Random Tech Questions you want answered.

I was worried it might also have lots of pictures or sound files that might have aided fragmentation, but I think it's just my anxiety lol. Thanks for the info, Rykin.

This video gives a decent overview on how fragmentation happens:

Thanks Rykin!

Also keep in mind that fragmented media files normally play just fine, because their bitrates are much lower than what the media can provide, even fragmented. Most spinning drives can deliver a hundred megs a second or more, and even high-res video files are normally only three or four megs a second.

Fragmentation could matter if you're trying to play multiple movies at once, but would probably almost never be visible with only one.

Good to know. My experience is on the server side, with lots of streams at once.

I'm looking at getting a new, larger media storage HDD. Probably 8-10TB. Is there a reason to go with 7200RPM over 5400RPM? It's typically being accessed by Plex.

The faster drives are only worth it if you're doing a lot of writes to the drive. For reading files, especially through Plex, you'd never see a noticeable difference between the two, unless you got a really sh*tty 5400 RPM drive and compared it to a beast of a 7200 RPM drive (think no-name China special 5400 vs a Seagate or Western Digital Enterprise 7200).

Yeah for a Plex library just get the 5400, it will probably be quieter and consume less power too.

Excel Gurus:

Working at a small hardware company we keep track of our customer returns with an excel spreadsheet where each row references a particular system and the columns in that row act as fields e.g. s/n , reported problem, date returned ect.. We manually transfer that row data over to a report excell sheet that is printed out and sent to the user. It is slow and laborious.

I am trying to find the best way to make a selected/highlighted row auto-populate a second sheet. My first thought was have a selected row auto populate sheet 2 row 1. Then having the report (sheet 3) auto populate with the information from sheet two, row 1.

Is there a forumula I can use to use to grab a particular cell in a highlighted row from another sheet?

Any suggestions are welcome. I'm even open to throwing out the whole Excel thing if their are better cheap/ free programs, or services, to track repairs and print reports.

Yes you can do this with the INDIRECT function.

For example say in your report sheet you have cells A1 though E1 that you want to populate with row 12 from the original returns list. You could have a 'row pointer' cell where you tell the sheet what row to pull, let's put it in cell P1 on your report sheet.

In P1 (your pointer cell) you put the row number you want to pull, in this case 12.

In A1 you put something like =INDIRECT("ReturnSheet!A"&$P$1)

ReturnSheet is the name of the sheet where the data comes from. The 'A' tells it to pull column A, $P$1 tells it to pull whatever row that the pointer cell has in it, in this case 12. So it factors out to pull cell A12 from ReturnSheet.

Copy that to the other fields you want to fill out, adjust column A to columns B, C, etc. And then going forward you just need to change your pointer cell (P1) to be whatever row you want to pull the return data from and it will automatically update your form.

There are probably free or low cost specific return tracking tools out there, but I don't know of any good ones off the top of my head.

Thanks for your assistance! I just tried it out and I'm doing something wrong.

Sheet1 , C98 = 10-3232 R200
(that is a part #)

Just to test it out on sheet2 i put in the value of 98 in P1.

Then put in the following formula in sheet2 , C6

=INDIRECT("Sheet1!C"&$P$1)

But it just shows the formula in the cell instead of a value. No errors or anything.

Edit: Weird but I paste that same formula in D6, a cell that haven't been messing, with and it works! Does that make any sense?

Edit 2: Doh, it was categorized as a "text" cell. Thank you!!!

Cool I am glad you got it working. Explaining excel solutions via text always makes it seems more complicated than it actually is.

Thank you Pur and Leaping for answering my question while I completely left this thread for 2 weeks.

LeapingGnome wrote:

Cool I am glad you got it working. Explaining excel solutions via text always makes it seems more complicated than it actually is. :)

No kidding. Searching excel solutions is super complicated when you don't know exactly what you are looking for too.

I'm smoothing out so much of the process now with pull down lists and auto fills!

My computer has started freezing up at random. No error. Only way I can tell is my mouse suddenly doesn’t move and keyboard commands (windows key, ctrl alt delete) are unresponsive. Screen shows no indication anything is wrong except the clock no longer is moving.

It will happen when nothing is open and I’m away from it. It will happen when I’m just browsing the internet.

This is an older pc I built myself about 8 years ago. I’m not really in a position where I want to build a new one. The computer has gotten pretty noisy lately- like there’s a very loud fan, or something, when it is running. I’ve read that could be the power supply. But I want to be sure before I start spending money on replacing parts.

Tscott wrote:

My computer has started freezing up at random. No error. Only way I can tell is my mouse suddenly doesn’t move and keyboard commands (windows key, ctrl alt delete) are unresponsive. Screen shows no indication anything is wrong except the clock no longer is moving.

It will happen when nothing is open and I’m away from it. It will happen when I’m just browsing the internet.

This is an older pc I built myself about 8 years ago. I’m not really in a position where I want to build a new one. The computer has gotten pretty noisy lately- like there’s a very loud fan, or something, when it is running. I’ve read that could be the power supply. But I want to be sure before I start spending money on replacing parts.

Very difficult to diagnose and nobody will be able to tell you for sure what part is causing the freeze. It could be a dozen things. My advice is to backup your documents and do a clean install. That way you eliminate software issues as the cause of the freeze. Run as lean as you can for a few weeks to see if the freezes go away. That includes all usb peripherals other than mouse and keyboard. Try and clean the PC out as well with dust blower.

If not try and borrow or use another mouse and keyboard. Then move to one memory module at a time. After that you are into The other components.

As TheGameguru said, it could be one (or several) different things. Unfortunately, the best way is to systematically try to eliminate each possibility as best as you can.

In addition to swapping hardware, you might consider doing a thorough check of your HD for bad sectors and remap those that are identified as bad. I recommend spinrite for that kind of diagnosis/repair: https://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

Tscott wrote:

My computer has started freezing up at random. No error. Only way I can tell is my mouse suddenly doesn’t move and keyboard commands (windows key, ctrl alt delete) are unresponsive. Screen shows no indication anything is wrong except the clock no longer is moving.

It will happen when nothing is open and I’m away from it. It will happen when I’m just browsing the internet.

This is an older pc I built myself about 8 years ago. I’m not really in a position where I want to build a new one. The computer has gotten pretty noisy lately- like there’s a very loud fan, or something, when it is running. I’ve read that could be the power supply. But I want to be sure before I start spending money on replacing parts.

The noise could indicate a problem. What sort of temperatures are you seeing for the CPU? (CPUID HWMonitor would be a decent utility to use.) If it hasn't been cleaned and had the thermal paste refreshed, I'd do that first before anything else. After 8 years things can get pretty crusty.

Thanks for everyone's input. I've cleaned out the insides of my PC, removed all usb cords and connections that were non-vital, and I did a display driver update that was needed. My PC has run fine the rest of the day. I'll see how it goes the next few days, and I'll look into the temps of my PC when I have the time.

As others have said, that's really annoying to diagnose. There are a few other diagnostic tests that you can probably do that aren't intrusive.

Booting memtest86+ is one. The download section should have an iso and a USB key installer.

Are the freezes any more likely if the system is running hard, or have you not had the opportunity to notice? You could try running a CPU or system benchmark and see if it freezes right off the bat.

At what point should I do a fresh Windows install? I’m having issues with several drivers, iTunes not updating, and my headset not picking up. One of my tech support friends recommended doing a fresh install every so often but not looking forward to it.

jdzappa wrote:

At what point should I do a fresh Windows install? I’m having issues with several drivers, iTunes not updating, and my headset not picking up. One of my tech support friends recommended doing a fresh install every so often but not looking forward to it.

I don't think there is a definitive answer to that question other than when you feel you need to.

Doing a periodic reinstall of Windows was a thing back in like... the Windows XP and earlier days.

There is no good reason you should have to routinely reinstall modern versions of Windows.

jdzappa wrote:

At what point should I do a fresh Windows install? I’m having issues with several drivers, iTunes not updating, and my headset not picking up. One of my tech support friends recommended doing a fresh install every so often but not looking forward to it.

I'd say you're there. Any one problem doesn't warrant a wipe but given you have several you should definitely consider it. The good news is that it’s super easy to do nowadays. As long as your data is backed up elsewhere and easy to restore. The biggest pia is reinstalling huge games. Make sure your saves are in the cloud or manually backed up too!

Middcore wrote:

Doing a periodic reinstall of Windows was a thing back in like... the Windows XP and earlier days.

There is no good reason you should have to routinely reinstall modern versions of Windows.

I disagree. As good as it is, Windows rot is still a thing with all of the driver updates and patches. A good wipe and re-install definitely can help strange issues. Especially on an older pc.

You shouldn't really need to anymore, but you can. Windows 10 even has a "Fresh Start" option now, although I've never tried it, so I can't recommend it one way or the other.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4012986/windows-security-track-device-performance-health

Very quick Windows 10 question:

I'm building a new PC, but I haven't done it in a bit and totally forgot about installing it onto a computer without a CD-ROM drive. I should just buy a USB and do the digital download verison, right?

Yes. I haven't installed Windows off a CD/DVD in forever. If the computer you're setting the USB stick up on is running Windows, you can download and use the Windows Media Creation Tool to do the downloading and stick imaging in one go.

You can create a bootable usb stick using the Windows Media Creation Tool.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/soft...

If your system already has Windows 10, you can wipe and re-install and automatically reactivate. If you have 8 or 7 you still may be able to activate*.

* Totally anecdata so YMMV. If you're going to purchase Win10 anyway it doesn’t hurt to try installing first and activating later.

PaladinTom wrote:

If you have 8 or 7 you still may be able to activate*.

* Totally anecdata so YMMV. If you're going to purchase Win10 anyway it doesn’t hurt to try installing first and activating later.

In my experience you need to do an in-place upgrade using the Media Creation Tool download while booted into W7 for the license to convert to a digital W10 license.
Once that is done you can do a clean install which will activate normally.

And by experience I mean I did that today. Works like a charm.

Windows 10 doesn’t even fit on a DVD now.

If you have a Windows 7 key you can plug it in to Windows 10 during or after a completely clean install - it will activate if it hasn’t already been used for an upgrade. I’ve done this numerous times when upgrading or installing an SSD. I’m only assuming it will fail if the key has been used before - I haven’t actually tried to use one more than once. On pre-built PCs with Windows 8, the installer will read the key from the BIOS without any prompting.

If you’re building a new PC that license technically still belongs to the old PC though.