Random Tech Questions you want answered.

I think what's happening is now a bunch of Chrome OS devices are getting upgraded to Android 11.

Android 11 handles storage differently, which means a lot of apps will have to be (but most probably won't) be rewritten to accommodate that. So in the meantime they crash constantly or run very, very poorly.

It looks like something similar is happening with Nvidia Shields, too, after upgrading to Android 11 in the last update.

I think they're also "containerizing" Android on Chrome OS in a way they didn't before. Not sure if it's a VM like Linux, but I think previously it was more of a... compatibility layer?

tl;dr if you utilize the Android app functions of your Chromebook a lot, maybe hold off on the next few updates. Although I guess longterm it's still going to be an issue until the apps you like to use are rewritten or you find alternatives.

Very weird thing's been happening over the last day or two.

Basically, I've started to get what I think are ping spikes, but pretty frequently. Like every 5-10 minutes.

They never last long, like for maybe 10-15 seconds, but all of a sudden, websites will load slow or I'll have trouble connecting, or my YouTube video will stop loading, etc before returning to normal moments later.

For instance, I was talking to a buddy on Discord last night for an hour, and without fail, every 5-10 minutes, my ping would skyrocket and I'd fade out of the conversation before coming back a few moments later.

Because of the deeply intermittent nature of this, I haven't been able to check my PC (wired into the router) vs my phone or my PS4, both of which use the WiFi. I did an internet speedtest on my PC several times, and all appears to be normal there. My speeds haven't changed at all, but this weird, annoying issue persists.

Mostly, I'm hoping this is just some annoying ISP thing, and not a sign that some important part of my PC's hardware is slowly dying.

EDIT: Oh, I should also note, absolutely no issues streaming music or podcasts from Spotify. Had hiccups with Hulu and Twitch, but literally zero issues with Spotify for some reason.

EDIT v2: Did a big ol' deep clean with Malwarebytes and CCleaner, and there may have been an improvement? We'll see.

I once had weird intermittent network issues like this on my desktop, to the point where I bought a PCIe network card instead of using my onboard network.

The problem turned out to be a misbehaving USB hub, causing some periodic system hitching. The network activity stalling was just the symptom that I noticed.

Anytime you get weird intermittent system performance issues, my first recommendation is always stripping down your peripherals to the essentials. And then, monitor your system's per-process CPU usage to see if a specific process is blasting the CPU at the same time the connectivity hitches happen.

Mmmm, my wireless mouse has been getting increasingly squirrely these last few weeks. Perhaps that's the cause?

Prederick wrote:

Mmmm, my wireless mouse has been getting increasingly squirrely these last few weeks. Perhaps that's the cause?

It could be the cause, or that squirrely-ness could be another symptom of the problem.

Remove as many peripherals as possible, and swap in replacements where possible, even if it's just some leftover junky keyboard and mouse that you don't want to use long-term. Run the system for a while like that to determine if the problem has gone away. If so, you can then slowly reintroduce peripherals piece by piece, seeing if any of them re-trigger the behavior.

But if you strip away all of your USB peripherals besides a replacement mouse and keyboard, and the behavior happens again, then you can eliminate your peripherals as potential causes.

Intermittent issues are not fun to troubleshoot. I recommend simplifying your software setup as much as possible too. Are a bunch of things running in your system tray all the time? Shut them down, shut them all down. Kill off everything non-essential. Bring them back slowly after you get to a state where the problem isn't happening anymore.

Prederick wrote:

Very weird thing's been happening over the last day or two.

Basically, I've started to get what I think are ping spikes, but pretty frequently. Like every 5-10 minutes.

They never last long, like for maybe 10-15 seconds, but all of a sudden, websites will load slow or I'll have trouble connecting, or my YouTube video will stop loading, etc before returning to normal moments later.

For instance, I was talking to a buddy on Discord last night for an hour, and without fail, every 5-10 minutes, my ping would skyrocket and I'd fade out of the conversation before coming back a few moments later.

Mostly, I'm hoping this is just some annoying ISP thing, and not a sign that some important part of my PC's hardware is slowly dying.

EDIT: Oh, I should also note, absolutely no issues streaming music or podcasts from Spotify. Had hiccups with Hulu and Twitch, but literally zero issues with Spotify for some reason.

What ISP are you using? I used to be a network tech for Comcast, and this time of year HFC networks (standard cable providers that offer internet) struggle due to some weather related issues that pop up. Packet loss isn't too uncommon, which would be my first guess at the high ping (longer times due to sending multiple packets to finally get through). The reason Spotify would be fine is because audio is a relatively small amount of data to stream, so whole songs are generally buffered instead of parts of video. Discord calls, Twitch Live, etc, aren't generally buffered, so those will stand out as being significantly worse. Hulu buffers, but not nearly as much as Spotify, so it's easier to outrun the buffer if your ISP is having problems.

That being said, intermittent ISP issues are an absolute pain to deal with, even as a tech. Some companies have some amazing tools to use to pinpoint where problems are, but the tools are generally only somewhat useful as many techs don't understand them that well.

I'm a Spectrum user, if it means anything.

EDIT: Nevermind. Legion was 200% right. My USB HDD that I use as a backup has been getting kinda wonky over the last few weeks. I just unplugged it and I'm right as rain.

That will do it. Backup that drive and get rid of it. Its not doing you any good as a backup if its unreliable.

Ugh. There's a TON of data on that thing (somewhere around 2 TB). That's gonna be one of those annoying "just get it started and wait several hours" jobs, huh?

I've seen interesting things on indiegogo with regards to wifi SSDs. 2.2 Gbit transfer rates is nothing to sneeze at.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/a...

Prederick wrote:

EDIT: Nevermind. Legion was 200% right. My USB HDD that I use as a backup has been getting kinda wonky over the last few weeks. I just unplugged it and I'm right as rain.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/IB50bCp.gif)

Prederick wrote:

EDIT: Nevermind. Legion was 200% right.

I don't think we are allowed to say things like this.

mudbunny wrote:
Prederick wrote:

EDIT: Nevermind. Legion was 200% right.

I don't think we are allowed to say things like this.

God help the NFL threads...

*Legion* wrote:

The problem turned out to be a misbehaving USB hub, causing some periodic system hitching. The network activity stalling was just the symptom that I noticed.

It's so funny this came up, because this just happened to me, ha.

I was rebooting/resetting everything, genuinely baffled, and unplugging the USB hub on my desktop fixed it (completely separate issue from my Chrome OS upgrade woes, alas.)

Speaking of misbehaving USB - about once per hour or so, my machine plays the "a USB device just connected or disconnected" noise. No obvious way of knowing what's causing it. Anyone know a handy way of figuring out which device is flaky, or what's behind it?

(It might be a non-USB device, I don't know exactly what conditions cause the sound to play.)

Is your location accurate? It's significantly less humid in the northern hemisphere right now, which can cause static buildup much more easily. If you're carrying even a small charge and you touch, for example, your keyboard or mouse, it can deliver a small shock, which will disrupt the USB signal and cause windows to think your device has been unplugged/plugged. It happens all the time with my mouse, and I wouldn't have known that it was my mouse if it didn't have lights on it, so I could see them blink when I touched it.

I had a app that told me what usb device was just plugged in but can't recall what it was. My turned out to be my tablet that I had plugged in. Almost every time I would touch the table the tablet was on I'd get that usb notice sound. It stopped after fixing the cable.

I guess you could just remove all your usb devices and plugged them in one at a time and test them for awhile to see which is cause the problem.

So I'm developing a 3D game, and ever since I updated my macbook a while back, rendering performance has gotten a lot worse. For months I poked around, trying to find what I was doing to cause the slowdown.

Then today I finally realized - the OS update turned on a feature called "Automatic Graphics Switching", which apparently preserves battery life by disabling the discrete GPU, even when the machine is plugged in. And from a casual search, it's apparently impossible to have this feature only work when the machine is on battery. There used to be a 3rd party app that did it, but Apple killed it.

Am I missing something here? Why would an OS have an on-by-default battery saving mode that throttles performance even during AC power?

fenomas wrote:

So I'm developing a 3D game, and ever since I updated my macbook a while back, rendering performance has gotten a lot worse. For months I poked around, trying to find what I was doing to cause the slowdown.

Then today I finally realized - the OS update turned on a feature called "Automatic Graphics Switching", which apparently preserves battery life by disabling the discrete GPU, even when the machine is plugged in. And from a casual search, it's apparently impossible to have this feature only work when the machine is on battery. There used to be a 3rd party app that did it, but Apple killed it.

Am I missing something here? Why would an OS have an on-by-default battery saving mode that throttles performance even during AC power?

Is it only your rendering app that's failing to activate the dGPU? I assume the feature is meant to work the way Nvidia's Optimus tech does, where it would only activate when it detected an app/game that needed it was opened.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Is it only your rendering app that's failing to activate the dGPU? I assume the feature is meant to work the way Nvidia's Optimus tech does, where it would only activate when it detected an app/game that needed it was opened.

It seems to be contextual? A while ago, enabling graphics switching made everything slow - even OS-level stuff like moving windows around. That was when the machine was plugged in and the battery was around 80%. Then I charged a little while, and now with the battery at 100% the dGPU seems to be permanently on, for everything, even if I unplug the AC power.

Maybe the feature just looks at battery level, and doesn't actually know whether the machine is plugged in or not.

That would be weird, considering how smart the machines seem to be about power management otherwise. I once had to borrow a MacBook Air power adapter to limp my MacBook Pro through a surprise video task. The machine was able to use what power it could get to supplement the battery and would give me time estimates to empty or full based on how hard I was pushing the machine at the moment. You'd think a machine capable of that would be good about the way it used the GPU.

Maybe it was prioritizing efficiency and/or batter health over performance. I'll poke around and look for an option like that.

I don't know, I think it's easy to overestimate how smart these sorts of features are. I remember when I first got a macbook, it ran so hot that I couldn't rest my fingers on the keyboard, so I was looking up how to ship it back for repairs. Then I found some advice to install a 3rd-party app to make the fans turn on at a lower temperature, and that fixed the problem. Then I realized the implication - that this meant the machine had been overheating on purpose! The reason my fingertips hurt was literally just that Apple considered burnt fingertips preferable to fan noise

Anyhoo, I've just noticed that the battery dialog has a warning message that my battery is old and needs to be replaced. So that's probably kicked me into some special state, where the OS tries to throttle the battery more aggressively than the default.

I think Apple would really prefer you to buy a dedicated external keyboard and mouse, to spare your fingers from the heat.

I should ask about it on the mac support site, so a user can explain that 60℃ is actually the optimal keyboard temperature because it makes you think more carefully about what you type.

Forget about your fingers. What about your (my) lap in the summer when wearing shorts?! Yeeowch.

I had to install a fan utility as well!

Anyhoo, I've just noticed that the battery dialog has a warning message that my battery is old and needs to be replaced. So that's probably kicked me into some special state, where the OS tries to throttle the battery more aggressively than the default.

Holding charge will degrade but batteries shouldn't be worried about until they get around 1000 cycles on Macs. Apple gives you that warning much earlier to get you to shell out for a new one. (battery or laptop)

PaladinTom wrote:

Forget about your fingers. What about your (my) lap in the summer when wearing shorts?! Yeeowch.

I had to install a fan utility as well! :lol:

I got one of these in summer 2020 while (endlessly) working from home in shorts, for exactly that reason. Plugs into laptop's USB and generates a nice cool breeze both for the laptop and my legs.

PaladinTom wrote:

Forget about your fingers. What about your (my) lap in the summer when wearing shorts?! Yeeowch.

I had to install a fan utility as well! :lol:

Someone once asked an Apple employee about this in an interview. The reply was basically "that's why they're 'notebooks' and not 'laptops.'"

Vargen wrote:
PaladinTom wrote:

Forget about your fingers. What about your (my) lap in the summer when wearing shorts?! Yeeowch.

I had to install a fan utility as well! :lol:

Someone once asked an Apple employee about this in an interview. The reply was basically "that's why they're 'notebooks' and not 'laptops.'"

Ah, so I was using it wrong. Thanks Apple.

On that topic: does anyone have an M1 Air and does it still get “warm” on the bottom? (The system I had that got hot was a 2016 Pro.) I’m genuinely considering a 12.9 iPad with a keyboard instead of a laptop when I next upgrade. There are other reasons, but with this setup there is no heat on your lap.