A thread for boring computer questions.

Get a cheap external keyboard?

I spilled some beer on my laptop a couple of months ago and bunch of keys stopped working. I ended up having to replace the keyboard. It was pretty easy to do though.

What kind of external hard drive do you guys recommend for a Macbook Pro? I'll mainly be using it to hold my music collection to run it through iTunes, as well as for some backup. Here's the story, I've been using a couple Western Digital drives for backup of photos and personal documents, but neither really have the kind of expansion space for my growing music collection. Anyway, my wife bought me a 3TB Seagate GoFlex drive which is supposedly totally Mac compatible. I hooked it up and had no problem consolidating my 450+ GB collection to it, but it is constantly freezing my Finder and/or iTunes even when in use. It appears to be still spinning, but just locking things up and forcing me to do a hard reset. Anyway, much research leads me to see that this is a really, really common problem with these new USB 3.0 drives since Mac doesn't support 3.0 - something about them just not working well together. I also saw that you can buy an adapter base with Firewire 800 that might (key word there) alleviate this issue and give me more stable connection. Problem is, I've called about 7 stores and no one has these and they are even on backorder direct from Seagate. I don't really want to wait to see if this MIGHT fix my problem and miss out on my return window for the drive.

I think I've answered my own question here, but am I better off just returning this and starting over?

What kind of drive would you recommend for my use/setup? I appreciate you smart peoples' advice.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003HIXOOQ/ref=oh_o02_s00_i00_details
what I got

Thats a little more than I hoped to spend, but not significantly so. Especially with all those positive reviews.

some wifi routers let you attach hard drives to them to make net drives, which should be good enough for streaming music, occasional backup -- i dunno if the usb3.0 issue would affect it as much?

halp.

mac laptop. no sound from speakers. can hear sound & adjust volume while headphones are plugged in, but internal speakers not working. sound preferences not displaying internal speakers, only 'digital out.' haaalp.

mac hides some audio prefs in the audio MIDI Setup

Check the audio-out minijack. Can you see a red light shining inside? There's a little switch in there that controls optical audio out, and it sometimes gets stuck in the on position. While it's active, your internal speakers get cut off. Carefully plugging-in and unplugging your headphones will usually get the switch unstuck, but sometimes you'll have to poke it with a toothpick.

i will check that out & will report back, thx!

the red light is on inside the port, but plugging / unplugging headphones hasn't worked. i'm poked in there with a toothpick, paperclip but I can't seem to catch whatever switch is on in there. dangit.

On mine, the switch is rectangular and near the top opening of the jack. If fiddling with it doesn't work, I hope Apple will fix it for you. Seems like a common enough problem.

so i bought a cheapo $10 replacement charger for my laptop. it overheats (which isn't a huge problem but it gets hotter than my last charger, which is an accomplishment) and whenever the computer's charging the cursor starts to lag like crazy. sometimes it's completely unusable. am i just gonna have to deal with it? i'm assuming i just have to deal with it.

throw your laptop away

not what i was expecting but ok

just spitballing here tbh

i tried setting the computer on fire now i'm on fire

friend of mine bought a cheapo charger which got really hot but seemed to do the job, then after about six months it went out in style, catching fire and blowing the fuse. good 2 c that u've accelerated the process.

Cheapo chargers can be seriously bad news. If it's making your computer fritz it will be putting out noisy power. Eye-opening: http://www.arcfn.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-apple-is.html?m=1

well balls. i guess i'll just go back to my broken charger for now.

OK, this one is pretty boring:
What are good numbers for print resolution for a photo printer? What about scanning resolution?

I'm looking at one that says

Print resolution: Black (best quality): Up to 600 dpi; Color (best quality): Up to 4800 x 1200 optimized dpi from 1200 dpi input data (when printing from a computer on photo paper)

Scan resolution: Hardware: Up to 1200 x 2400 dpi; Optical: Up to 1200 dpi

Is this any good?

Last time I shopped for a printer was 2001, so I no longer know what I'm looking for. Thanks.

That's fine, I'm pretty sure.

Though I should add my usual disclaimer that I add when I give advice about printers, which is that printers are terrible and impossible and my relationship with them is, at best, a truce.

I think most of the talk of resolution is irrelevant when it's the actual quality of the machine. Like If I was looking at two machines and one had some crazy optimized dpi listed but the other didn't, but the other was more expensive, I'd go with the other.

And personally I'm not a big fan of "all-in-ones" thought I know they can be decent. My girlfriend uses an HP I got for free when I bought my Mac Pro in 2008 and with the right paper, inkjet photo prints are surprisingly passable and the scanner is fine for documents or whatever, but she'll still use her old HP b/w laser printer for all text stuff.

My only advice for inkjet printers is that Epson generally reigns supreme. Same with scanners. And I was given advice from somebody who once worked at HP that their laser printers are not what they used to be. I bought a cheap-o Brother laser printer that I was happy with though it seems to print little dots on the side now.

Thanks. Food for thought.

Though I should add my usual disclaimer that I add when I give advice about printers, which is that printers are terrible and impossible and my relationship with them is, at best, a truce.

Ditto. Why must it be so?

they have gears, is probably the reason

Let's invent a printer w/ no moving parts. I just did my part, now you do yours and we'll make lots of money.

Printing is always a pain. This is what I use:

http://vandercookpress.info/images/219OS.jpg

Trying to install Office 2007 (what we're supposed to use at work - lol out-of-date) while still keeping Excel 2003 (my preference* - lol prehistoric) installed, going mad in the process. Found some instructions online which said "on the 2007 installer option screen tick 'keep previous versions installed', but they won't necessarily play nice", except my 2007 installer doesn't even show me an option screen.

* I need to write Excel macros for my job and do not trust Excel 2007 not to shit up my ability to do that - mostly just my Luddite inability to learn how to work the ribbon, but I have had some genuine other issues w/macros in 2007 too

I don't know if I'm asking for advice or just venting. Mainly venting.

This'd be one where I would say "where are your IT department and why arent they doing this?"

It is basically impossible right now for our IT dept to do anything even slightly complicated. They have some good staff - also some not good staff - but not enough of them, so everyone is frantically overworked, takes weeks to reply to tickets and won't read any instructions more than a line long before doing anything.

So they can install 2007 (in fact they will say "we put a script so you can install 2007 for yourself on the shared drive, you should just have run that already and not bothered us, ticket closed") but the chances of getting a working copy of Excel 2003 on at the same time without weeks of back-and-forth are about 0, I reckon. Especially since ideally I'd like Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 and that appears to be non-trivial. And since I still have admin rights...

Also I'm doing this on my home laptop right now, but yes, it's a test run to let me do work stuff and if I find a way I'll do it at work too.

Now that I no longer work for a company where file server backups are the IT department's problem and not mine, I need to find a reliable way to backup my laptop should it decide to shit the bed.

I guess I need some of external device (any recommendations?) and am also wondering if I can do some kind of automated cloud-based backup sort of thingie. Any recommendations for something like that?

So, basically, my boring computer question is how does a non-techie best shot backups. Cheap and easy is U&K.

mac or pc?

pc

1. get a mac
2. Time Machine

sry I actually have no idea how to get a good backup regime going on Windows.

the general principle, though, is that you don't really have any file you don't have at least two backups of, one of which should be offsite. So the ideal situation is you have an incremental backup system backing up continuously or hourly or nightly to a local external disk, then you rotate that disk out with one you leave at work or safe-deposit box or some other hidey-hole once a week.

cloud-based backup is supplemental to this. (NB I still don't actually do this, need to order a box of hard drives)

quincie, how big are the files you want to backup? if it's just like important word docs and excel stuff etc just use dropbox

silby I thought they gave you keys to S3 when you signed the contract

I might be allowed to get a free personal account for "educational purposes", haven't looked into it

For my (pretty simple) backup-to-external-drive regime on Windows, I find Microsoft's SyncToy does a decent job. We also use it small-scale at work with no trouble.

Hmm OK what should I being looking for in purchasing an external drive? And as far as cloud-based stuff goes, what I'd really like is just to have some sort of icon thingie on my desktop that I can drag files into (dayo, this wouldn't be anything particularly special, just Word and excel docs and the like). But then I wonder about backing up program files: like, what if my Endnote fucks up and then I can't use it and it's six billion references that I've carefully curated?

Sorry if this is uber dumb. My techie husband's assistance was identical to silby's 1) get a mac.

Hmm can I back up to his Mac instead of buying an external drive, or is that madness?

Hmmm OK I just installed dropbox and dragged a file in there to test it out. But now that file isn't showing up in the original location? I thought that if I dragged it over it just made a copy in dropbox and I could, say, work on the file in the original location and some sort of magic would happen whereby any changes would synch up with the file in dropbox? What am I not getting here.

No, you put the file in dropbox and it magically appears on dropbox.com and on any other computers using the same dropbox account. You can copy it in there if you like, but you have to work on the copy in the dropbox folder or the changes won't get saved.

I've just started using Dropbox properly, I love it!

It blows my mind that I can work on a piece of music at night, listen to mixes on my phone on the tube in the morning, do some edits over breakfast on my work computer then return home and carry on working without having to do any file admin whatsoever.

I highly rate SugarSycnc. I sync my documents folder using their 5gb free service and it works beautifully.

On the subject of external hard drives, does anyone have any brand recommendations or is it all much of a muchness? I have a couple of Buffalo drives that are still going strong. Looking for 1TB ideally.

I've stood by Western Digital.

i was going to make a thread for this but maybe someone here can help me out

i'm looking for a good program like cold turkey/freedom/leechblock but nothing quite fits my criteria. my goal is to force a very small window of allotted internet time per day every day.

my dream program:
1. works outside of a specific browser to limit all internet, including incognito and impossible to override without having special computer knowledge (cold turkey does)
2. doesn't require adding every single specific site you want blocked (cold turkey doesn't)
3. can be set up with a daily schedule (focus me can)
4. doesn't rely on specific time settings, can simply provide a certain amount of time online at whatever times throughout the day (browsecontrol does)
5. is not an expensive corporate tool used to control employees' computers and probably easy to manipulate (browsecontrol is)

focus me (nee distraction blocker) is the closest one i can find but it only allows access on a schedule and i'm not sure if it restricts in incognito or not. also it's easy to override... who thinks typing 100 characters is a hassle?

does anyone use anything like this? i tried leechblock in college and it worked on me for about an hour. i was seriously going to ditch my computer completely but i can't be without netflix and ableton and maybe occasionally email.

outside of the small window, do you want any internet at all?