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[Reelya]

Ooh no, there's your problem. Windows 10. You want to run ArchLinux. Much more relaxing.

https://www.maketecheasier.com/arch-linux-review/

No Arch Linux installation is the same, and that’s the appeal to Arch users. It isn’t the friendliest Linux distro for beginners, but if you’re looking to truly understand what a Linux distro can do ...

There you go, going the ArchLinux way will ensure you have bugs and workarounds to do that are unique to your set-up and nobody has ever seen before. Say goodbye to Windows bloat and hello to the streamlined ArchLinux where even the smallest of component services will be hand installed by you, the ArchLinux master. And the best bit:

Arch is the ultimate distro for choice, so as you can expect, choosing how Arch Linux looks is really left up to you. Quite literally, as the installation ISO doesn’t come with a desktop environment at all.

Yup, ships with just a command line instead of a pesky GUI cluttering things up. Neato!

[Parsely]

I'm on Win 10 desktop and having a real hard time getting my external speakers to play any audio.

The device is a subwoofer with two desktop speakers (left and right) that plug into it; then it has a power cable, a little power switch/volume dial that is permanently attached by cable, and a cable to plug into the audio outlets on the back of the PC.

Troubleshooting items:
- Power cable is plugged in
- Power switch on the switch/volume control is on and has a green light to show it's on (I'm also positive that the speakers are plugged in and working because they buzz really loudly when I plug/unplug the audio cable into/from the PC)
- The PC volume is turned up
- The physical speaker volume dial is turned up
- The audio source I'm playing from a browser definitely works when I test with my headphones
- When I test the speakers I always unplug the headphones first
- I've tried switching between all available audio sources, no luck
- I tried using the win 10 built in audio troubleshooter but it's useless

Please help, my headphones are great but they're exhausting to wear for hours every day!

[Reelya]

When you say you've tried all audio sources, have you tried stuff like plugging the output of other things in there such as a phone and playing music from the phone's headphone jack? What other things do work with those speakers? Make sure the speakers actually work as speakers before doing stuff that might mess with your Windows set up.

[Schmaven]

I recently found in the windows 10 sound settings a selection drop down box for sound output.  That was the key for me to get sound via HDMI to my TV and again back to my computer speakers.  Other than that, I've got no ideas.

[Lupe]

There's a windows 10 bug that seems to be messing with audio things recently (at least, it hit both mine and my partner's computer) The fix was some combination of disabling the sound drivers and devices, then rebooting, then re-enabling everything, but it sort of played out like you describe - Headphones worked fine, but no sound from laptop speakers, and no obvious fix.

My best guess is there's an issue with the code for detecting when to switch between headphones and speakers.

[Reelya]

I got a new laptop and it's sluggish, though turning off animation effects (Windows 10 system settings) fixed a lot of how sluggish it feels.

Today I was wondering whether partitioning the 1TB HDD was worth it (keeping Windows and all apps in the outer part of the platter helps keep read/write speeds high (see the not at all dubiously named 'short stroking' method). But then i started looking into whether an SSD drive would speed it up and found out about NVMe drives (as opposed to SATA SSDs). Got the back off the laptop and sure enough there's an NVMe port, so i can add a type of SSD that goes straight into the PCIe bus and bypasses the SATA controller completely, and leave my HDD intact for storage purposes.

So I've ordered a new 120GB NVMe drive on ebay now for $40 to try this out. That should really make the difference with this cheap laptop.

[Schmaven]

In my experience, switching the OS from being installed on a regular HDD to a solid state hard drive has the biggest impact on how fast the computer feels.  Just be wary of cheap SSDs because they all have a limited number of read/write cycles, and replace it once it starts showing signs of failure.  I got 1 with a 10 year manufacturer warranty.

Also, install Dwarf Fortress on your SSD

[BigD145]

I got a new laptop and it's sluggish, though turning off animation effects (Windows 10 system settings) fixed a lot of how sluggish it feels.

Today I was wondering whether partitioning the 1TB HDD was worth it (keeping Windows and all apps in the outer part of the platter helps keep read/write speeds high (see the not at all dubiously named 'short stroking' method). But then i started looking into whether an SSD drive would speed it up and found out about NVMe drives (as opposed to SATA SSDs). Got the back off the laptop and sure enough there's an NVMe port, so i can add a type of SSD that goes straight into the PCIe bus and bypasses the SATA controller completely, and leave my HDD intact for storage purposes.

So I've ordered a new 120GB NVMe drive on ebay now for $40 to try this out. That should really make the difference with this cheap laptop.

If you plan on keeping the laptop for 5+ years then get a Samsung stick SSD in there and use it as the primary system drive. I have a middle of the road laptop from a few years back and the first thing I did was get an m2 in there. Samsung has software that balances the wear and tear on the limited writes of an SSD. You can also try Classic Shell as a start menu replacer. It's much simpler and still gives you access to the built in win10 start menu. Tuning the bells and whistles of windows is all there.
Are there other companies doing good things in SSD's? I do not know.

[Starver]

I think DF savegame folders on an SSD will 'wear it out' fairly fast (seasonal saves won't add too much more if you don't housekeep them away frequently, to be 'tidy').

If you can symbolic-link that[1] over to another drive (the same one you've set the mostly-static-OS-onna-SSD install to keep its ever-changing swapfile) then you might greatly increase the SSD lifetime. But at the cost (in both savegame and swapfile cases) of losing the bandwidth advantage of the frequent read/write files.

So, option 3: SSD for quick-load/infrequent stuff (main OS, Program Files and DF like runtime directories, wherever you actually happen to store them), plus a second SSD for frequent-access files (selected MyDocs-type stuff, savegames... ¿swapfile too?), that's perhaps not quite as top-notch, and backed up onto (however mounted, permaplugged if your system physically allows it, or as removable drive[2]) a large capacity traditional magnetic-platter disk for occasional low-performance RWing on mature and relatively more reliable technology.

...@BigD, there's balancing software (and firmware, built-in, hopefully working nice with each other), as you say, but itnall seems more like herbal remedies and sticking plaster to make up for current failings. Not that this doesn't happen every time a new storage medium is developed, of course, so please excuse my curmudgeonly attitude to this latest one, probably being the same as I was for the last one that I once worried about but now 'trust'.

Spoiler: Click here for all the generally rambling Feetnete, if bothered (click to show/hide)

[1] Or whatever the latest Windows incarnations call it. To be honest, I've found the inbuilt 'directory diversions' more trouble than they're worth, when fixing problems that they affect. Neither as good as the old strict tree-structure nor as intuitive as the age-old *nix symbolic linking system. But maybe that's through lack of practice.

[2] Or two. Better, if you can get (say) a couple of 4TB drives, instead of a single 8TB one, and then for more vital files/system backup images keep a copy on each (simultaneous copy/recopied or alternating if generationally), so that hardware failure doesn't wipe out everything. Ideally, you'd use a good Grandfather/Father/Son system on three or more media, one at a time 'off-site' (or at least not sat in the exact same place as the other ones, in case of localised fire damage or theft) as you cycle through the media. And make use of a Differential/Incremental backup system between images. But I'll admit that *I* don't adhere that tightly to this process[2] and have a number of old drives (thumb and platter) with various faults on that at some point I may see if can be repaired[3].

[2] Though yesterday I copied everything (or most things, didn't copy long unused files, and more logically reorganised what I did) off a possibly-failing frequently used thumbdrive onto a replacement one, the old one and a 'platter' now will store what was on it prior to starting the replacement one. The receny replaced one sits by its own predecessor (a couple of years dust on it). Unfortunately, I've got several other such drives in my pocket that I'm not so careful with, and I really must "platter" their current contents, at the very least.

[3] For one external HDD, taken from its caddy and tried directly without the caddy-electronics, I keep meaning to disassemble its twin and try using its controller on the latter's caddy... Once I've made sure I'm not so dependent on accessing the doubtless out-of-date contents of the twin (which, given the known failure rate in this sample of two, I should have done several years ago...).

[BigD145]

You can't get much better than isolating and skipping physically damaged parts of a chip that inherently has a limited lifespan that's a known value. It's not an herbal remedy. It's removing one kidney. The tradeoff for speed with current tech is less writes/rewrites. All physical media has wear and tear to deal with. You can have it fast, cheap, or good. Pick two.

Seasonal saves is a bit of a mystery to me unless you get frequent CTDs (ignoring the surprise tantrum spirals of yore). DF isn't saving every few minutes.

[Starver]

I wasn't tarring them all with the same brush, but I've seen too many "utilities" that don't quite do what they say they do, or even end up working badly because they're hardware-unaware in some way (gone are the days when a good defrag makes a slow machine faster - or at least shows you definitively that you've got way too little unused space to defrag via - and it's positively recomended against with SSD tech and even now with on-drive management systems controlling platter use behind a kind of Firmware HAL, hiding and 'dealing with' corrupt sectors from most non-manufacturer tools unless they're fully SMART compliant/whatever).

So that's where my cynicism is based. Probably not as bad as I think it is. But, by dint of my working with hardware that needs fixing (even if I tend to put off fixing my own), I see/notice a lot more problems.

("Fast, Cheap, Good: choose one, if you're lucky" seems to often apply, in my world. )

As for Seasonal Saves, I just like them. For historical reasons, in both senses. I don't usually use them (have to, or go into them for save-scumming purposes) very often at all, but I like the safety net. I'm most likely to go into (a copy of) one to re-run some experiment to see what might have happened if I'd dug a ditch/magmaduct/cavern-entrance in another way, or set up my workshops in a different manner/priority. Then revert to the "true" save to continue where I left off. And seasonal saves at least does the job of pre-anticipating my need for a test copy of the gamestate.  Also, so long as I don't tidy them up often (move them around* or delete them from the disc entirely) then they're sat on prime disc-space preventing it from suffering from further RW-stress for the duration.

It does also reflect the fact that I'm a data-hoarder by nature. Loads of old-versions of files that I'm probably not even needing ever to access the newest version of the file (or can remember where it is, if I can even remember I might have it at all). Add that to my personal quirk-list, if you will.


* Okay, so moving files, and even directories, on the same disc probably has minimal RW load. Just the FAT record(s).

[Reelya]

I wasn't tarring them all with the same brush, but I've seen too many "utilities" that don't quite do what they say they do

SoftRAM might well be the most insidious example of that. This company sold it for Windows claiming it would "double your RAM" by compressing pages in memory. Something that other software actually did. Except ...

SoftRAM and SoftRAM95 were system software products which claimed to double the available Random-access memory in Microsoft Windows without the need for a hardware upgrade. However, it later emerged that the program did not even attempt to increase available memory. In July 1996, the developer of SoftRAM, Syncronys settled charges brought by the Federal Trade Commission of "false and misleading" claims in relation to the capability of the software. The product was rated the third "Worst Tech Product of All Time" by PC World in 2006.

In December 1995, the German computing journal c't disassembled the program and determined that it did not even attempt to do what was claimed. In fact, the data passed through the VxD completely unaltered so that no compression whatsoever could have taken place. The actual drivers were in fact slightly modified versions of code examples taken from Microsoft's "Windows Development Kit". Still, the program would try to pretend that it increased system resources, by silently increasing the size of the swap file on Windows 3.1 and by giving false information on the current state of the system. Even worse, the program was compiled with the debug flag on and so ran slower than the original driver from Microsoft.

EDIT: I had a small epithany right now. I almost wanted to call it "literal snake oil for computers" but that would be misusing the word literal. Gotta get out of that habit. Thought about it and the word I should be going for is "veritable snake oil". Seems like people who say literal to mean figurative and actually looking for the word veritable.

[wierd]

Sad, since it (softram) soiled the notion of swap data compression for YEARS afterward.

(Nevermind that zram is totally a thing, and it works quite well, on Linux-- and in recent years, MS themselves introduced this concept with windows 10 as a stock behavior.)

[Naturegirl1999]

My IPad Pro has a problem with the screen, I made a video attempting to describe said problem. Do any of you have any ideas what would cause the color changes or how to fix them?
As for why I even have 2 Ipads, one used to belong to someone else before it was given to me because of the person getting a new Ipad

[Reelya]

99% that's a hardware problem. The best-case scenario there would be that there's a problem with how the cable from the motherboard to the screen is connected, and it would be a matter on unplugging and replugging the cable. However open up your Ipad Pro yourself and messing with the innards at your own risk.

if it's just some a software problem (unlikely) you could try backing up any personal files then restore to factory defaults.