A thread for boring computer questions.

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?

everything except netflix i think

wait, you only want to *block* netflix outside the allowed hours, or you only want to *allow* netflix outside the allowed hours?

i only want to allow netflix outside the allowed hours

i'm playing around with the focus me trial and it's pretty close. you can force a total lockdown so the unlock point is moot and it works in incognito. but it's still on a scheduler and you can rearrange the controls whenever you're unlocked. cold turkey let's you lock shit down for 30 days at a time but i doubt i'll be able to do that with anything else.

My desktop computer only has one hard drive, and when I run Adobe Premiere the performance is awful. Lots of crashing, tons of lag... Obviously some of this is just because Adobe sucks, but I think my setup is also not ideal. I think maybe I should not have my media stored on my C drive, but I'm not sure what sort of secondary drive I should be using. Should it be a RAID drive or an SSD drive, or would simply using an external hard drive suffice? Should I upgrade my graphics card? I have the ATI Radeon 5450 HD that came with my computer. I have 8 GB of memory so I don't think that's the issue.

I am living in rural Mexico for several months. My computer support is limited to my spouse, who is a systems engineering type who has no aptitude for help desk type support (his support is limited to "just buy a Mac" and/or "just use Linux").

My PC (an HP probook that I like just fine) is my lifeline to 1) grad school coursework and 2) everything else outside of rural Mexico. It came with Windows 7 and Office 2010.

The thing has some sort of "HP Support Assistant" that periodically seems to run some sort of updates, although I can't ever tell if everything is really up to date or not.

My boring computer question: do I need to get a copy of McAfee or some other anti-virus software thingie? Anything else I need to do to keep this machine trouble-free? I am backing up docs with Dropbox, but is there other stuff I should be doing to avoid problemos?

1) skip ahead to "Let's talk about your anti-virus solution" on http://www.metafilter.com/user/77879. follow the instructions there, i.e. uninstall any norton/mcafee-type antivirus stuff you've got, and install MSE.

2) bookmark that page, you will need it one day, unless you...

3) buy a mac

i don't know if windows has something like time machine, but you could (should imo!) also make a full backup of your hard drive once a week. by an external drive the same size as your hd. use something like "driveimage xml" (maybe there are better options, i last used windows before 9/11, but http://lifehacker.com/5839753/the-best-disk-cloning-app-for-windows says it's the best).

also never used it, but max iirc recommends http://www.crashplan.com/.

but if your internet isn't the best down there then your #1 priority should be an external drive

(or two)

Oh hey looks like MSE is already on here! I still need to implement a hard-core back-up plan, though. It would help if I had a clue about (or patience for) computer shite. But thanks much for links, that will help me get started!

Anyone else having youtube issues lately? I've had them all week, on multiple devices connected to different internets

Basically the videos just stop at random points, clicking on the timeline bar a bit further ahead resumes. Happens very often though.

Can't find anything on the web other than 'clear your cache' which I've done multiple times and hasn't changed anything

i've tried both Chrome and IE btw

guess its just me.

yt now defaulting to 144p lol i didn't even know that existed!

I've had that happen in the last few days as well. Start playing a 20 min or longer video, and it suddenly stops halfway through as though it's only 10 mins long. Refresh the page, click on the timeline to get back to where it stopped, and Youtube will only play another 5 mins or so. Rinse/repeat. Also for a couple of days it defaulted to 144p, but so far today it's been fine. (Win 8, Chrome - haven't tried any other browsers on this PC)

got so bad that I'm now referring to using a proxy site to view any youtube vids. It's not bad, apart from losing a lot of YT functionality like playlists and signing in, but meh as long as I can watch a damn video without it stopping.

No problems here, apart from this odd thing that's been happening in the last couple of days where a video will play for about a minute, skip over a couple of seconds, and then continue playing like nothing happened.

I checked some forums and I'm definitely not alone, I wonder if its anything to do with location or isp.

I don't know where else to ask this, so it goes here: In what format should I be saving images (photos, stuff from the web)? I guess not JPEG, right? BMP?

Especially wondering about things I want to print in photo quality.

Could you clarify your use-cases?

They're mostly iPhone pics since my digital camera broke and I haven't replaced it. I'd be doing some light photoshop and printing them either at a lab or on my quite decent photo printer. (Is that what you meant?)

jpg, as high quality as you can stand.

if you're really concerned about quality tiff w/ lzw compression, but if you're dealing with the web, jpg over bmp, png etc

OK, thank you. Somewhere along my life's journey, I got the idea that jpg was bad? I don't know why, though. May I ask why jpg or tiff are preferable?

jpg is lossy compression format while tiff LZW compression is lossless. you will gain nothing from saving a jpg as a tiff. however if for some reason you are going to be opening, editing and resaving an image over and over again then save it as a tiff or psd, a jpg will re-compres with each save which will add up to a loss of quality. (theoretically, with a high quality jpg setting you could resave it many, many times before you would ever notice a difference.)

thread i have need of you! ty for the bump, i had completely forgotten

does anyone know how much it would cost to replace a laptop's casing? specifically the top half? the screen itself is totally fine, the plastic is just fucked and cracked and possibly has something stuck in it.

I don't know if "fixing laptops" is a thing that happens in America

xp Depends on manufacturer, model, and age. In the past I've sourced and installed laptop components for people, including the top half (assume you mean the bit that covers the back of the screen when the lid is shut).

is it a bad thing if my cheapo $10 charger looks like it's slowly bursting open at the seams