A thread for boring computer questions.

I recently did this too. it was very vague in telling you what was about to happen, like it would just clean up things, not delete ALL your add-ones. I was v annoyed.

with me it did keep my bookmarks. I also found a directory on my desktop with all the old data backed up in it (but only the day after) so look for that. it's called something like Firefox Saved Data.

add-ons. stupid phone.

did anything work?

Lee, thank you. For some reason FF couldn't find my bookmark backup files but they were there, just had to transfer the stuff manually per your instructions. Very grateful for your help!

Does anyone know exactly what's saved in Firefox's "prefs.js" file? That's the other one I know of that stores personal settings of some sort, along with sessionstore.js and bookmarks.html. Is there a specific plug-ins or add-ons file that stores all of your customizations?

And, what are the equivalent files in Chrome? (which I'd love to move to once I learn the deep technical aspects)

also good to read you're back up and running, you're more than welcome for any help i could be.....

So ive been getting warnings about my primary battery being low, reading up the web seemed p fuckin unclear as to whether this was cmos or the actual unplug-and-use battery, but now the damned thing cant find an OS or hard drive upon startup

Please, someone, tell me its the (quick, cheap, easy fix) cmos battery thats likely here

Isn't the main warning about the CMOS that the date/time is wrong? :/

Check your BIOS date/time if you can?

I got as far as a chkdsk that returned no errors but still wont startup.

I'll change the cmos tomorrow (yeah it controls the time but also has something to do with routing through BIOS iirc?) so hopefully it'll right it.....

Yeah the CMOS isn't only responsible for the date/time but the first warning of a dying CMOS is the time being off. Good luck!

I just got Windows 7 at work and it's got a really annoying, disruptive quirk where it often won't let me change a file name, save/replace, or delete b/c "the file is in use by Windows Explorer" or "another program is using the file," which is NOT CORRECT. Or I try to delete or cut/paste a file and it says the file no longer exists, but the icon won't leave the folder and I can't replace it.

Our IT guy doesn't know what to do about it. Googling says it's a problem w/ thumbnails and you have to edit the registry to fix it, which I don't feel comfortable with.

Is everyone having this problem? Is there not something I can do short of registry edit? Am I alone in this?

Sometimes going into Program Manager (through ctrl-alt-del), then searching through Processes and Services for some remnant of the "in-use" programs, then zapping it with the "end process" button works. Alphabetizing by clicking on "description" helps narrow down which process is a part of the 'in-use' software, by name of the app or name of the software developer/company.

xp in Explorer, go to Organize | Layout and uncheck Details Pane and Preview Pane

I just got Windows 7 at work and it's got a really annoying, disruptive quirk where it often won't let me change a file name, save/replace, or delete b/c "the file is in use by Windows Explorer" or "another program is using the file."

I get this quite often - usually with files downloaded from dodgy places - and I've found no better solution than to close windows explorer via task manager, delete the file manually in a command prompt and then restart explorer. This is not ideal! I haven't seen it with files I've created myself though.

the Detalis/Preview pane thing works often but not always but often

Thanks everyone. I was wondering if the preview pane might be a culprit - goddamnit I was really enjoying the preview pane.

This problem is such bullshit! It seems like it should never have made it to market, much less persisted for years.

Another BCQ if you can stand it: what's the deal w/ Google Drive & Windows 7? After getting 7 I realized that some of my work wasn't syncing which led me to find Drive in two locations with vastly different contents: Documents/Google Drive and Computer/Users/jesse/Google Drive.

I assume this has to do w/ Documents being a library, and the solution is just use the "Users" one, but I want to understand where it all went wrong.

bought a hp laptop the other week with windows 8 on it. for a bunch of crappy reasons i need to put xp on it - is this just a case of downloading a torrent, sticking it on a disco and installing it? (i have a cpl of legit copies somewhere but god knows where they are so i have to resort to tpb)

are there likely to be any problems with it being a fairly modern laptop (2012) running xp? and if it all screws up can i easily reinstall windows 8? i'm only using it for one program only and won't be going online with it or anything so the no-more-security updates thing won't be an issue.

No, it won't be that easy. I'm on an HP desktop running Windows 8, and I was not able to get Windows 7 running on it. The drivers are not available, and the motherboard is locked down making changing OS more interesting than it should be. HP's support site is a nightmare of angry customers trying to help other angry customers with no help from the company.

Classic Shell solved my objections to Win8, and I moved on. Maybe you could run XP in some sort of virtual environment if you have to, and maybe I am dead wrong about everything else.

Wait the motherboard is locked down? How??

tbh Windows 8 is pretty wonderful if you like spend a couple hours figuring it out

Wait the motherboard is locked down? How??

Secure Boot. Maybe locked down is too strong of a term, but getting this HP to boot from a disk required way more research and bios work than any pc I've ever worked on. Ultimately, it was the complete unavailability of non Win8 HP drivers for this HP specific motherboard that led me to reinstall Windows 8 (now 8.1). Make and save a recovery disk set.

Some of it is great (file transfer speed and interface).

I hid the Metro stuff, added a menu, and updated to 8.1, and I'm completely happy.

Also, isn't there some kind of XP compatability mode on Win8?

NI what's the app that requires XP? I am intrigued

Wouldn't it be simpler to just run a virtual machine which runs Windows XP?

^^^

thanks zachary, i was literally minutes away from installing xp over windows 8 but did some googling and the consensus is that new HP hardware won't work with xp, drivers aren't compatible etc. saved me hours and hours of incredible hassle so thank you v much. now it means i'm going to have to blow a fortune on new gear which is nnngh but at least i've saved hours and hours.

stevie, it's all part of a long horrible story - basically i dj for a living and the program i use is only really stable on xp (asio drivers aren't working so well with it on windows 8). this all began when djing in a bar and a woman spilled a thick sugary cocktail on my macbook pro (i use bootcamp) two weeks ago destroying it. (as an aside, poss more suited for a thread on boring legal questions, have i got any legal recourse against her or does it lie with the venue/myself?)

actually, just thought of a much simpler solution: going to buy a soundcard that's compatible with win8. the program actually runs fine, it's just the quality coming out of it that's not ideal at the moment, pretty sure that'll be the old soundcard's fault

probably the best, going virtualization would probably not work well in this case w/audio

yeah, had all manner of nightmare issues getting xp to run on bootcamp in the first place - until i finally found an obscure program that shut off b/g processes that were causing the sound to judder horribly. don't want to go through all that again

otm re: soundcard; trying to jerry-rig the whole thing w/ XP will just be a disaster. Or maybe Win 7? I've gotten ASIO4ALL on mine working pretty nicely (a ThinkPad)

I can't imagine there wouldn't be Win 7 drivers

is laptop beyond hope? sometimes cleaning the insides is all that's needed (though what a pain!)

getting worried

i think my lappy and all my shit's been compromised? idk how this works. last week i got this email from a google group i'm a part of

Your mail to 'Writers' with the subject

***SPAM*** [redacted]

Is being held until the list moderator can review it for approval.

The reason it is being held:

Post by non-member to a members-only list

Either the message will get posted to the list, or you will receive
notification of the moderator's decision. If you would like to cancel
this posting, please visit the following URL:

and then i got a shit ton of emails in my spam folder from mailer-daemons from real companies (incl virgin mobile where i've been shopping for a phone) saying so and so email didn't send to so and so. with this header: Why is this message in Spam? It seems to be a fake "bounce" reply to a message that you didn't actually send. Learn more

(learn more does not tell me much)

so i change my pw and figure the worst is probably over cause the bounceback emails stop (for like a day) and then yesterday i learn that people in my gmail auto-address book DID get spam from me

dl'ed malwarebytes cause avira's been crashing whenever i run a scan, and then i look in the "Web Exclusions" list which should be empty and there's an IP in there like an hour after i DL the thing. i google it and it shows up on projecthoneypot as a mail server (http://www.projecthoneypot.org/ip_77.78.208.147).

idk what's happening is someone controlling all my shit?

maybe try trend micro's (free) 'rubotted'? i dunno. nor would i know what to do if it says yes

http://www.metafilter.com/user/77879

after following all those ^ instructions and deleting all my gmail contacts my spam issue happened agan :( don't know what to do besides deleting my account but that might not actually fix anything

i know it's possible that whoever's doing this just stole my contacts and they're still sending messages that only look like they're from me but i still get the rejected messages kicked back to me so maybe they're actually using my account? idk

Do the spam messages show up in your Sent folder? If not, then probably your email address is forged in the headers.

yeah, that seems to be the case :/ the headers are off (uses my email name rather than my real name like normal, which i guess constitutes "off", though maybe it's happening cause the email is being marked as a potential spoof and gmail changes it?? idk. nothing in my Sent folder though) so i guess i'm just gonna keep sending awkward spam emails to deceased family members and college professors i haven't spoken to in five years

When you choose random shuffle playback it seems that it takes a while for the randomness to cover the full range of content. Is this the way random number generators work or is this just a problem that I got wrong on a problem set?

"Shuffle" as most commonly implemented will just play all the songs in a playlist in a random order, without any weighting or bias to play an "even distribution" of the songs inside. If you have, to use an extreme example, 99 songs by The Beatles and one song by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in your library, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir song is equally likely to be in any one of the 100 play order positions, so you wouldn't be surprised if you have to listen to over half your Beatles songs before you hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (since you'd expect that about half the time). So in a more realistic scenario, yeah, it's entirely possible that you'll hear multiple songs from one artist or album before you hear anything from another. If you have more of one thing than another thing, there are more orderings where you hear a bunch of the first thing in a row than a bunch of the second thing in a row. Generally though any pattern you discern in your shuffle mix is confirmation bias. (Humans are pretty bad at coming up with or identifying random numbers, or making random choices. There's literature out there on this.)

Ahh -- I should have realized there were too many Pooh Sticks songs ... but even within the same album I have the feeling that I can predict how things will jump around from some seed number and that it takes a while for the trace of the seed to go away ... if only I had a very long album or boxed set even ... sorry for speaking so unscientifically about this!!

Also, with short link generators, how do they guarantee uniqueness each time, and can you always make them some fixed length?

00001
00002...

That's 100,000 right there

Allow upper and lower case alphabetics and you get 62 to the power 5 combinations, about 916 million using a length of exactly 5 (like bit.ly)

They don't dish them out in order, no. There's probably a database behind the scenes (needs to be to store the target URL) and they pick a random unsigned value each time.

Unassigned

I work at a library and I want to get the IT department to implement an independent identifier system not dependent on any other system. I was told various things by various people, but the simplicity and effectiveness of what you've described seems obvious. I can't imagine 916 million not being enough. Is a database of that size common and manageable on typical hardware?

Sure. Especially as each row probably only has three columns in it.

That reminds me: Google has a book scanning service that is scans out-of-copyright books and adds them to archive.org. it uses a similar scheme, uppers, lowers, digits. But if you try and Google one of their own ids it doesn't work because their search engine treats uppers and lowers the same.

https://archive.org/details/ladandlassastor00reevgoog - AjQOAAAAYAAJ

https://www.google.com/search?q=AjQOAAAAYAAJ&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t

So the program to fill in the first column would be something like nested for statements for each position that iterate over the 26 lower case and 26 upper case letters and 10 digits? Is such a program included in libraries of common programming languages? Would it take a reasonable amount of time to fill in the first column? And if you did not want your identifiers assigned in sequence, you would use a random number generator to pick an unassigned identifier between allowable values in the first column, then once assigned add the status to the second column and the URL to third?

It is good to know that users want to search on these identifiers ... (Thanks!!)

competing ways of doing this, as usual - do the work upfront or do it when you need it. the first is like a bag of lottery balls. as you remove them the bag gets emptier and emptier and every ball you pull out is guaranteed to be a new number. but you've needed to create 916 million lottery balls ahead of time.

the second case, just think of a random number. then check to see if you've already used that number. if you have, pick another number and repeat. if not, add it to your list. the check gets harder as time goes by (more hits, so this works better if your keyspace is much larger than your number of items), but you're spared the pre-creation task.

as for creating the random strings, it's pretty trivial in any programming language:

String str = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789";
String s = "";
for (int i = 0 ; i < 5 ; i++) {
  s += charAt(Math.random() * str.length);
}

(yes, StringBuilder(), i know)

(there's generally a base 64 encoder but that uses 0-9 a-z A-Z and two punctuation characters (_+/- it differs) which complicates things.)

Ah -- it makes much more sense to make the character selection the random part, particularly if you're not going to be generating the numbers beforehand, which should be fine. This is great. Now I think I have enough information to ask about it and to respond constructively if I'm told it can't be done. Thanks!

Never forget the adage that if a software person tells you something can't be done what they mean is it's not fun to do.