Tag: computers

Hacked!

On October 16, an unknown person registered an Internet domain associated with a business I once owned, activated an obsolete email address, and used the credential to destroy my Facebook accounts.

What a shock that was and, as you can imagine, Facebook doesn’t seem to care.

So, I’m off Facebook, perhaps permanently.

Just for fun, imagining a world in which you cared about what I’m up to on a daily basis, where would you like to find a record of that? Instagram? TikTok? YouTube? Elsewhere?

In the meantime, find me on X at @johndyerwrites

Image by MV Studio MV from Pixabay

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Ludditeticulous!

So, Linda brings home this $5 Hewlett-Packard Deskjet 2772 printer/scanner from the women’s club rummage sale, because my $20 yard sale Canon Pixma IP3500 that I bought for the Florida house ten years ago doesn’t have a scanner.

The HP is slow, ink carts are expensive, the print head is unserviceable but yes, it does have a scanner. For $5 I can run the ink dry and throw it away. Good so far, right?

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Computerfied

My Dell XPS 8700 is seventeen years old. Anyone else would have given up on it, but I nursed it along, and it sufficed until the release of Unreal Engine 5. You see, I need UE5. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to use it effectively, but right now I gotta have it.

Prophetically, the old girl gave me a goodbye wave during the cutover procedure – a disk drive failed to mount. The backup was three weeks old. I did a restart. The drive mounted. I pumped it. Crisis averted.

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Plan SSD From Outer Space

If you’re one of the four visitors who read the last post, you’ll know what this is about – and yes, the mission was successful.

I installed Crucial MX500 SSD boot drives in a pair of Lenovo AIO 520S-23IKU computers (2017) and a Samsung 870 EVO drive in a Gateway NV77H23U laptop (2012). On the first attempt, the Samsung went into one of the Lenovo machines, provoking an intermittent failure (No operating system). So I tried the Crucial devices AND I changed my procedure.

Instead of cloning the boot drive using the same machine the SSD was destined for, I used another computer for the task – taking the mechanical drive out and then connecting both old and new drives via USB. Both Crucial drives cloned without incident and I suspect this difference in procedure is responsible for subsequent success installing the Samsung EVO in my geriatric Gateway machine.

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A Tinker’s Tale

I’ve taken a break from writing these past ten days to attend to infrastructure tasks — computer maintenance, Internet service provider wrangling, a lighting project in the kitchen, a round of watch battery replacements …

Linda and I have a pair of identical 4-year-old Lenovo all-in-one computers that have become unbearably slow for reasons I might be able to diagnose if I was willing to invest a couple hundred hours, which I’m not.

Far better to replace mechanical disk drives with SSD devices, a cheap and fast way to breathe new life into sluggish hardware if said SSD installs trouble-free.

You might say, “John, why don’t you just buy new computers?” Well, then I’d be faced with reinstallation of licensed software in both machines, none of which will migrate. License keys will be unrecognized on the new machines, vendors will decline to refresh keys, I’ll be forced to buy products again, some of the products will only be available as cloud subscriptions …

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