Computer Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread II

aimeeandbeatles said:

if I did that, my scanner would be pushed off the cabinet and crash to the floor and that's not good to have expensive electronics crashing to the floor.

Plus I would have to deplug my speakers and I'd rather not. My speakers do have a headphone but that would mean the headphone cable would be dangling in front of the monitor. I put it on top for better sound.

I now have a router and modem on top of my computer desk and the power surge bar on a small stand under the desk. There's a lot of cables that can get easily snagged and cause expensive (and not-so-expensive but annoying to replace) electronics to crash to the floor. I tried a twist tie but it did not work and I don't think string would work too well either. What would you people suggest.

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This is where you have to decide what works best for you and deal with the rest. As mdwh said, extension cords are cheap.

aimeeandbeatles said:

Also, what would happen if you plug one power surge bar into another one? Would it not work? Would you get double-protection? Would it do bad things and destroy expensive electronics?

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Not a good idea. While not illegal, most cities have fire codes against doing it. When I lived in Kansas City and we had the fire marshals inspect our facility at work, it was the most common ding we had on it. So much so that when we saw it and the fire marshals were no where near our building, we would advise the users to not do that.

If you need two power strips at the same location, it's best to run them off of different circuits in the house. We used to run an extension cord from one outlet to where we needed the strip, that seemed okay.

If you draw too much current in one location there's a good chance that the wiring in the house is not sufficient to carry the load and can ignite from it.

PlutonianEmpire said:

Is there a way to view one's avatar history?

That is, a history of all the avatars they used for a particular forum?

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Not that I'm aware of. I don't think there's a history of personal information like that.

Well I'll see if I can find an extension cable around. Although I was under the impression you can get degraded audio that way. Maybe it was mistaken.

What would happen if you daisy-chain a plain power strip to a power surge protector? I have 2 outlets left and 3 things to plug in. 3 of the things alreaddy plugged in don't have a big power draw. Google wasn't too helpful with this. Is it safe?

There's a reason google wasn't helpful with it, because it's not safe.

Seriously, don't do it.

You'll put too much current into that circuit and cause it to overheat, and potentially burn your house down.

Well the issue is how much power you draw through this cables. It is possible to daisy wire several power surge protectors, but if you have too many consumer loads the first (the one with the most load) might overheat and either melt down or start to burn. I have seen both happen as it's a matter which plastic is used (in save environments). Here most PSPs have the maximum wattage printed next to the power switch.
If you have only little consumer loads which would also work in one power surge protector there should be no technical problems. BUT in a case of fire your insurance might refuse to pay even if the PSP was not the source of the fire.
For cable management you could use cable ties like these:

They should be available for cheap money at your local hardware store.

OK I will deplug the extra stuff from the surge protector and and plug a power strip into the wall outlet.

When I was young and naive, i.e., three years ago when I was 27 years old, I daisy chained two surge protectors in an old victorian apartment with two prong outlets (and not very many to boot). It never burned down but my TV and my PC power supply both died, and my stereo was never really the same, and I suspect it was because I was wiring my living room like I lived in a third world country. So yes I would not daisy chain that stuff.

Right now however I do have an extension cord to which a surge protector is plugged into, and another surge protector is plugged into the same wall outlet. Short of re-wiring my apartment which is not possible, I have no choice. The circuit breaker occasionally kills the power to this outlet.

I found the power strip that's good. I actually had 2 but the third prong broke off one so I dont trust it (I think Ill throw it out as it was one of those ones that cost $20). But the other one was fine. I will move the plugs later when I find my scanner and external hard drive (I sent it down with my computer & peripherals but it got seperated. Dont worry I packed my hard drive in the original box and with a lot of packing)

EDIT: I found holes in the back of the power strip that are meant to put wall mounting things in so I can put it up on the wall so the cables don't need to dangle down as much.

I've noticed my new modem (I'm not sure what sort of modem it is, but I use fibre-optic internet which the upstream was really good compared to the old modem) makes crackling noises on occassion. How much should I worry? It isnt constant. I googled it and I got info on how to modify modem firmware or something like that.

Is it possible that 1 core of a multicore processor is broken? Also how can I tell if one is broken?

While stressing the CPU at full load, look at the core usage in CPU-Z or a program like Everest (whatever it is called now, AIDA or something). The free trial version of Everest has a stress tester that will show you the core temps and core loads for all the cores. As far as I know the CPU would not function with one core malfunctioning... but not sure about that.

Run a mulricore prime95 stress test for a few days and see if anything fails.

Why is it when I press print screen I take a snapshot of my desktop, not what is actually on screen at the time? Games for example. Screens aren't possible using print screen.

Those games may be disabling the print screen function. Or are something that the print screen function are not capable of capturing.

Is there a way of enabling?

Print screen doesn't work for direct3d, use the games' built in screencapture or use a 3rd party program.

salty mud said:

Why is it when I press print screen I take a snapshot of my desktop, not what is actually on screen at the time? Games for example. Screens aren't possible using print screen.

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If I recall right, if it uses something (is it overlays? I've since forgotten), it doesnt work for Print Screen. This happened with a media player and I got a nice screenshot of a blank video screen.

Or some game may disable it for some reason.

Is there any min-max to figuring out which of the Intel current gen "advanced features" are best for you? Meaning that i3 vs i5 vs i7 sports some variety in the feature list. This assumes that a few tenths of a a gigahertz difference isn't heartbreaking.

Intel® Turbo Boost Technology

Intel® vPro Technology

Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology

Intel® Virtualization Technology (VT-x)

Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d)

Intel® Trusted Execution Technology

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http://lanoc.org/review/pc-hardware/5096-i3-vs-i5-vs-i7-sandy-bridge-comparison


I'm specifically wondering if giving up hyper-threading is worth it for the variable processor speed "boost".

salty mud said:

Why is it when I press print screen I take a snapshot of my desktop, not what is actually on screen at the time? Games for example. Screens aren't possible using print screen.

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I believe at least part of the problem is that what you see on screen isn't in some convenient bit of memory that print screen accesses, but instead the graphics are constructed on the graphics card, and sent straight to the monitor.

Anyone got a Chromebook in their hands yet? Is it a good deal? How'd you describe your experiences with it?

Is the "ap-store" an Apple-like rip-off or are Chrome aps essentially free, and easy to program one's self?

GoodGame said:

Anyone got a Chromebook in their hands yet? Is it a good deal? How'd you describe your experiences with it?

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I'm curious about this too. I think a big let down is crap hardware support - 11" or 12" laptops with Atom CPUs, going for (in the UK) £300-£400 - for the same price, you can get Windows laptops with much faster Intel Core processors. Or if you're okay with Atom, you can get cheaper and smaller Windows netbooks. Surely the whole point of a "network computer" is that it can be low powered, and therefore cheaper than full blown computers (not to mention not having to pay for Windows)? Give us Chromebooks at under £200 (cheaper than Windows netbooks) then it would be worth it. But not if they can't even equal the value of Windows computers.

ARM Chromebooks are apparently planned - perhaps these will work better if they can be cheaper and more mobile.

Being able to boot quickly is meaningless - Windows 7 is quick these days, and irrelevant when a device is put to sleep.

Is the "ap-store" an Apple-like rip-off or are Chrome aps essentially free, and easy to program one's self?

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I'm not sure what what you mean by "rip-off" - Apple didn't invent digital distribution, and it's also hard to see why application stores shouldn't be similar to each other - by their very nature, I'd expect them to be similar. Choosing to sell software hardly means you're "ripping-off" an idea - selling for money has been an idea since the dawn of civilization, and also not an Apple invention

The more interesting question is how the idea of software works at all, given that (AIUI) the whole point of Chrome is that you don't have local software, but instead do it all online. A quick Google suggests that these are indeed web apps. I presume that these will work with any platform, not just ChromeOS (which I think is one problem the Chromebooks have - you can already get all the benefits of Google web applications with a Windows netbook/laptop). It also means that Google don't have any monopoly on selling web applications, so unlike mobile stores like for Nokia and Android, they don't have that in-built advantage (though no doubt as a large company, with lots of free advertising from the media, they will do better than most).

I think a closer comparison would be existing sites where you can by web-based software (I'm sure I've seen them, but forget any particular names). Again though, just because Google didn't invent it doesn't mean their site is a "rip-off".

I've got a question: Is there any way to play .ogg files in Windows Media Player? I tried something of xiph.org, but when I try to play the music, it says that the program crashed.