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Author Topic: The Generic Computer Advice Thread  (Read 572355 times)

King Zultan

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #4650 on: July 29, 2021, 03:03:20 am »

I do live in a humid place but I don't think that would hurt it as much as the laptop usually is left in the house, but it could have happened because of my AC as every now and then I'd find the screen would be damp when I opened it, when I left it on a table in front of it. Guess It's good that I don't put laptops there anymore.
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bloop_bleep

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #4651 on: July 29, 2021, 02:10:18 pm »

Related question. Would spilling some jam on the very edge of a single key cause occasional borking of a bunch of keys? There's been about two isolated tiny spills of a droplet touching one or two keys but my keyboard is wonking out occasionally on some specific keys not related or close to the droplets. I have a suspicion it's maybe dust getting in there. Pressing down keys with more pressure tends to cause it to start working again so maybe it's moving past some dust covering the metal traces.
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LordBaal

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #4652 on: July 29, 2021, 05:47:46 pm »

Well, I have seen some strange shit happen with keyboards, but is unlikely two drops of marmalade would do that kind of thing.... unless the jam attracted ants. It migth not be dust but corpses of ants down there.
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I'm curious as to how a tank would evolve. Would it climb out of the primordial ooze wiggling it's track-nubs, feeding on smaller jeeps before crawling onto the shore having evolved proper treds?
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Naturegirl1999

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #4653 on: July 29, 2021, 05:50:49 pm »

There’s a species of ants that release a pheromone that attracts other ants to help, despite them already being dead…a reaction like this ended up breaking electricity in a house at one point, I don’t remember what show it was that talked about this but I think it was on Animal Planet. What if you set some sugar somewhere else in your room that will attract them instead, possibly overriding said pheromone?
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Starver

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #4654 on: July 29, 2021, 06:00:33 pm »

[I thought I might be ninjaed, but safely ignoring the Ant explanation. Unless it's Langton's Ant.   :P ]


Having delved into a few keyboards, I might suggest it could just happened to land on one of the tracks which serves a row/column/cluster of keys (when that includes various meta-keys, it can cause confusion as it thinks ctrl, shift and/or alt are pressed and doing things with the 'regular' keys that you might not appreciate), but even with the nature of jam (high-sugar semi-liquid that might resist drying out) and the tendency for most KBs being manufactured with minor spills/sweaty fingers in mind[1] I'm more inclined to think it's more a wider mechanical issue, probably nothing particularly to do with that jam.

If you dropped jam on it, the chances are you dropped other things in (biscuit crumbs, dandruff... though head hair[2] seems to be my main one for long-time used keyboards that I don't clean enough because I don't expect others to want to use them). With full peripheral keyboards it takes a lot to jam (NPI!) things up[3], and shear mechanical wear[4] is more likely. With laptop ones, the 'pantograph' mounting (one version of key attachment above the sprung electrical contact membane that might be used) is very delicate bits of plastic and can be jammed slightly too closed or slightly too open, again sometimes creating odd effects, though 'dead key' and undue rrrrrrrrrrrrrepetition behaviour is the usual symptoms.


I have had keyboards where something (maybe the IC that translates contact info into the "what is/are pressed" signal to the mobo) has sometimes thought that a key (the AltGr, maybe, i.e. the 'right Alt' for those who don't have it as anything as special is pressed even when it definitely is mechanically not. If it is AltGr, it actually does much less than you'd expect (not everything that the normal Alt does), but some things react with it (it's how I get the € symbol, but it's the more esoteric Shift-Alt-scoping behaviour that usually tells me when it's gone wrong). When something seems wrong I'll press and release it and the (as I presume) keyboard controller chip goes "pressed? I thought it was already pressed... And now it's released..." and then things are back to normal. I tend to just hit-release both shifts, both alts, both ctrls, both 'Windows' keys and the 'Windows menu' keys, by rote, though, just to 'officially unpress' whichever single one of them may have been logically-only 'stuck', unless it's obvious which one it is. ;) Restarting the PC (without touching the troublesome bits of the keyboard) also seems to clear it, so there are at least some instances where it was never physical stickiness.


Ach, I'm trying to cover all the bases here, and making it all much too complicated, I know. In short: see if you can get any strands of hair out of the keyboard (can be awkward, if it's moved under the keytops and not just lying along the key-'cracks' between rows/columns), check for 'avalanches' if you incline your board/laptop (with power off if the fan's too loud) and if any key feels slightly funny then that might be going/about-to-go either with dandruff/sugar/salt or a dodgy bit of ridiculously small bit of plastic that is replacable (but whether you should try or not is beyond my remit to suggest).



[1] But if you somehow periodically have condensation on a closed screen, KZ, I'd suggest something a bit more troublesome.

[2] I presume. It's not particularly short and curly... Not that I can imagine anything below the neck gets a chance to drop in there, anyway, and it's not obviously the colour of my facial hair either.

[3] I remember one keyboard, in a place I worked at many years ago, made a notable 'avalanche' sound when held up and tilted. It wasn't broken, but I opened it up anyway when the person wasn't using it for a while and it had a lot of fine white crystaline grains in it. I didn't test it (especially not taste it to see if it was either sugar (spilt in one or few instances of preparing a desktop coffee?) or salt (maybe snack-based, but possibly also the remains of many slight amounts of finger-sweat?) or whatever-else-it-might-have-been... But I felt better after emptying it out. (Modern keyboards seem to have in-built 'drainage' holes to deal better with spilt liquids, which would have helped with granuals too, but this one was not designed so usefully and needed a flat screwdriver and some careful persistance to open up enough.)

[4] One computer has not only had most of the (commoner) keytops wiped clean of the printed characters (luckily I'm fairly good at my own variety of touch-typing, at least on a physical keyboard) but a number of them have worn so much from use that there's a hole in them where I've effectively rubbed them through to the inner void of the keytop. ;)
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bloop_bleep

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #4655 on: July 30, 2021, 01:18:56 am »

With laptop ones, the 'pantograph' mounting (one version of key attachment above the sprung electrical contact membane that might be used) is very delicate bits of plastic and can be jammed slightly too closed or slightly too open, again sometimes creating odd effects, though 'dead key' and undue rrrrrrrrrrrrrepetition behaviour is the usual symptoms.

Yes, I have a laptop keyboard and those are the symptoms. Mostly occasional dead key but when it works again it sometimes repeats too. Worth noting that the laptop is advertised as having an "air-inlet" keyboard which is another reason I
think there might be dust under the keys.

And yes they seem to be pantograph switches looking under the keys.

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LordBaal

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #4656 on: July 30, 2021, 06:55:48 am »

Air inlet keyboard should refer to the refrigeration system. It should not be designed in a way that actually helps get dirt or whatever inside the keyboard itself.

If you are handy try to service the keyboard, if it's serviceable at all. I have encountered some keyboards that are "sealed" and to open them you had to destroy them to some extent, or used the classic security screws which migth make you ponder which is cheaper to buy, a set of those screwdrivers and the thing in the end might be just irreparable or a new keyboard.

While starver discarded it outright, if you tend to eat around the laptop, still check for insects too, and everything he wrote which is a good explanation of most things that could go wrong.

I'm hesitant that two droplets of jam on the edge of a key would have got so inside the thing or reached the board tracks as liquid would do.
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I'm curious as to how a tank would evolve. Would it climb out of the primordial ooze wiggling it's track-nubs, feeding on smaller jeeps before crawling onto the shore having evolved proper treds?
My ship exploded midflight, but all the shrapnel totally landed on Alpha Centauri before anyone else did.  Bow before me world leaders!

Starver

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #4657 on: August 03, 2021, 08:04:49 am »

Does anyone else have a problem with Chrome (Android, if nothing else) and, as an example, the page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_conditional (it is still messed up with the desktop version forced upon it[1]). It does not mess up at all in Firefox (same platform), though switching Apps takes heartstopping moments as the perverse nested rendering seems to need to be unloaded and the screen goes black/etc for a long fraction of a second as it tries to adjust.

I was just going to upload a screenshot, but I forget that imgur (and other image hosts I have some trust in) try to push their Apps to mobile-browsers (even when I don't want it - another point to add to the footnote, below?) and it's not practical right now. So I shall have to describe it... Have you ever played DOOM and used the no-clip cheat/found a WAD glitch to go outside the map area and got the weird 'vertically-stratified worldview' that undulates and flashes around as you move and the engine does its best to render things through the wrong side of a one-sided (external) map wall? Like that but horizontal. The wikipedia header hovers mid-screen, while some body text that I've drag-scrolled down to appears in multiple fragmented and partially overlaid copies above it, while embedded graphics on the page seem to obey their own rendering rules with non-identical multiple-overlaying '1-D Moiré' effects as I scroll. (Readability is possible, after a fashion, but as if I'm trying to use a fresnel-lens/flicker-grating improperly, and clearly I'm getting some elements out of order, as well as mashed-up with themselves, compared to the competently-rendered version.)

This is not universal to Wiki. Another page renders faultlessly (SFAICT), and though my first impression is that maybe the faulting page has SVG imagery embedded where the non-faulting one is illustrated purely through raster (PNG?), that is a pure shot in the dark on my part.

Chrome recently was updated. Amongst other changes, since this update, is that changing 'tabs' (or the list of available-to-open pages, given Tabs-as-tabs are apparently out of style, now even in Firefox) presents one not with the tabbed page but refocusses to the address bar of the switched-to page as if to copy/edit the URI (which makes no sense to me) and I need to explicitly dismiss that/the on-screen keyboard (or refresh the page, with possible reloading implications for certain dynamic page content) to get what was an immediate tab-switch beforehand. But I've seen this multiphasic rendering thing on an isolated Wiki page maybe a month or two ago, so it's probably not just the latest UI/UX changes or dependency-changes that caused this but an unfortunate prior component-code update that's less easy to narrow down. (Chrome's update 'information' in the Play update section tends to be rather bland, unlike those whose authors include handy "Changed the rendering code to a faster version", or whatever.)


And I'm fairly certain (though I will check later, back home) that this isn't happening on a proper desktop's browser (I'm sure I've got chrome installed on one older machine, which I can update, but I'm mostly an FF user at home, with other non-default and possibly legacy browsers there for the occasional handy cross-comparison/separation of Cookie-tracking purposes).

The last time I tried to put anything up to the Devs' pages for various browsers I found myself drowned in a sea of suggestions/bugreps immediately following major version changes that may or may not have already included the observations I myself would have liked to post. In fact, I don't think I ever did manage to get a FF 'account' to report my displeasures over last year's major UX changes, just had to adapt, and the Chrome login is stored on a different device so I'm venting here (it seems) in immediate leiu.  Not the best place to get resolution, but more likely to be seen by technically competent laypeople who can yet say "actually, it is just you" or else suggest something better than my inline-SVG theory as to why I'm getting consistent glitching (noting that reloading, flushing caches or even restarting the device don't 'solve' anything) only on certain pages, based upon their own similar experiences.

So, not laying too many demands upon you lot, am I? ;)






[1] There must also be a way to force wikipedia-domain (or anywhere else I need) to not auto mobile-version itself upon loading. The layout lacks ease-of-use beyond mere reading. On another site it 'helpfully' reframes apparently to be easier in extreme portrait, when I arrive via tablet, but as I stick to landscape orientation by choice it makes it worse when the extesive sidebar menu now 'leads in' the main frame of page information, etc. But that's not my intended bugbear here, just sayin'...
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Solifuge

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #4658 on: August 05, 2021, 06:04:05 pm »

Recently built a new computer, hoping to install Mint Linux (or another one that has good compatibility, and requires minimal setup and command line fussing). Turns out my B550 Mobo's ethernet somehow doesn't exist, according to Mint, so I can't actually download packages to see if there's a way to fix this.

I really don't want to have to use Windows 10... so as a Linux newbie, any advice for how to get packages onto my Linux box without internet?

Alternatively, would anyone in the US like to buy a mid-high-end Windows 10 computer, so I can make a new build that actually runs Linux? >:I
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wierd

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #4659 on: August 05, 2021, 11:14:06 pm »

It is likely that it detects the ethernet adapter, but lacks an "in kernel tree" driver for it.
I have that problem with my USB CUDY wireless AC adapter.

What B550 motherboard do you have? I will look to see if I can find a tarball for a suitable driver.
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Solifuge

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #4660 on: August 07, 2021, 05:19:58 pm »

An absurd, pretty little NZXT N7 B550. Unfortunately, my dumb ass did not notice that NZXT "does not provide any drivers for Linux" and also it's USB ports aren't recognized on anything earlier than Win 10 (even in it's very limited "Legacy" support mode). Hence being strongarmed into updating to 10, and just doing my best to defang it's datamining and in-OS advertising.

If there's a compatible 3rd party driver, I've not found one yet. >:I >:I
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wierd

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #4661 on: August 08, 2021, 11:50:24 am »

You will need to compile this driver, and install it.

https://www.realtek.com/en/directly-download?downloadid=c4676ea8d1adc3c6f28a4ae2c3e2787a

Your ethernet is a Realtek RTL8125BG 2.5G, which is not in mainline kernel source tree. Realtek provides a driver as a source package however, which is what I linked.

The wifi chip is an intel AX210 Wi-Fi 6E, which is supported by mainline kernel since 5.1 (you might need a different distro from mint, maybe xubuntu hirsute)
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Mephisto

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #4662 on: August 27, 2021, 10:07:49 am »

After fucking around with my expensive paperweight for entirely too long, I backed up the SSD using another system and did just about everything I could think of - reinstall Windows, install Linux, download a prerelease Windows 11 iso and install that. Everything would fail.

Finally, I ran a memory test. Boom. Locked up completely, requiring a hard reset. I've been dealing with that exact event for a year and Windows' logging gave me no pointers.

This is an older HP Spectre x360 with soldered CPU and RAM. One ebay purchase and a bit of waiting later, new mobo installed and it's all hunky dory. It was a pleasure to work on, being at an odd intersection between user-serviceable (screwed-in battery, phillips and torx screws, mobo only held in with light adhesive to keep it from moving) and unserviceable (aforementioned soldered CPU and RAM).

All that to say, is there any utility in a laptop motherboard with one or more bum RAM chips? I could list it on ebay but I don't want to bother if the only thing a purchaser could do with it is toss it at an e-waste recycler.
« Last Edit: August 27, 2021, 11:00:18 am by Mephisto »
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bloop_bleep

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #4663 on: August 27, 2021, 11:42:43 am »

You could try unsoldering the chip and hopefully then it'd just be a working laptop motherboard with half the original RAM.
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The closest thing Bay12 has to a flamewar is an argument over philosophy that slowly transitioned to an argument about quantum mechanics.
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The trick is to only make predictions semi-seriously.  That way, I don't have a 98% failure rate. I have a 98% sarcasm rate.

LordBaal

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #4664 on: August 27, 2021, 12:25:26 pm »

Just unplug it before trying!
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I'm curious as to how a tank would evolve. Would it climb out of the primordial ooze wiggling it's track-nubs, feeding on smaller jeeps before crawling onto the shore having evolved proper treds?
My ship exploded midflight, but all the shrapnel totally landed on Alpha Centauri before anyone else did.  Bow before me world leaders!
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