My ISP sent a tech out less than a week ago to adjust my cable signal levels, and he got everything set up properly, including putting some sort of attenuator on the back of my cable modem. It was their suggestion, since my levels were outside of specifications; however, I hadn't noticed any effects on my service.
Now, only days later, the levels are out of spec again:
It seems that only the return path is out of spec, and my connection doesn't seem to be suffering in any way I've noticed. Should I be setting up another appointment for a tech (PITA to make sure I'm home) or is this not something I should concern myself with?
Check the line for kinks or crimps, and remove any splitters? I had a similar issue (I'm with Start, reselling Cogeco) here in Kingston, and they had to run an entire new line from the street all the way to my modem to finally fix.
Does anyone know of an app or program for Windows that allows you to password protect individual files? For insurance through right clicking a document and selecting 'set password'?
Not sure if this fits your needs but you can zip a file and set a password on the zip, I think. If it's an office file or a PDF, some of those programs can password protect things too. Or you could store the file on an encrypted USB. I could be wrong but I think with all of those methods, if you forget/initially mistype the password, that stuff is locked forever, just a warning.
Check the line for kinks or crimps, and remove any splitters? I had a similar issue (I'm with Start, reselling Cogeco) here in Kingston, and they had to run an entire new line from the street all the way to my modem to finally fix.
No kinks, crimps, or splitters - there's actually only about 3 ft of line I have access to in my apartment. It sounds like I'll need to call them out again, but at least it's running well (as far as I can tell) in the meantime.
So I'm trying to replace my 10/100 DSL modem/wi-fi router that Verizon gave me with a Gigabit DSL modem/wi-fi router, to get the most out of the Gigabit cards in my gaming PC and my NAS connected by Cat6 cables. I bought a TP-Link TD-W8970 off Amazon, although none of the options I saw appeared to have reviews passing the "xkcd criteria" (i.e. - anything below 4 stars is crap). This thing definitely gives a cheap vibe, there's Engrish all over the menus.
I followed the instructions exactly, it even had my configuration pre-loaded, but it would always fail at the final stage. Going as in-depth as this thing would let me, it appears that the router can't communicate with the Verizon DHCP server to obtain a Gateway IP (I connect through Dynamic IP, not PPPoE). I'm not sure if this is Verizon not allowing me to use my own modem, if my cheap-ass DSL can't support Gigabit connections, or if the modem is a sh*tty cheap piece of electronics. I had Verizon back in NY for a brief period, running PPPoE, and I used an Actiontec modem I bought off Amazon without any issue after numerous problems with the modem Verizon provided.
So before I hunt for a box to return this thing to Amazon, I figured I'd ask the Goodjers: is there anything I can try to get this modem operational, and if not, are there any recommendations for a Gigabit DSL modem/router or should I just go with the brand name and get a Netgear for $40 more than this thing cost? Any input is appreciated, but I won't be able to do anything with it until the weekend due to the holidays.
Here's something I learned last night. If you have a Qualcomm wifi adapter with a feature called bandwidth control, turn it off. It sucks, especially on a spinning drive. It constantly writes info to a text file about apps and how they're using your network, slowing down drive performance by a huge margin. It was taking me 20 seconds sometimes to open task manager, felt like I'd gone from having 8gb of memory to 4.
Everything is much better after disabling that "feature".
So I'm trying to replace my 10/100 DSL modem/wi-fi router that Verizon gave me with a Gigabit DSL modem/wi-fi router, to get the most out of the Gigabit cards in my gaming PC and my NAS connected by Cat6 cables.
Not sure how Verizon does things, but in my neck of the woods many ISP providers register the MAC address of the router to prevent unauthorized devices from hijacking their service. You might need to contact Verizon and let them know you have a new Router that should be authorized on your account.
I asked in the regular questions thread, and mermaidpirate helpfully pointed out that this thread exists
I have something I'd like to do related to desktop backgrounds and screen savers and I'm not sure what to google.
I'd like to cycle backgrounds. Windows has that built in, but you have to point it at a folder. My Picture Library has a bunch of stuff that are not wallpapers. I'd prefer not to have to organize my folders to appease the wallpaper system, and also prefer not to have to manually sift through several hundred pictures to do so. I also have two monitors, which are different resolutions and I'd like to be able show different wallpapers on each monitor.I also like to use the Pictures screensaver, and would prefer at least not to show tiny pictures, with the same preference for not having to organize my folder structure to appease the screensaver.
Does anyone know if software exists for this purpose? I could probably write something to fit my needs, but if something already exists, I'd like to use that.
clover already suggested DisplayFusion, but that doesn't seem to quite do what I want and also does a bunch of stuff that either I have a way to do already, or don't want.
Maybe John's Background Switcher will do what you want? Not sure it fits 100% of your requirements but should hit most of them.
Begin Rant:
When I first built this computer 2 years ago I had absolutely zero issues. No dead parts, no weird bugs, everything worked great and all the games played great. Over that time I have replaced my ram with 16gb Corsair Vengeance stuff and upgraded from the GTX 465 to the 770. I had a HX 750w PSU from Corsair. For the next year I had zero issues and everything ran great, now at the advent of next gen super leet games my system started restarting anytime I tried to run AC:Unity, Far Cry 4 and so on. No errors, no logs, just the indication that the system restarted from some strange reason. So I began to trouble shoot, putting the system through its paces trying to figure out what it may be. I put my card in my wife's computer and ran similar tests(furmark, occt, etc) and everything was fine. Put her card in mine, ran all those tests, everything seemed fine. So I decided that I would just play games on her computer temporarily until after the holiday season so I could save some money. First thing I try to play, Minecraft, BSODs her computer and it won't restart, as it begins to restart it does the shut down click and nothing. Anytime you try to start it, nothing. Aha! I thought, it must be the car after all, I'll RMA this one and all will be well. Start looking on newegg and only find information that says I'm out of warranty, get pissy and order a new card(970 gtx). While I'm waiting on the new card to arrive I start playing some games on my computer with my wife's 550ti installed and mess around in Minecraft and Fallout 3 as I didn't want to play new games in low and those were scratching my itch at the time. Notice that youtube viewing causes the screen to go black sometimes and pop up a driver failure warning. Assume, at first, that it must be because I'm using a 550ti but it installed drivers for a 770. Remove all of the drivers and do a fresh install specifically for the 550ti. Issue keeps happening, so I start to look up some possible solutions. Most point to power supply failure, since the system was just restarting without any sort of log that also indicates hardware failure and while my card did act up on my wife's computer, it doesn't mean that a failing PSU could've done some damage. Order a new PSU before 970 even gets here, wait and install them both today. Load up games, all seems well, everything is going fi-AppCrash.exe on Far Cry 4 and The Crew(free with my 970! 
). Load up Dragon Age: Inquisition. Everything seems fine, game is going, no crash...screen freezes, mouse still movable, ctrl+alt+del, screen keeps trying to 'find itself' or whatever, finally see a smaller screen of DA:I and the task manager pops up but the main screen is insanely fuzzy and squiggly, mouse icon disappeared at that point, can't find way around to close DA:I, forces computer shut down. Looking through even logs I've found some nvlddmkm cannot be found or caused failure logs, look up a solution and try to follow those steps, even running windows update and getting some optional stuff. Now I'm waiting for that stuff to download and I'm agitated. Not only that but now I'm paranoid that perhaps the socket isn't supplying enough power and it's ruined my system.
End Rant.
That sounds very frustrating. It sounds like you've tried the most likely possibilities, and they didn't pan out, so now you're looking for the less likely ones.
The next thing I'd check would be the RAM. First thing I'd try would be memtest86+ without changing anything at all. If you get errors there, you know at least one of the sticks is bad.
Assuming you've got four sticks, try removing a pair (check your motherboard manual for where you should install two sticks for best performance), and re-run the tests. If you still see problems, swap the other pair in, which should clear the problems. Then, with the erroring pair, try running one at a time -- the tests will run slower, but they'll run, and that should let you isolate the problem chip.
If memtest doesn't show a failure, try doing the pull-and-swap routine with normal gaming. Memtest does not catch everything. If your problems stop with one pair of chips pulled, well, you know where the problem is, and can swap around, in the same way, until you figure it out.
It's kind of time-consuming, but it's usually not very difficult.... swapping RAM just takes a couple of minutes. It's the test cycles that take awhile. With the memtest part, at least, you can run them overnight.
Yeah I ran Memtest when the whole thing started. Only have 2 sticks so it was less time consuming than most. Ran both in: Passed. 1 in each of their respective slots and also passed. I didn't think to try running one at a time while gaming though so I'll give that a try in a bit. Saw a suggestion to regulate cpu voltage to 1.25v but I'm wary of that one. Going to also do a cleaning of the drivers again and this time I'm not going to install the Nvidia experience as it's pretty buggy. But yeah, grasping at straws at this point. Honestly I'm going to move my computer to my new house(even though there's no internet yet) just so I can be sure it's on a good plug. I don't trust the contractor that built the addition on my grandmother-in-law's house. He didn't do a very good job with the stuff you can see, so I can't imagine how poorly he ran the electric lines.
Has anyone used voipo or axvoice ? How has the experience been?
I'm contemplating ditching the land line for a cheaper voip option and those look to be the cheapest available.
Oh, for some reason, I glossed past this, three weeks ago. If anyone's still reading and interested, check out voip.ms. With most phones, you have to be fairly technically ept to get the system working, but there's tremendous power exposed through the web interface, most of what VOIP can really offer, and they're cheap as heck.... I pay a buck-fiddy a month, no joke, plus about a penny a minute. (You can get a ton of minutes for $5/mo, if that's better for you.) There's also a phone system out there that can talk with voip.ms and configure your account for you, but I forget the brand name.
I spent probably three or four hours setting up the line initially... I had to go through about, geeze, maybe twenty pages of options, and think carefully about every single thing. And the quality was a little spotty, early on, but at this point, I forget I'm on a VOIP phone... and I only have to load $25 into the account about once a year.
Does anyone know why both my and my wife's android phones (approaching 2 years old 1 htc and 1 moto) are telling us we don't have enough space to download or update apps although we both have more than a gig of free space on our phones?
I had trouble like that on my old htc desire HD. I never found a fix, so I'm no help, sorry. I moved all my installed apps to the SD card like the 'internal storage wizard' suggested but the problem kept coming up. I could never work out what to flush out of the internal storage to fix it. I wondered if perhaps it was old downloaded mail somehow causing the problem but I never worked out how to test or deal with that.
Random question:
I don't have a headset with a microphone for my pc. When p,saying games like Titanfall should I be able to hear other people talking if they are using a headset or will that only happen if I too have a headset with a mic?
Just curious.
Thanks,
Chad
Random question:
I don't have a headset with a microphone for my pc. When p,saying games like Titanfall should I be able to hear other people talking if they are using a headset or will that only happen if I too have a headset with a mic?
Just curious.
Thanks,
Chad
You should hear them through your speakers if they are saying anything. Check your settings if you aren't(and you know someone is talking) either the volume is too low, or perhaps the voice chat audio is defaulting to something else, which would be a check in origin's settings I believe(that's how it works on steam at least).
Thank you for the response. I see a microphone icon next to people's names but Im guessing they aren't talking. If it's similar to Xbox, a small graphic flashes next to the icon when people are talking and I haven't seen that.
Thanks!
Chad
Bubs14 wrote:So I'm trying to replace my 10/100 DSL modem/wi-fi router that Verizon gave me with a Gigabit DSL modem/wi-fi router, to get the most out of the Gigabit cards in my gaming PC and my NAS connected by Cat6 cables.
Not sure how Verizon does things, but in my neck of the woods many ISP providers register the MAC address of the router to prevent unauthorized devices from hijacking their service. You might need to contact Verizon and let them know you have a new Router that should be authorized on your account.
Finally had some time to devote to this issue again, and I got it resolved, so I wanted to share:
I think the problem before was that I unceremoniously ripped out the old modem's connection. Googling suggested that you have to release the DHCP lease manually, or gracefully disconnect the modem so that the lease is released, or you have to wait "several hours" for the existing lease to expire otherwise. I was trying to do this in the course of an evening the day before I left for Thanksgiving. So just now, I did the disconnect of the old modem, pulled the DSL line from the wall, switched everything over, reconfigured it, and it's working beautifully. I have my desktop and NAS on Gigabit, all my wireless devices are happy (laptop, cell phone and printer; need to reconfigure my Chromecast at some point), things are good.
TL;DR: Something to bear in mind if your ISP assigns gateway IPs via DHCP and you want to switch modems, the DHCP lease of the old modem has to expire or be released before you can switch.
TL;DR: Something to bear in mind if your ISP assigns gateway IPs via DHCP and you want to switch modems, the DHCP lease of the old modem has to expire or be released before you can switch.
Sometimes that's local to the cablemodem; it knows the MAC address it first saw, and it will only let that MAC out for a DHCP address. When I was on Charter, I always needed to power cycle the modem, and that would clear up DHCP problems.
You can also, frequently, clone the old MAC onto new hardware... there's often a spot in the web admin interface to put it. Jot down the old one, and write it into that spot, and the cable ISP can't easily tell you changed hardware.
I'm more familiar with the issue locally, for sure: assign a DHCP reservation after the device has already connected, either the lease has to expire or you reboot the modem to purge the leases. I didn't really get it before; this experience spelled it out for me. Networking is not my favorite CS/IT topic, for sure.
I saw people talking about MAC cloning/spoofing in my Google search. I figured I would try that if disconnecting the old modem gracefully didn't work. I'll keep that in mind for the future.
I've attempted like a billion fixes at this point on my PC but no dice, so I'm putting that on the back burner while I plan a good way to organize consoles at my new house. I want to keep everything in one room(my office) and then run one long hdmi cable into the living room(about 10 meters) so that the only thing plugged up in there is the tv and maybe eventually a surround sound system. I've found an HDMI Switch with an IR remote that can handle swapping through the sources so really at this point I just need to figure out how to run cable. Initially I had planned on running it through the floor and under the house(no basement) but didn't like the idea of crawling under there if I can avoid it(snakes, spider, small spaces, blech). My mom of all people made a good suggestion, which is to take off the vinyl siding and run the cable along wall. But I'm concerned about temperatures. I've googled a bit today but haven't found anything about negative affects from temperature but I'm not convinced that I didn't miss something. Anyone know anything about it?
Networking is not my favorite CS/IT topic, for sure.
Most of it's actually pretty easy. There's a lot of stuff to know, but all the individual pieces are fairly trivial. I think of it as more an exercise of memory than anything. Once you get past a certain point with it, everything suddenly meshes, and it all makes sense. There's basically two separate technologies you're learning: Ethernet, which is a hardware standard, and then TCP/IP, which is a software layer that runs on top of Ethernet (and almost everything else, too.) It's easy to get those confused, at first, but they're separate things.
I've googled a bit today but haven't found anything about negative affects from temperature but I'm not convinced that I didn't miss something.
Per Wikipedia, operating temperature on Cat5 cable is -55C to +60C, so probably your vinyl siding will fail before the cable does.
edit: for some reason, I thought you were running Ethernet, but on re-reading, I see it's HDMI. You'd have to check per cable, but in a quick check, I'm showing -15C to +55C, which is probably still fine unless you're in a very cold area.
You can get converters so that you can run HDMI over Ethernet, if you're in New York or Minnesota or something.
second edit: your location says Kentucky -- I doubt it would be a problem, there. 
Bubs14 wrote:Networking is not my favorite CS/IT topic, for sure.
Most of it's actually pretty easy. There's a lot of stuff to know, but all the individual pieces are fairly trivial. I think of it as more an exercise of memory than anything. Once you get past a certain point with it, everything suddenly meshes, and it all makes sense. There's basically two separate technologies you're learning: Ethernet, which is a hardware standard, and then TCP/IP, which is a software layer that runs on top of Ethernet (and almost everything else, too.) It's easy to get those confused, at first, but they're separate things.
b12n11w00t wrote:I've googled a bit today but haven't found anything about negative affects from temperature but I'm not convinced that I didn't miss something.
Per Wikipedia, operating temperature on Cat5 cable is -55C to +60C, so probably your vinyl siding will fail before the cable does.
edit: for some reason, I thought you were running Ethernet, but on re-reading, I see it's HDMI. You'd have to check per cable, but in a quick check, I'm showing -15C to +55C, which is probably still fine unless you're in a very cold area.
You can get converters so that you can run HDMI over Ethernet, if you're in New York or Minnesota or something.
second edit: your location says Kentucky -- I doubt it would be a problem, there.
Haha, thanks for the tip. I found a -50c comment, but it was Yahoo answers so I didn't trust it. Before I buy a cable I'll check out the specs and see if I can get the details, but yeah it sounds like it should be good to go.
What I'd do: check Monoprice. Look to see if they have temp ratings. If not, ask support what the temp ranges are for their cables, and then buy a few if they're okay.
So the new AMD drivers came out. I'm currently running the BETA 14.11.2 drivers, but the new 14.12 have come out. However they say that the display driver is 14.501.1003. Does this mean the beta drivers are still better?
Here is the link: http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop?os=Windows+7+-+64
So, is there an Apple or iPhone troubleshooting thread that I've missed, or is this the right place for a question?
Say an iPhone clock freezes when the device locks. (The lock screen freezes the device, though it can still receive calls and texts and unlocks just fine?)
Say that rebooting the device doesn't work and a restore from backup didn't work.
Say the network time doesn't set automatically and the time zone doesn't set properly either. (The phone network Apple 'guru' was just as confused.)
Is there anything else a home user can do without voiding Apple warranty, or should I just have her sling the phone off to the Apple tech automatons?
You can completely factory reset and NOT restore from backup. "Restore from backup" is quite possibly just putting back the thing that is broken.
If you don't get the same behavior on a completely fresh factory restore, then that's a clue that the backup needs to be junked.
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