Root Access

@JourneymanGeek: Yeah, that's the reason I don't really run a virus scanner. Their either bloated a lot or they don't scan well enough and do other things wong.

MSE is pretty nice though, but I have the mentality to remove anything that has even the slightest impact on performance... xD

Or stability, like Comodo+ interfering with my Debugger and I think some other things... o_O

Journeyman Geek

so far i've had MSE prevent two trojans that tried to download themselves, and remove power reg scheduler from my dad's old lapop

(the latter isn't a virus, but its something that is needed once, and just bloody sits there afters)

Tom Wijsman

@SimonSheehan You might also want to see if you really need some of the other things, like CCC.exe to run on boot.

Simon Sheehan

@TomWijsman Probably don't need CCC to run on boot... I mean, the drivers still work without the control center right?

Tom Wijsman

@SimonSheehan Yeah, it mostly just a tray icon or something that inserts itself in right click menus.

Or something that provides automatic updates.

Simon Sheehan

12:34 AM

Okay. I'll disable that now before I reboot. I just uninstalled avast.

Tom Wijsman

I've disabled any Nvidia things that load on my computer...

Thinking of it, I should try to see whether enabling the Nvidia service might get me a better TDR recovery experience though.

It's annoying that Provides system and desktop level support to the NVIDIA display driver is so meaningless... :(

Simon Sheehan

@TomWijsman how much RAM does your system use when booted and idle? over 1GB?

Tom Wijsman

Currently 1.9 GB in use, but Firefox is taking up 550 MB.

So 1.3 - 1.4 GB

Simon Sheehan

Ah okay.

Tom Wijsman

but I have some new tray icons running these days, RescueTime (trying it out since 1 - 2 days) and something that came with the Intel SSD Tool or it's drivers.

Simon Sheehan

12:38 AM

@TomWijsman IAStarIcon.exe... what might that be? Appears to be some intel thing.

Tom Wijsman

So I guess it's a bit lower than that.

Simon Sheehan

Windows Mobile device center..

Tom Wijsman

@SimonSheehan Intel Rapid Recover Technology (part of Intel Matrix Storage Technology)

Simon Sheehan

Bluetooth crap.. .i can disable it

Tom Wijsman

Some answers site tells me.

Simon Sheehan

12:39 AM

@TomWijsman Do I need it to be on my startup?

Tom Wijsman

Don't know, saying that it's an icon I think it is just a tray icon and can be disabled.

Mobile device center can be run from the start or you can manually enable the service when you need it, it's for syncing with your PDA.

I find 1.3 GB on boot pretty much, but I haven't looked into what is using so much.

Simon Sheehan

Brb, rebooting now.

Tom Wijsman

Back at the Windows 8 DP demo they had like only some hundreds of RAM.

Less RAM = Less loading into it; Less RAM = More RAM for other things; Less RAM = Less swapping with the Page File.

Hmm, gonna look into it later this week...

Anyone up to give my hidden comment an upvote?

Simon Sheehan

@TomWijsman Nothing has changed :/

Tom Wijsman

@SimonSheehan Hrrm, but at least Avast is out of the trace now.

Simon Sheehan

12:51 AM

@TomWijsman yep... installing MSE though.

I just don't know what it could possibly be. This is a bit ridiculous.

@TomWijsman I wonder if theres something wrong with my HDD

Tom Wijsman

@SimonSheehan: A lot happened in the System/Unknown DPC calls.

Does the event log report something about that?

You might want to try to get symbols configured and look if it tells you something.

Add an environment variable _NT_SYMBOL_PATH and make it srv*c:\Symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols

Then right click and hit load symbols in XPerf.

It might be configurable through the File menu of XPerf, not sure...

Another thing that could have happened is that the update literally broke something at the kernel level.

Three options: Reverting the update, a system restore or sfc /scannow.

Simon Sheehan

@TomWijsman The last boot was fairly good. Right after i installed MSE.

Tom Wijsman

@SimonSheehan Perhaps Avast somehow needs a double boot before it's completely removed? Strange...

Simon Sheehan

@TomWijsman Perhaps it removed a ton of temp files from the uninstall.

Anyways, rebooting AGAIN for testing.

alright, its chugging away behind me installing some updates

And this time it appears to be actually doing something instead of hanging for 4 hours..

@TomWijsman thanks for all the help though. Been one fiasco after another today

Tom Wijsman

1:12 AM

Thanks, good luck on the updates.

@SimonSheehan: If you want to do something in return, I'm still hoping for someone to upvote my comment here...

Simon Sheehan

@TomWijsman Done..

@TomWijsman Sent you some rep too

Tom Wijsman

Hmm, the Nvidia Driver Service seems to be for having the game profiles apply and just that.

And some color settings on boot, but they already apply without the service running.

And lastly, it fixes the control panel in some cases. But I've nether needed the service for either of those...

Simon Sheehan

@TomWijsman just booted wickedly fast!

Tom Wijsman

@SimonSheehan: Nice, sounds like Avast has interfered with one of your updates somehow.

Hmm, Google+ now has a YouTube button at the right side. o_O

Simon Sheehan

1:28 AM

:o

Journeyman Geek

it looks out of place

Tom Wijsman

If you maximize the resulting window, it is comparable to YouTube Instant as you don't have an intermediary search results page anymore.

Simon Sheehan

I dont like how much RAM Windows 7 uses... I used to use 80Mb idling with XP :/

Tom Wijsman

@SimonSheehan I'm wondering why the RAM was so low on the Windows 8 DP demo...

Journeyman Geek

@SimonSheehan: don't forget windows 7 uses spare ram to cache things

so.. to some extent the extra ram use is useful

Simon Sheehan

1:33 AM

@JourneymanGeek good point... a lot more processes though.. I had 20 processes on XP ;)

Journeyman Geek

2:25 AM

erf. anyone know of any really small distro with memtest that i can run off unetbootin?

hm, never mind. unetbootined ubuntu minimal fails on this, rather mysteriously to boot

Simon Sheehan

2:49 AM

@Journeyman what're you trying to do today? Still resurrection that machine?

Tom Wijsman

3:06 AM

support.microsoft.com/kb/2607576 o_O

Journeyman Geek

@SimonSheehan: dads old machine. was in a police evidence lockup for 5 years. I just added the ram off my identical non functional machine

the hard drive seems to be the only real bottleneck

we will likely be reformatting it once we've worked out what data on it is useful

Tom Wijsman

@JourneymanGeek Sounds like they scanned it thoroughly...

A lockup of 5 years? Sounds long.

That must be a big case then, because they would else be obstructing him from his personal / work files.

Journeyman Geek

@TomWijsman: case was dropped after 5 years

Tom Wijsman

@JourneymanGeek: Did he had a back-up of his data or something? It sounds weird that one can so suddenly lose all his data for 5 years.

Journeyman Geek

and from what i see, they switched on and accessed the machine once in 2006. (which alone is bad practice) and the system was apparently left open

they took the backup too.

Simon Sheehan

3:17 AM

Sounds very serious

Journeyman Geek

and yeah, it totally messed things up for that period

it was a load of bullcrap, and everyone involved knew it i suspect

Tom Wijsman

For some people keeping their data can result in unemployment/bankruptcy.

Journeyman Geek

hm

yup

we replaced the machine, and we ended up putting a copy of nearly everything in e mail (both our own ISP and gmail) as well as on dropbox

Tom Wijsman

I suppose after they took it?

Journeyman Geek

lol

much after

i wasn't around most of that period

Tom Wijsman

3:21 AM

The cloud is a secure option to never lose your data...

Journeyman Geek

At some point, i got fed up with how... crap our setup was, and started changing whatever i could get away with

Simon Sheehan

The cloud is nice, but Im not putting my back into it - It could go down any time. Hard drives last a while

Journeyman Geek

(so, from IE to firefox, redundant mail backups (my excuse was its easier to search, which proved true... when we had a client who was making excuses not to pay us), dropbox (official reason is syncing and being able to link files...)

@SimonSheehan: well, the idea is, we have the cloud, in addition to at least two copies of all important data

Simon Sheehan

Ah okay

I sort of do that with music

I've got it all backed up to USB, my iPod. Then it's on 2 machines.

Journeyman Geek

i don't have music on the cloud >_>

collection is too large. I have lossless copies on two hard drives, lossy+lossless on one hard drive and the ipod

Simon Sheehan

3:26 AM

Ive got something around 4300 songs

Journeyman Geek

7897

but if push comes to shove, i can rebuild that collection relatively easily

Tom Wijsman

@JourneymanGeek: Given the thing you removed, it makes a bit more sense why they keep it that much longer.

Journeyman Geek

@TomWijsman: yeah.

Tom Wijsman

But well, some of these agencies (even the most famous) do this kind of stuff without thinking about the consequences.

Like taking a whole server rack without even thinking what services are hosted on it, resulting in a sudden shutdown of quite some unrelated websites.

Journeyman Geek

well, thats the americans.

Their agencies tend to have... interesting ideas on what their responsibilties are

Tom Wijsman

3:33 AM

Can't they get sued for doing such things?

Journeyman Geek

No

Didn't you read about the FBI agent who drove a car that was evidence, crashed, and got away with it?

Tom Wijsman

Yes, a car that costed a lot.

Journeyman Geek

autoblog.com/2011/10/11/… basically law enforcement agencies have a huge amount of leeway, short of physical harm of any sort

so, no

Tom Wijsman

But well, those things are easily covered through holes in the law as well as "I had to drove it to another storage place".

Journeyman Geek

and yeah we had someone whose case got thrown out cause an officer pushed her

Tom Wijsman

3:37 AM

Hmm, pretty solid argument "Nobody saw us joyriding!". xD

Meh, Nvidia is trying to crash my system again... Love it that I'm like waaaaaah... CTRL+ALT+DEL right when the hang hits.

Journeyman Geek

lol

Tom Wijsman

It causes the screen to refresh (go black) and go to a different screen that doesn't show anything graphically intensive.

I wonder if I can somehow automate that and just have a short freeze or resolution reset...

I dunno if I still have the trace when I managed to trace it a while ago.

Might try to figure out how I can get a command to run immediately the hang occurs...

Simon Sheehan

Well off to sleep I go. Good night everyone!

Tom Wijsman

@SimonSheehan Good night.

And happy boot in the morning! xD

Randolf Richardson

4:40 AM

@Sathya: That's a very nice Computer Hardware Chart, thanks for sharing it! I really like that it uses real pictures of connectors.

Journeyman Geek

5:23 AM

@RandolfRichardson: the original is here. the nice thing is that poster is updated fairly often

sonic840.deviantart.com/art/…

Sathya

@RandolfRichardson glad to share!

Randolf Richardson

5:57 AM

@JourneymanGeek That's a really good resource for art.

@Sathya: Something weird is going on with the databases, I think -- someone else's name showed up in my user record. I fixed it, but I'm really surprised about this, and worried that there may be some problem in the back-end with records.

I hope that my edit to my record didn't make things worse.

Sathya

@RandolfRichardson SU profile?

Randolf Richardson

@Sathya Yes.

Sathya

@RandolfRichardson weird, I'm seeing that there was a merge of another user into your account. Could you raise a question on Meta about that?

Randolf Richardson

@Sathya Again? This happened once a long time ago.

I can post a message in meta about this.

Sathya

@RandolfRichardson I'd recommend doing so - perhaps the site devs can give an answer on this. From what I see, there was an auto-merge of another account into your user on Oct 17

Randolf Richardson

6:11 AM

@Sathya I just posted my question here: meta.superuser.com/questions/3661/…

Sathya

@RandolfRichardson thanks

Journeyman Geek

8:02 AM

blah, senility strikes again

Journeyman Geek

8:28 AM

I'm trying to remember a piece of software off sysinternals that i can use to work out what is accessing the hard drive

ahh, procmon

DMA57361

morning all

Journeyman Geek

morning

hm, i think i really ought not to bother, since i will be nuking this system once we have the data out...

Tom Wijsman

9:39 AM

Hard disk supply could take two years to recover

Journeyman Geek

9:52 AM

thats a bummer

also, is SE down?

DMA57361

@JourneymanGeek mid-deploy I think

hmmm, maybe not :/

Tom Wijsman

@DMA57361 Mid-deploy just keeps the error page usually, this error page just stays. Let's hope it's something planned..

DMA57361

@TomWijsman well someone mentioned a new change going out in TL, which is why I assumed that was the case

they're aware it didn't go to plan...

Journeyman Geek

TL?

Tom Wijsman

@DMA57361: meta.SO is still there

Teacher's Lounge

DMA57361

9:57 AM

@JourneymanGeek TL = Teachers Lounge = the moderators chat room

Journeyman Geek

meta.so is up, but they're on a different server i believe

Amith KK

ALL se sites are down, except meta.so

DMA57361

@AmithKK yeah, looks like a failed deploy, the dev's are aware and are working on it

hippietrail

there doesn't seem to be a main room to whine about the network being broken so here looks as good as anywhere

Journeyman Geek

@hippietrail: my ISP occationally mucks up their transparent proxy, so i tend to blame that for everything.

including the weather

DMA57361

10:00 AM

@JourneymanGeek wow, an impressive proxy if it can do that :P

tombull89

@hippietrail chat.meta.stackoverflow.com/rooms/421/whining-room

hippietrail

i blame my zeppelin trip question on travel.SE which was obviously too intense for the server to handle

i made a pathetic first attempt at whining there thanks

DMA57361

oh well, guess I'll go do some real work then D:

Clippy

Super User Blog: Video Conversion done right: Codecs and Software

Posted by slhck on November 7th, 2011

Videos are everywhere. They come in quite a few different formats – all with their own advantages and disadvantages. Converting videos from one format to another is a very simple task, given the right tools. In this post, we will go through the most popular video codecs and the software you need to get the best results.

Before we begin to encode, we have to ask: What is a video codec? “Codec” stands for encoder/decoder. A video codec specifies the software (or the algorithm) to convert video files into a bitstream and then decode that bitstream into a video again. But why is t …

Tom Wijsman

meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/111194/…

Seems one boxing isn't alive either for site links...

DMA57361

10:05 AM

and it looks like we're back in action

tombull89

"I Feel A Disturbance In The Force, As If Several Servers Cried Out In Terror, And Then Were Silenced"

DMA57361

ahem, anyway with that comes the new review badge

tombull89

@DMA57361 300 reviewed, ok, what does it mean by "60 actioned"?

ah, never mind.

13

A: New bronze badge for "reviewing"

Reviewer: 300 reviews, over 60 actioned. (possibly) Scrutiniser: 1000 reviews, over 300 actioned. Where actioned is: Edit (suggested edits don't count until approved) Flagged (only counts if the flag is marked as valid/helpful). Voted to close (only counts if the question is closed). Voted U...

DMA57361

yeah, basically it's "do something with it" via superuser.com/review

Tom Wijsman

@DMA57361: Can you verify that it is the same user (by IP) on this post?

(suggested edit by the way, I'm tempted to click Reject but I don't know enough about him)

@DMA57361: I've found another thing...

DMA57361

10:14 AM

@TomWijsman nope, I'm not able to access the IP of the anon user (that I'm aware of) :(

Tom Wijsman

@DMA57361 superuser.com/review/close

DMA57361

@TomWijsman yep, I think that's new and 10k only

Tom Wijsman

@DMA57361: Hmm, I already have fulfilled the badge. It takes time before the badge gets assigned, right? Like... With the global recalc?

DMA57361

@TomWijsman I guess since it's new it will be a little slow to start being given out

Journeyman Geek

12:44 PM

augh

superuser.com/questions/212893/… i am almost certain this guy is just looking up things on SF and linking them for hopeful easy rep

Sathya

@JourneymanGeek downvotes, away

I can never understand why people have such hatred

superuser.com/questions/354738/…

Journeyman Geek

@Sathya: must be something he ate.

Sathya

@JourneymanGeek no doubt

Journeyman Geek

the amusing thing is, they hurt the view people have of linux and open source, more than they help

Sathya

@JourneymanGeek yeah

tombull89

1:07 PM

@Sathya, no-repro on (not) getting to M.SU...wonder what's going on...

Sathya

@tombull89 weird

tombull89

Also, it looks like Best Buy are shutting down the UK stores...wonder if they realised price match wasn't a good idea in the end :P

Sathya

@tombull89 LOLOLOL

Journeyman Geek

hm, new review thing is awesome

@tombull89: its all your fault! ;p

tombull89

Also, why'd that "computer with 40 ethernet ports" get deleted? Should have been locked but not deleted as a "warning" to other with bad ideas.

I wanted to get a screenshot before it went, didn't have time though :'(

Sathya

1:16 PM

@tombull89 for your viewing and reading pleasure(!) i.imgur.com/OVXhn.png

@tombull89 lesser the crap, better. Will avoid "you deleted my crap but his crap is only closed waaah!"

tombull89

1:40 PM

@Sathya Woah. I thought you were going to get a shot of the question, not the answers as well.

Sathya

@tombull89 you can crop it out :P but having the complete thing makes more sense for your reference anyway

tombull89

@Sathya chuckle no, not complaining at all. Cheers!

Sathya

@tombull89 :) cheers!

Journeyman Geek

shakes fist at geotagging

could someone in the US see if the US product page linked here works? blog.logitech.com/2011/08/18/g300

my mouse is so damned new, that my country web page dosen't have it. And it detected me as being australian for some odd reason.

@Sathya: my issue was, he never said why the hell he needed that, and couldn't use a switch ;p

Sathya

@JourneymanGeek 404 at first, changed location & now it shows

tombull89

1:48 PM

@JourneymanGeek What I suggested...but ah well. If he had the money...

Journeyman Geek

@Sathya: US?

Sathya

@JourneymanGeek yes, US

Journeyman Geek

2:03 PM

oh joy. I think THATS why i had so much trouble finding that mouse...

Apparently its not officially out here yet XD

or something. The local newspaper DID review it (i did not read said review. Local newspaper's IT suppliment is crap)

Sathya

@JourneymanGeek you read local news eh ;p

Journeyman Geek

@Sathya: we get the local newspaper. I get my news from more reliable sources, like little children and rumours

Sathya

@JourneymanGeek lol

Journeyman Geek

2:54 PM

boingboing.net/2011/11/07/…

Sathya

@JourneymanGeek lolwut

Sathya

3:18 PM

ah, clippy

always catching the unaware ones :p

DMA57361

@Complicatedseebio that's a chat easter egg, groan, ignore it

Complicated see bio

@DMA57361 I can only see part of your message. I'm going to leave and come back in the hopes that "clippy" will be gone.

Ah, there we go, the paperclip is gone now.

Sathya

wish I could stay, but I'm late for my overnight bus - catch ya'll later

Complicated see bio

@Sathya Have a nice trip!

DMA57361

3:56 PM

→ 21 messages moved to Room RE accidental merges

studiohack

6:02 PM

awesome! just got data off a drive with a SATA enclosure!

Super User

6:53 PM

0

Q: Question of the Week #34

Now we're into week 34 of the "Top Question" of Super User in the Super User blog. Please post and vote for your favorite question for this week. Please post any question that you feel is of worth and the reason why. Try not to promote your own questions or answers for publicity's sake. We are...