Random Thoughts Five: Ya rolls the dice, ya takes yer chances

[metatron]

It's very gouda you to provide that muensterious list of German cheeses. It is much chedder than other lists I've seen. But if I'm brieing honest, I never curd much for German cheese. I goat plenty of other cheeses prefer.

Marks for effort.

p.s. if you guys don't like this post you are bullying me

You? Really?

Ok. Fine. I'll remember.

 

[cardgame]

You'll remember that I'm funny? I should hope so.

 

[Paul in Saudi]

I checked. I check every day. No mass killing all month. (In the US by a single killer.)

 

[Arakhor]

I finally figured out the cause myself, recently. Windows is defragmenting your drive all the time automatically, deleting a large amount of files frees up space to do this with. It is particularly noticeable when your drive is 90% or 95% full like mine usually is whenever I notice this happen. The "updates" are really just moving those files around, hence 0kb.

90-95% full? Good grief. Just buy a secondary hard drive!

 

[rah]

Yeah, it's not 1990, space is cheap.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Defragmenting all the time ?
It's 2019 ! Get an SSD.

 

[cardgame]

I have not one but two SSDs

they're fullish because storage is easier than downloading with my current internet. I will every week or two find cause to clear 50-100gb of space on one or even both, so no worries there.

 

[Lexicus]

Just FYI, defragmenting an SSD is A Very Bad waste of its capacities with no upside. And continually deleting and rewriting information to the drives will wear them out a lot faster than writing stuff on them once and then leaving it there.

 

[Synobun]

Just FYI, defragmenting an SSD is A Very Bad waste of its capacities with no upside. And continually deleting and rewriting information to the drives will wear them out a lot faster than writing stuff on them once and then leaving it there.

Does Windows automatically disable its auto-defrag if your hard drive is an SSD? Or do you have to disable it yourself?

 

[Lexicus]

It's not 100% clear. I believe I remember reading that more recent versions of Windows will do a check and disable the auto-defrag if they detect an SSD. But I just Googled it and found articles claiming that Windows does defrag SSDs, but in a different way from how it defrags HDDs that is actually helpful to the SSD. Not being a technically-knowledgeable sort I have no idea what is true, but intend to do further reading.

Further reading yielded this fairly unambiguous statement:

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheRealAndCompleteStoryDoesWindowsDefragmentYourSSD.aspx

The short answer is, yes, Windows does sometimes defragment SSDs, yes, it's important to intelligently and appropriately defrag SSDs, and yes, Windows is smart about how it treats your SSD.

so I was clearly wrong about defragging. I do believe that I'm right about continually deleting stuff off the drive and replacing it with new stuff though. Ironically probably more cost-efficient to keep buying more drives.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Windows 7 and above will do TRIM on SSDs. It's a sort of non-destructive defragment that zeros out any empty sectors.

 

[cardgame]

My SSD will last another decade or more, easily. You have to write 100gb every single day nonstop for years to kill an SSD. My write life over 4 years is only 61TB. Among consumer-grade SSDs of its previous (inferior) generation, none died before 500TB write in a real-world test.

 

[Takhisis]

People still write by hand.

Weirdos!

I had my money on some kind of huffing cult.

We're definitely just weirdos.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

We're definitely just weirdos.

Nope. Just people who have not given our lives completely over to electronic gadgets.

One thing I'm delighted about is that the surgery I had 3 weeks ago has meant my vision has improved enough so I can do my taxes myself instead of having to go to the seniors' centre to get someone to do it for me.

I will be doing it by hand - pen, paper, find a stamp (I do have some around somewhere), and mail it.

It will be nicer when both surgeries are complete so I can read books again. I haven't been able to do that for several months.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

That's really great!

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

According to this spam email I got, Bill Gates wants to donate five million to me. Yet somehow he can't get a hold of something better than an AOL email.

 

[Silurian]

According to this spam email I got, Bill Gates wants to donate five million to me. Yet somehow he can't get a hold of something better than an AOL email.

Tell them that you have some money for them but they will have to pay you a fee first.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Or that a Nigerian prince manages your finances.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

According to this spam email I got, Bill Gates wants to donate five million to me. Yet somehow he can't get a hold of something better than an AOL email.

I got that one, too. Have you had the one where Melania Trump wants to give you money? She's more generous, but can't spell as well as Bill Gates. I'm not sure she's legit, though, since she wants to give me "United dollars."

 

[Arakhor]

As far as I understand it, excepting the genuine mistakes, there's an entirely cynical reason for that - less well-educated people won't notice the errors and may be more susceptible to the email's claims.