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[Plex]

G+ is rather nice if you have a load of google accounts in your life. Only one password to remember.

It sucks nuts if you want to make a youtube account, because it forces making a G+ account with all the bloat associated with it.

And when you need to check your mail, it automatically logs into Youtube and fills your recommended videos list with old shit you watched 3 years ago.

I miss the good old days, before G+ was integrated into everything...

[BigD145]

Is there a way to not be logged in* in facebook constantly?
I fairly regularly accidentally like something and then I have to delete my like on FB.
I consider myself old fashioned when it comes to computers/internet and I really despise this kind of BULLSHIT.

*or whatever do you even call this phenomenon

Uh...Sign out when you're done?  There should be a button.

Yeah, that works. Thanks.

...I still dont like FB.

Go into your hosts file. Add this: 127.0.0.1 facebook.com

[Aklyon]

G+ is rather nice if you have a load of google accounts in your life. Only one password to remember.

It sucks nuts if you want to make a youtube account, because it forces making a G+ account with all the bloat associated with it.

And when you need to check your mail, it automatically logs into Youtube and fills your recommended videos list with old shit you watched 3 years ago.

I miss the good old days, before G+ was integrated into everything...

If you actually use the recommended videos list, or g+, then thats your problem. The latter has never been useful and the former is not the subscriptions page and therefore not relevant to what I'm going to actually click.

[scrdest]

More on the hardware side: my laptop HDD is going senile at five years old... But the symptoms don't seem to match any typical HDD is kill scenarios, and I need to have a ballpark on how close to the AAA LAPTOP DED scenario I am, so I'm asking on the off-chance one of you folks had that kind of issue.

When I try to wake it up from hibernation, it spins up and starts buzzing, and when I turn it off, you can literally hear the disk grinding to a halt, occasionally failing to be detected by BIOS. Then, after several tries it just spins up, boots, and runs perfectly fine, and it doesn't even seem to have any bad sectors or anything. Then it's back to the same story once I try to boot it up the next day (although it ran fine for a while after a good chkdsking).

I'm junking the ol' thing soon anyway, since it's reaching the point where fixing each and every part failing in sequence will be more expensive, if even possible, but if it's a situation where the whole thing (since there's only a single HDD, with the OS on it) can fail completely soon, I'm probably going to have to take the plunge and fork over a couple months' worth of living expenses in cash.

[gimlet]

There's a LOT of physical problems CHKDSK won't catch - if it's a SATA drive get something to run a SATA diagnostic, usually from the drive manufacturer's support website.   Increasing stats like "reallocated sector count" are a HUGE warning sign.

But it really sounds like you're on short time - for sure backup anything really crucial on that drive ASAP.  You *might* want to think about replacing the drive, because a drive alone isn't that expensive and it's one thing you might be able to use in the future in a different machine, or if nothing else, in a dock as a place to back up files.  A 1T laptop drive should be $60 or less, 2T $90 or so.  Apart from the hassle of making sure it will fit, and copying - that's no fun either.

[Reudh]

More on the hardware side: my laptop HDD is going senile at five years old... But the symptoms don't seem to match any typical HDD is kill scenarios, and I need to have a ballpark on how close to the AAA LAPTOP DED scenario I am, so I'm asking on the off-chance one of you folks had that kind of issue.

When I try to wake it up from hibernation, it spins up and starts buzzing, and when I turn it off, you can literally hear the disk grinding to a halt, occasionally failing to be detected by BIOS. Then, after several tries it just spins up, boots, and runs perfectly fine, and it doesn't even seem to have any bad sectors or anything. Then it's back to the same story once I try to boot it up the next day (although it ran fine for a while after a good chkdsking).

I'm junking the ol' thing soon anyway, since it's reaching the point where fixing each and every part failing in sequence will be more expensive, if even possible, but if it's a situation where the whole thing (since there's only a single HDD, with the OS on it) can fail completely soon, I'm probably going to have to take the plunge and fork over a couple months' worth of living expenses in cash.

I'm inclined to agree with Gimlet. If that shit's happening, the HDD is probably on its last legs. Get an external hard drive and dump everything off it soon as you can.

[scrdest]

Thanks for your answers!

The thing is, I actually got another diagnostic tool (HD Tune Pro on a 15-day trial, but I'm not planning to have a HDD failure a month anyway) and, uh...

...it's perfectly fine. Zero bad sectors (admittably, on a quick scan), zero reallocated sectors or events, or anything at all in SMART.

I'm suspecting it's something more prosaic, like a worn-out bearing (which sounds similar now that I compared it on YT, but I would expect it to, y'know, be consistent, and not just happen on spinup). I have no idea how... lethal, so to speak, that is, though.

[flabort]

Cross-post to continue conversation...

Let me tell you, it's like Acer specifically did all they can to give the laptop exactly two years of lifetime. It's running on four years now, but holy shit Acer, get your shit together.

From my personal experience Acer is a bad brand. Btw, did you have to uninstall a piece of software called Mywinlocker?

I didn't, but this has prompted me to search my computer for one, and there seems to be one. Let's move this to the advice thread...

So what should I know about this program, and what should I do about it before I go poking and prodding through my computer or deleting folders that I shouldn't touch?

[i2amroy]

Honestly unless you are running out of hard drive space or something similar you don't need to worry about it. It's basically just a basic security program that comes preinstalled on acer computers. Think of it just like those silly little u3 or sandisk programs that come on sandisk portable hard drives; if you need that tiny bit of extra space you can go through the process to remove it, but as long as you don't ever use it it's just a small annoyance that doesn't really cause any problems.

[heydude6]

Ah well, the guy above me probably knows better. My problem with it is that every time I boot up my computer, it always begins with a popup that says "installing Mywinlocker". After 5 minutes, it then fails to install allowing the cycle to continue in the next boot cycle.

COMPUTERS SHOULDN'T HAVE 5 MINUTE BOOT TIMES!

EDIT: This was before I started prodding and poking, although I think I have made it worse.

[Thief^]

But it really sounds like you're on short time - for sure backup anything really crucial on that drive ASAP.  You *might* want to think about replacing the drive, because a drive alone isn't that expensive [...] A 1T laptop drive should be $60 or less, 2T $90 or so.

I 2nd replacing the drive, although I'd recommend an SSD, if you can afford one as large as you need (or you can admit to needing less than you are using). SSDs are much more appropriate for laptops because they don't have moving parts and don't care about movement or bumps while they are on.

Both the laptops in my house have had the SSD treatment (with a 126 GB and 80 GB SSD respectively) and it makes them noticeably faster and more responsive.

My brand of choice is Samsung Evo.

[Reudh]

But it really sounds like you're on short time - for sure backup anything really crucial on that drive ASAP.  You *might* want to think about replacing the drive, because a drive alone isn't that expensive [...] A 1T laptop drive should be $60 or less, 2T $90 or so.

I 2nd replacing the drive, although I'd recommend an SSD, if you can afford one as large as you need (or you can admit to needing less than you are using). SSDs are much more appropriate for laptops because they don't have moving parts and don't care about movement or bumps while they are on.

Both the laptops in my house have had the SSD treatment (with a 126 GB and 80 GB SSD respectively) and it makes them noticeably faster and more responsive.

My brand of choice is Samsung Evo.

Can confirm, I use a Samsung Evo 750 (256GB) on my big ol' rig for Windows and some other programs, and it's super quick.

[Lord Shonus]

This link should work.
https://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=27907692

Is there any serious problem you can spot with these components? I'm doing an incremental upgrade (keeping my current drives, video card, and massive PSU), but I'm not up on the current tech enough to spot any pitfalls. I don't intend to overclock, and will probably only run one video card (although my next upgrade (in a few months) will be to a rather beefy one).

[Thief^]

The motherboard and case look overpriced to me. Why do you need triple-SLI support if you're only running one GPU? Get something cheaper, and save your money to buy a GTX 1080 when it releases in a few months.

I'm not familiar with Intel's current CPU/mobo/ram compatibility, so I can't comment on that.

[Sanctume]

Did you check reddits'  https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc -

and also http://pcpartpicker.com to compare prices as well as check if your parts are compatible with each other, as well as best available prices comparisons