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[Naturegirl1999]

How do you safely unplug and replug the motherboard cable? My guess is that it’d be very small and easy to accidentally break

[Reelya]

They almost certainly aren't soldered in, since screen replacements are a thing. There would either be a ribbon cable or a round cable with pin/plugs on each end that goes from the board to the screen. Still you want to be comfortable taking apart things like phones, laptops etc before you mess with that.

[Naturegirl1999]

I’ve successfully backed up the larger IPad data, now I’m not sure how to incorporate that data into this one, going to Manage iCloud Settings>Backups>[real name]’s IPad (2) just has the Delete Backup button. Is there not a way to add the backup data?

[Iduno]

I’ve successfully backed up the larger IPad data, now I’m not sure how to incorporate that data into this one, going to Manage iCloud Settings>Backups>[real name]’s IPad (2) just has the Delete Backup button. Is there not a way to add the backup data?

Unless someone has a better suggestion, you could try to download the information from the backup (unless it just overwrites everything; that doesn't help) and then back up everything.

[Reelya]

Just got my laptop fitted with an NVMe SSD drive from ebay. Got the drive cloned but wasn't sure it was that much faster, but then I had reason to switch back to boot with the original drive, and goddang is that thing laggy at stuff like bringing up the start menu. I guess you notice the lags with the HDD a lot more after having used an SSD.

[wierd]

nvme shines when lots of large file data is being read, and that data is scattered around, and or-- when serving lots of simultaneous uploads. 

[Starver]

, and goddang is that thing laggy at stuff like bringing up the start menu.

I know "what I do a lot aint what other people do a lot", but it always surprises me that I get awful lag on right-click menues or Start Menu popup.

Yes, I know in the background it isn't just a simple invariant and involves checking various 'special' {CLSID-hexstring} objects, etc, that may change the whole context (and not just which set of Open(... With)s are applicable for a given filetype) but it's the first level down into the GUI from what's accessible to whatever mouse-click or keyboard-press might be possible, and yet seems to not be considered candidate for even the most minimal prefetch-and-cache (minimal memory requirements, easier to parallel cache several such relevent items in one group-call in a moment of GUI idlenesz than individually redive into data storage for when I 'surprise' the system by asking to be served).

What gets me the most (though I don't expect quite so much prefetch) is when opening up a new folder window will display the Explorer contents, as expected, for an instant and then blank, statusbarring the message "Searching for files..." for a number of heartstopping moments before redisplaying the contents, exactly the same (apparently not even having guessed wrongly in Search Order or View Type (details, list, icons, etc) on first-flash), apparently delayed me for no reason whatsoever - especially painful when I misclicked and I know in a microsecond that I want to reverse up a level and dive into a neighbouring directory instead.

(Newer versions of Windows do a twirly-thing, or somesuch, rather than/as well as the status-bar message, depending on how much they bother to have the status-bar switched on at all, but I find so many more things annoying with newer versions that I default back to the best-of-a-bad-thing as my baseline.)


And pressing F1, accidentally... You mean F2 but transposed your hands a little while twisting and turning on your office-chair, staring at screen and various other things laid on your desk... You realise it immediately, but have to wait (or try to continue back in the original window of focus) as you wait for the help-documentation to load up in front of/behind your active windowjust so you can close it immediately. Inbuilt help-viewer is bad enough (I would not expect it, and the helpfile for it to render, to be prefetched - though for those that do actually need help it might he useful), but software (FOSS, often) that is installed with online/nonlocal HTML help-docs (calling your browser up to read them) is even more annoying. And even more so when you know you aren't even networked up and it'll take a few more moments to work out that this will predictably fail...


Sorry, several bugbears of mine, there. Nothing needing solving, just thought I'd vocalise some long-standing niggles of mine. That may not be obvious/applicable to others, but keep on recurring in my own little bubble.

Nothing to read here. Please move along, folks!

[Schmaven]

Sounds like you're due for a hardware upgrade or two.

[Starver]

Maybe I am, but it's not as if it's a problem that only happened because of some spooky-action-at-a-distance bit flipped in my firmware to signal the existence of a new bleeding-edge to which I better now slavishly decamp. It always was a problem, and new stuff brings its own problems along, and I can still complain about the bad stuff from the old days even while defering from adopting the bad stuff from the current set.)

(It's not the new hardware I take issue with, mostly, so much as all the other parts to it. But I try to keep an eye on things even when I don't have an item of the newest tech somewhere in my 'playoom' full of varyingly-aged systems, and decide my own balance of regrets and frustrations as circumstances and availability permit. I've been meaning to hunt down a new (valid, and that means legal) Win7 licence for a while, to go on a bit of Win10-capable kit that I want not to install that on, but my usual source has of course delisted it. And, no, I don't want to VM it/etc. But it'll wait. Perhaps forever, as I get distracted by other things.)

[Reelya]

I think the point here is about what you can do to improve your existing system, not about getting a new system.

It used to be that upgrading the RAM was really the only way to try and squeeze out some more performance from an old machine, or upgrading the video card, if they still make a video card that would go in it. But in both cases you're kind of throwing money away in that system since if you get a new box you probably won't be able to re-use those parts in a new box, or the video card will be a bottleneck.

If you haven't already, an SSD is probably the best investment for an older system that addresses the issues you mentioned. SATA if you have to, but NVMe if you can, since that's the maximum in future-proofing you can do: They make PCIe NVMe cards. The advantage of M.2 / NVMe is that it bypasses the SATA controller (which was really designed for the HDD era) and plugs your drive straight into the PCI express bus on the motherboard. The result is some really insanely low latency. If you think of the SATA controller as a tap on a tank of water, then M.2 and NVMe are like punching a hole right in the side of the tank. So, yeah just a head's up that SATA SSDs are kind of old tech now and people are just getting the NVMe drives instead since they run right off the motherboard and don't have to go through the drive controller malarkey.

[Starver]

If that's the point (to my definite tangent, born of a burst of long-term build up of miniscule annoyances pressurised steadily over time and suddenly finding its way out of a small fissure opportunistically opened up by your comment) then, yes, I could probably shuffle some newer items into my small menagerie of hardware. I think I might have to deal with the possibility of a few more points of "system change" requiring revalidation of antique OS licence-keys (if not now, then next time I upgrade significant components, directly or like hermit-crab shell hand-me-down chains).

My point was more that it was something wrong from the start, just entirely more noticable these days with greater expectations (when new things don't go wrong).

Spoiler: Secondary tangent, ancient history (click to show/hide)

Back in c.1984, we used a given 'office suite' for DOS, a decade prior to MS's Office suite officially bundling together its own previously individual components. This included a versatile database component, with such good features that the exact same version was retained long enough to code up in its internal scripting an "export tables to HTML" function, once that was eventually a thing. Very useful.

As early-'80s hardware was replaced with mid-'80s hardware, a test was made. A sort-and-search was done to establish that (say) it took slulightly over a minute to go from "Abrahams" to "Younge" on a given database of names on the old hardware, and (maybe) 30 seconds on the newer. When late-'80s hardware arrived, the test was run again on the (not too dissimilar) dataset to show it went from 30s->15s (or whatever).

Each change of hardware thereafter reduced the time taken, for the same software coding, until it was basically instantaneous. 'Even' when run in a DOS7 command-shell within the 9x environment.

Then we tried importing to Access just for fun... Though because Access didn't have a direct import facility, we did most of the work, easily, exporting from the versatile older software in a format that Access knew and that the senior software could by configured to provide! The equivalent sort-and-search test was run, though, and it took...  well, it was far from instantaneous. I'm tempted to recall 30 seconds as the time, but that'd be a guess and it could have been half or double.

These days, I imagine Access in Office 2019 on a 2020-era lump of silicon will make small measure again of this benchmark (if I can still get the original data and executables to work - the former might be last seen on 3½" floppies, the latter may need its original 5¼" ones that are probably long gone unreadable even with a drive to fit them and a mobo header to fit that). But the point is more that newer is not necessarily better, may not be necessary and could even be worse.

Which is not to say that the other person being advised how to try an SSD should not do so. I absolutely think they should, on the balance or indeed very much tilted in its favour. I'm just not sure I'm going to see much improvement by SSDing (say) my venerable old Win2k box (I can cause problems copying stuff to USB sticks while simultaneously writing to its HDD, which I've learnt to avoid, and it's not the HDD channel that is the bottleneck) that still has a continuous purpose in my life and actually suffers less from the exact issues I mention than the XP-and-greater boxes I was mostly refering to. But that's just me and the reasoning behind my caveat of "what I do a lot aint what other people do a lot".

Sorry for any confusion, along the way.  Please just ignore these last couple of rambles and carry on carrying on!

[Reelya]

That's because USB was kind of broken on Win2k from what I remember. My mom had that on her system, though I never ran 2k, went from 9x -> XP. Being a DOS gamer, running 2k myself was never a real option: I ran 98se right up to Pentium 4s, until I needed a new board and it wouldn't install 98se anymore. On mom's Win2k set up, pulling out a USB drive without dismounting it would crash her entire system. Running an SSD is entirely separate to that, it's just a new drive you'd stick onto the SATA controller.

You could theoretically put a SATA SSD in an old machine, and arguably it'd be a vast improvement, since it probably is bottlenecking pretty hard on the drive. Consider any time that you have page-file thrashing and how slow that is. That's the drive limiting performance right there.

Put SATA drive on IDE system, about $15:
https://www.amazon.com/Kingwin-Adapter-Convert-Devices-Compatible/dp/B002SZDOM6/
(only caveat here is that this particular adaptor doesn't have a master/slave jumper, so whatever is put on here becomes master. not an issue if it's for the boot drive).
This supports transfer rates up to 3Gbps, so it clearly won't be the bottleneck

New WD Green SATA SSDs, from about $30 for 120 GB
https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B076XWDN6V/
(transfer rates up to 6Gbps)

So yeah, this stuff massively exceeds the theoretical transfer speeds of the IDE controller, so the effect would be that you've put the absolutely fastest possible drive that your system can handle in there. The only issue would be whether everything works together nicely (read through the reviews of the kingwin adaptor). Still, it's pretty cheap even for testing it out and the drive can still be used elsewhere.

[wierd]

For a time, win2k/XP drivers existed for SATA controllers.

If you are going to put one in, do the setup and do the "Press F6 to install drivers" thing.  (Or streamline the drivers in with nLite.) Then that 2k machine will run like a dream.

As concerns DOS gaming on 2k machines (since I positively LOVED win2k BITD), there was FOSS software called VDMSOUND, which fixed all the glaring problems with the NTVDM subsystem.  You can still get it from sourceforge.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/vdmsound/

Install that, and the VDMSOUND Launchpad, and you could play 90+% of old DOS games quite nicely, with sound and VESA video modes. Good times.

[methylatedspirit]

I have a video card (R7 260X) that doesn't seem to work. When I plug it in into the PCIe slot, and insert the 6-pin connector, the fans spin when I turn the PC on, but nothing else works. The motherboard defaults to using the integrated graphics on the CPU; the HDMI and DVI ports on the GPU don't generate any kind of signal, only the VGA port on the motherboard. I've set the BIOS to use a PCIe GPU as the default display adapter, but it changes nothing. It just doesn't register at all.

Is this card dead?

[Lord Shonus]

Hopefully.


The alternative - that something's fried in the mobo or the power supply - is potentially much worse because it would cascade failure eventually. The thing to do would be to try a different video card or a different computer to cross-check.