COMPUTERS, THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

[Stanley]

P, I often think that nowadays there are often situations where you have to shove the paranoia to one side and take a chance. I think that every time I buy something on the web. We see the yellow lock symbol and crash on, but we don't actually know how secure the site is....

[LizG]

Isn't this a sign of the times? My Grandson is staying with us at the moment. He asked "Can I use some of your gigs Grandma? I want to download a new game onto my iPod." He's nearly 8.

[Pluggy]

I have two duff USB flash drives that are well below the capacity that is shown on a properties scan. These were bought from e-bay before I learnt my lesson. From internet searches it would appear that a free download programme 'H2testw 1.4' is the benchmark for checking for capacity problems. My problem is that I'm paranoid about downloading from sites that may have other things attached to it. Has anyone tried this programme and can they recommend a secure down load site?

H2testw isn't usually a problem but what it does isn't deep magic and can easily be emulated manually. It just writes a load of stuff onto the flash drive to fill it and then sees if what it's copied is readable back. What I'd do is download something like a linux .iso file (or any big file) and make copies of it onto your hard drive through renaming or numerous folders to something approaching the theoretical space left on the flash memory. Then copy it all onto the flash. If it doesn't throw up errors writing, clear the stuff off the hard drive and then copy it back from the flash. If it completes without errors and produces a viable looking directory listing its almost certainly a good memory. Fake memory with 'adjusted' capacity will throw problems once its got past what the memory actually holds will throw errors during the copy process or produce a curtailed directory listing.

Another explanation is available here : http://oss.digirati.com.br/f3/

F3 is an open source Linux alternative to h2testw.

This is the H2testw's authors download site which should be clean

http://www.heise.de/download/h2testw.html

It is in German unfortunately.

Buying small (by modern standards) flash drives is usually safer than big ones, because the small capacity (say 8GB) aren't worth faking and 8GB is plenty big enough for most things.

Suitable big linux .iso file for doing it manually available here : http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop. Its entirely harmless to windows.

An alternative is if you've got suitable sized music or photo collections, copy that onto the flash and back to see if it produces problems. Like I said its not deep magic.

Buying small (by modern standards) flash drives is usually safer than big ones, because the small capacity (say 8GB) aren't worth faking and 8GB is plenty big enough for most things.

[plaques]

Thanks Pluggy, I thought of trying to fill them up but thought it a bit too time consuming. I looked at heise.de for the same reason as you mentioned. The German isn't a problem so I think I will give it a go. Incindentally, one of the drives was only 2 gig, probably from the scrap pile that someone had found.

[Stanley]

You know how I am always going on about mobile phones.... My old mate John Ingoe came over specially from Rochdale to visit me yesterday. He brought me a litre bottle of whisky as well....



He's on his phone because a customer rang him, he was in trouble, a feed pump on his boiler had gone down. While John was with me he sourced a new motor, arranged for it to be brought down from Carlisle, rang one of his men and arranged for him to go over and get the pump ready for the new motor and fit it when it arrived at 4PM. All done sat in my kitchen inside half an hour. Impressive.... They do have some uses!

[Tizer]

Offer him the job of Prime Minister, quick!

[chinatyke]

I use 2 computers to access the OGFB site. One is a Mac and no trouble. The other one is a laptop running Windows Chinese version - XP I think. On this laptop I cannot automatically log in to OGFB despite ticking the "sign in automatically each time" or whatever the relevent box says. The laptop retains my name and password but doesn't go any further until I hit the <Enter> key. The question I have, is this a feature of the OGFB site that retains one IP address with the auto-log in details?
Does anyone else use 2 computers in different locations for automatically logging in?
It's no big deal, don't lose any sleep over it, just interested.

[Pluggy]

The login details are kept in the browser settings and are nothing to do with IP addresses. Have you tried another browser on the Windows machine ? If its XP I'd stay well away from IE, the version that XP still has is hideosuly insecure in this day and age.

[plaques]

This is the H2testw's authors download site which should be clean
http://www.heise.de/download/h2testw.html
It is in German unfortunately.

Thanks again Pluggy
Downloaded the programme, there was a translation available which made it a lot easier, but you still had to be careful not to be seduced into downloading other bits you didn't want. The results on a really duff stick are shown:-

The media is likely to be defective.
198.7 MByte OK (406974 sectors)
3.7 GByte DATA LOST (7766594 sectors)
Details:3.5 GByte overwritten (7344202 sectors)

The programme is very slow, probably hours for a really big capacity stick but there is no work involved.
Waiting a new stick from Amazon so I will check it out when it comes.

[chinatyke]

The login details are kept in the browser settings and are nothing to do with IP addresses. Have you tried another browser on the Windows machine ? If its XP I'd stay well away from IE, the version that XP still has is hideosuly insecure in this day and age.

Thanks Stephen. I use Mozilla Firefox. It retains and displays the log-in details correctly but doesn't do anything until I press <return> - Now that I realise that it is a problem with the browser I'll put up with the hardship of pressing <return>. It isn't my laptop so I'm reluctant to reload the browser.

[Stanley]

Tiz, he's too busy. Snowed under with work....

[Tizer]

Beware the dreaded blue light from mobile phone screens that stops you going to sleep...Praise for 'sleep-protecting' phones

[PanBiker]

We have a blue LED screen clock radio at the side of the bed that we have to put face down else the room is lit up almost like a Christmas tree. One fix for the mobile phone thing is to switch it off when you are not using it.

[Wendyf]

We have recently bought a new clock/radio and the screen dims automatically when you put the bedroom light off leaving it just readable in the dark.

[LizG]

I love that idea Wendy. I didn't realise there was such a thing. I'll look into getting one over here.

[Stanley]

Mine has three levels and I just set it on the dimmest....

[Wendyf]

Ours is a Pure Siesta DAB clock/radio, not cheap (I think ours was about £45 from Ebay) but it's a decent quality radio.

[Tizer]

One fix for the mobile phone thing is to switch it off when you are not using it.

That was my first thought too! But people seem to be unable to live without their permanent connection to the network. There was a news report a few days ago about `ghost vibrations' where people mistakenly think their mobile phone is vibrating in their pocket but when they look there are no calls or messages. Apparently it's becoming common and worrying folk. Of course, they are people who have the phone switched on all the time. It's almost as if they think that if they don't keep it switched on they won't get calls or messages! I wonder if these are the same people who leave their PCs or laptops permanently on too?

[Stanley]

Leaving computers permanently switched on... I once asked Big Harry why he and Janet left their machine permanently on and he told me it was for two reasons. One was that because of the large software programmes they used it took too long waiting for them to load after shut down. The other reason was that it avoided thermal shock in the system and in the end meant a more reliable machine. This was twenty years ago and chip speeds were much slower then....

[chinatyke]

Of course, they are people who have the phone switched on all the time. It's almost as if they think that if they don't keep it switched on they won't get calls or messages!

It costs nowt to leave it on! What's the point of having a mobile contact device if it's switched off all the time?

[Stanley]

No internet connection this morning. Checked phone, switched router off and back on, broke all connections and re-made them. No joy so I started playing solitaire.... That cured it, twenty minutes later it dropped back in. Makes you realise how we rely on it now and reminded me of the dark days of Dial Up! My world is now functioning.

[PanBiker]

I have recently bitten the bullet an upgraded my laptop to Windows 10. I have sorted the built in failure to connect to the internet over WiFi after upgrade problem. As well as uninstalling a lot of the stuff I don't want or need, the annoying lady meant for when the system is deployed on phone has been banished to a padded cell. It's not much different to previous offerings so It will probably stay. It wont let me delete the previous version though although it does tell me that this will be automatic after 1 month. Tried through the system applet that is offered to me and also via disk cleanup as suggested on a Google search. It's taking 24Gb up as it keeps the entire install in case you want to roll back.

Yesterday when I was typing up my post in the motorbike thread. I was using the post editor and three quarters of the way through typing the post Windows gave a couple of announcement chimes and deleted all but the last four characters that I had typed. I have no idea what happened. I cant think of a keyboard combination that would cause that. Anyway the post had gone with no option to recover.

I typed it up again as a text document and then cut and pasted it into the post editor.

[Pluggy]

Just got an email from Doc presently in mid atlantic asking me to delete his emails so he can collect his mail on a satellite phone with 2400 baud internet. There was a big attachment blocking it.

[Pluggy]

I think there are places I'd rather be in mid January rather than in a smallish boat in mid Atlantic, but I always was a bit thin in the adventure department.

[Stanley]

Funnily enough I was just thinking the same thing...... Chacun a son gout.... Mind you, they look to be thriving on it....