than that, nothing I can think of.

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Strazos
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Reply #4020 on: June 14, 2017, 11:05:53 AM

Is that thing "just" a battery, and hence easily replaceable?

Fear the Backstab!
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"Hell is other people." -Sartre
Merusk
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Reply #4021 on: June 14, 2017, 11:25:54 AM

It may depend on the motherboard, but pretty much, yes.  Oh and it's CMOS not Bios.. it *was* Bios a long time ago but these days it's just the clock so you shouldn't have problems like, "Computer has no BIOS, can't boot-up."

The past cannot be changed. The future is yet within your power.
Draegan
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Reply #4022 on: August 09, 2017, 07:03:50 AM

Is replacing a screen on a Asus rog laptop as easy as it looks?

Strazos
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Reply #4023 on: August 25, 2017, 09:32:09 AM

Since I've been out for a while, has anything really changed regarding ethernet cables? I'm having gigabit internet set up in my place, but unfortunately the modem is on the other side of the room from where my PC will be, so I'll need to run may 30ft of cable around the edge of the room over to my PC.

Is there any specific type of cabling I should be looking at, or is grabbing something from Amazon sufficient?

Fear the Backstab!
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"Hell is other people." -Sartre
Chimpy
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Reply #4024 on: August 25, 2017, 01:11:45 PM

Cat5e is fine for gigabit. You can go cat6 if you want but there is really no reason, esp in the >100ft distances you are talking about.

'Reality' is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.
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