You know whats BS? [RANT]

[mobius]

Updating to Windows 10 turned out to be not as harrowing as I expected. At risk of jinxing myself; I so far only encountered two major (and not really that major actually) obstacles.

1) the start menu
Of which I personally think sucks eggs. It's radically different from the start menu we were all used to; which imo was great and pretty all around efficient, user friendly etc. This new menu is ugly, stupid, not useful for me. Why change it? I don't know or care all I care is I found a solution:

http://classicshell.net/

this program or 'skin' essentially turns your ugly win10 start menu into the good old classic type! such windows 7 or XP. It can do other things too but I only use it for this.

2) audio problems
Sound didn't play correctly and 'stereo mix' as a recording device was missing from my audio drivers. Meaning I'd be unable to record audio from my PC; meaning I'd be unable to stream or record videos.
Again why I really don't know or care but here's the solution; download a common audio driver like realtek.

https://ftp.station-drivers.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=353&func=startdown&id=3572&lang=en

[namida]

I advise caution with Classic Shell. I've seen a few cases where Windows updates have broken it, resulting in the user not being able to get any kind of start menu at all (classic or new).

[ccexplore]

Well, at least it wasn't like Windows 8 where the fine folks at Microsoft somehow had the brilliant idea to remove (!) the Start Menu and even the Start button (!!) altogether, replacing it with a full-screen (!) "menu" of tiles (which looked almost exactly like the right side of the Windows 10 Start Menu) in an ill-conceived bid to make the UI look and work more like mobile ("because it's the future!" wait...most PCs don't even support touch input, hmm......).

Truth be told I don't think I even use the Start Menu all that much then and now, 7 or 10 or otherwise.  Most 3rd-party programs offer an option during installation to add a desktop shortcut to the program.  Plus you can also right-click on the icon of any running program on the taskbar (at the bottom of the screen) and select "pin this program to taskbar" to keep the icon available even when the program isn't running, thus turning the taskbar into a quick-launch area for the (usually relatively few) programs you run a lot.  And in lieu of manual digging deep into the menu for the occasional need of a less frequently used program, you can just use search (in both 7 and 10) in the Start menu to more quickly find the program you want by name.  Ironically it is quite possibly more frequent that I'd use the Start Menu to shut down or restart the computer vs actually launching another program from it.

The Windows 10 Start menu replaced the right column of stuff that were in the Windows 7 menu with a rather wide area containing a bunch of tiles for other stuff that I agree are mostly not very useful.  There are ways to remove all that stuff on the right and then shrink the menu down width-wise, and you end up with something not too unlikely the Win7 menu (or at least the left half that just has all your programs), but it is a bit of a pain compared to just using something like classicshell.

[mobius]

I advise caution with Classic Shell. I've seen a few cases where Windows updates have broken it, resulting in the user not being able to get any kind of start menu at all (classic or new).

thanks for the warning. Maybe every time there's an update I'll temporarily disable it; maybe this will work??

At least; as ccexplore pointed out the menu isn't strictly necessary but it is really nice to have; for one the button on the keyboard is very useful for not only bringing it up but getting you out of any other window (especially for example if you're in some full screen mode app).
There's also other ways of accessing, well, everything, but again it's nice to have your most commonly used files and settings right there.

[mobius]

seriously disappointed in myself right now.

Upgrading my new PC so far has been a dismal failure.

My first mistake was buying the wrong power supply (too low max WAT for my graphics card). So while I can play some games, it fails other times. But at the very least I was able to USE my PC and play some games for a month or so. And I upgraded to Windows 10 on an SSD drive. Experimenting with all these things was fun and went smoother than expected. (Actually getting the graphics card to work properly inital was a bit of a mess but I got it).

But now after deciding to go further I;
-purchased RAM that isn't good (got ripped off)
-broke a cable to the graphics card so I cannot use that now and can't play certain games anymore.
-did something to damage my SSD card somehow, still not sure what's wrong with it
-dropped the CPU to my one older spare PC rendering that useless atm.

Due to either the RAM issue, the SSD or likely both and another problem with the new motherboard and case I bought I cannot get the new PC to work at all and cannot load anything on my SSD. I completely lost access to a couple new musical albums I bought and some games I worked on recently.

I'm so freaking frustrated at this point I need to take a long break from this. I don't know what to do next.

[mobius]

success!!! finally!!!!!!!

Finally, after all that hassle (and some wasted money, but not too much) I got it working!

MY now brand new PC specs:

Asus motherboard
AMD FX Processor, 8 core, 4 Ghz
16 GB RAM (using only 2 slots currently so I have the option to go up to a whopping 32 Gs in the future if I need to, at present this seems like enough)
Nvidia 970 grahpic card with 4G
an 240 G SSD and a Terabyte HDD
Liquid cooler with a total of 7 fans in the case

The case is a Rosewell case; was rather cheap but seems very sturdy and well built. It is larger than my old PC with plenty of room inside. I'm pretty happy with it.

[Colorful Arty]

Nice! I'm glad this story eventually had a happy ending for you mobius; you deserve one!

[namida]

16 GB RAM (using only 2 slots currently so I have the option to go up to a whopping 32 Gs in the future if I need to, at present this seems like enough)

Yeah, 16GB is plenty for now. Even 8GB is still acceptable for general-use or gaming PCs, though 16 is better.

[mobius]

Cell Phones: [ey! nobody says "cell" phone anymore do they? ]

First there's updates, I could rant about updates alone. But my phone updates all the time, not just the phone but each app individually updates at different times; meaning essentially something's almost always updating.

Recently my battery started draining faster and losing charge even when I'm not using it. So I purchased a new battery from ebay... and it's freaking exactly the same as my old one! No improvement what-so-ever

But the worst is notifications. Now for some reason every time I plug my phone in I get a notification: "weak charging detected" even though as far as I can tell it's working just fine as before. I'm using the same cord and And my phone charges just as fast... it's the battery that's the problem, at least I thought....
And then since my SD card is almost full I keep getting a notification that my storage space is almost full. I know it's full, I don't care; it doesn't matter. I don't need this notification every single time I look at my damn phone.

[ccexplore]

I turned off app auto-updates on my phone.  But it was more out of necessity as I have a cr*p phone that is not able to use the SD card for storing apps for some reason, and the internal storage is pretty small, and of course there are many preloaded apps that can't be uninstalled, many of which I never used anyway (but because they are preloaded, taking an update would mean you're storing both the uninstallable preloaded version as well as the update).  Basically if I don't manage the app updates myself my phone would run out of storage long ago, on app updates for many apps that I never use but can't uninstall either.  I do manually update a few apps that I do use all the time.

Maybe it's different for iOS, but many Android phones, especially cheap ones outside of those made by Samsung and Google, tend to rarely ever get OS updates if at all.  It's just app updates.  OS updates tend to require the phone to reboot afterwards, so are you sure it's not just app updates?

As for the battery--how sure are you that the battery you purchased from eBay is in fact "new"?  "Weak charging detected" does sound like the battery is old.  I'm unfamiliar with the technical details of batteries, but it's quite possible that when the phone reports battery is charged 100%, it just means it detected it's not taking on more charges anymore, it doesn't necessarily mean the 100% is same amount of charge as the 100% 2-3 years ago when battery was still new.  So an old battery wouldn't mean you can't get it to 100%, but that the 100% you get is less actual amount of charge than on a new battery, so it'd run down to 0% faster.

When you said it's losing charge "even when I'm not using it", do you really mean the phone is off-off?  A quick press of the power button just turns off the screen, the phone will still consume power from the Wi-Fi radio, the cellular radio, plus any background tasks your apps and system may be running (such as, yep, those app auto-updates).

Depend on your usage pattern, perhaps it's feasible to leave Wi-Fi off most of the time except when you need it.  This could even get side benefits such as the apps no longer auto-updating (generally you have to opt into a setting to let app auto-updates occur over cellular; make sure it's off lest you waste cellular data over those unwanted app updates).

[grams88]

That can be quite annoying the battery draining very quickly mobius. There is also the risk of getting a new battery to find out it is the exact same. I wonder if the term cell phones is an american term. Updating all the time, my actual computer had problems with the automatic updates and this something I've turned off, otherwise it kept going round in a circle.

I noticed in society we kind of need a mobile phone now as a lot more things are geared towards that type of thing. I had to have a mobile phone for (Internet banking) they are getting more secure. I'm not really a mobile phone type of person, I only use it when I have to and one thing do really use it for is phoning up and leaving a voicemail for the (phone losers of america, voicemail) a prank calling community where I'm regular on the voicemails.  Apart from that I don't really use my phone for anything else except only if you have like for the internet banking. (I would rather you didn't have to use the mobile for that but there we go)

[mobius]

I'm betting that the battery I purchased was indeed crap as I just put my old battery back in and it's working better than the new one . So I'll just deal with it (it's not really that big of a deal right now to be honest.
It was from China. In short: when buying on ebay never buy anything from China. This was the second time I got ripped off from buying something from China on ebay. It can be difficult as there is a lot of sellers from there and sometimes it isn't obvious it's China either. They have stores in America (or are at least labeled so) which have American names, but you can see they must be operated by Chinese immigrants who've shipped them from some cheap knock-off company in China.

[Minim]

I remember buying something imported from China as well and feeling ripped off. I bought a wireless mouse from a charity shop (Which fortunately, I had a discount due to the fact I volunteer in one of them) which came in from the same country. When I got it to work, the signal wasn't great and I had to lay it on a flat surface such as a hardback book. A few months later the batteries were dead, and the mouse was thrown away.

Going further into computer mice: I prefer the wired ones, but they suddenly become a problem if you're trying to move them around the house (Especially with a laptop). The wire is so thin that when it catches a door knob, it breaks and the mouse becomes completely useless. I stopped buying them and gone for wireless ones instead.

[namida]

They have stores in America (or are at least labeled so) which have American names, but you can see they must be operated by Chinese immigrants who've shipped them from some cheap knock-off company in China.

At least here, there are a lot of local companies that specialize in importing cheap Chinese goods and reselling them. They aren't always run by Chinese people - I've encountered such shops run by just about any ethnicity you can name, but they all source their goods from China.

In general, I agree that you should mostly avoid generic Chinese brands for electronics. However, some well-known Chinese brands can be just as good - or even better than - the common big names; the problem is specifically with generic (or obscure) Chinese brands. I can even think of at least one Chinese brand I very highly recommend - Xiaomi (most famous for their smartphones, but they make a lot of smart devices). It's also usually fine in my experience to go for cheap Chinese stuff for accessories, such as phone cases, where you're not relying on the electronics being reliable.

Going further into computer mice: I prefer the wired ones, but they suddenly become a problem if you're trying to move them around the house (Especially with a laptop). The wire is so thin that when it catches a door knob, it breaks and the mouse becomes completely useless. I stopped buying them and gone for wireless ones instead.

My recommendation here is to go with Logitech. Extremely reliable and pretty good on battery life in my experience, and while you'll pay a tad more than generic brands, they're not too expensive - over here, you'd probably pay about NZ$25 for a generic brand wireless keyboard+mouse combo; you might pay about NZ$40 for the same thing from Logitech. My only criticism - if you get a device with programmable buttons, their software seems to erase the setttings for these every time it updates. I've reported this bug, but their response was simply "Yes, that's what happens when there's an update". There's probably an open-source replacement out there that doesn't have this bug, I just haven't looked into it yet.