Computers and Technology

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I use Giphy quit a lot and the directions are pretty clear. I may use this myself.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.hootsuite.com/how-to-make-gif/amp/

IT’S WIN-DOZE

Google used to have, “Search within results” That was very powerful for getting what you wanted.

Now all search engines seem to have a regional thing going on. What this means one person make a search in New York and another person use the same search term in California the results will be only local sources. Then there are people who game the…[Read more]

I put quotes around search terms already and it still ignores them, as well as giving me pages that do not even have a single one of my search terms in them. Aggravating beyond measure! The way search engines work now makes doing exact research extremely difficult.

All it does is put quote marks around a search string, so instead of searching for

these words

you search for

“these words”

. You can add the quotes yourself – Javascript with 11 downloads just doesn’t seem worth it to me.

I’ve found that the best way to deal with that is to do a total wipe of the drive and start fresh with a clean install.

Learned that one back in the old DOS days.

Just in case anyone’s curious it finally finished last night. It came up with exactly one error message: “the windows install was not successful.” Ha! Jathink?

I guess at least now I have a good excuse to get a new computer.

It’s always felt as if they don’t really care about their users.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=21

sounds foreign to me, sorry. I’m not as up on technology as I used to be. I don’t believe that Windows is doing a full-format install, no. I told it to save all my files and software. My files were mostly backed up in May. So it won’t be a nightmare if I lose them but I’d rather not; that’s why I’m being patient. Oh, and it’s at 85% right…[Read more]

I had (have but don’t use) an iffy 3 TB Seagate drive that kept acting up so I did a full format on it. That kept stalling, but eventually completed, as it seems that unless a drive is very far gone, a full format works with the error correction of the drive’s hardware to get those sectors permanently marked as unusable, and thus invisible to…[Read more]

8 gigs of RAM already, though it is a SATA hard drive.

This morning when I woke up it had progressed to 71%. However, it stayed stuck there all day until just about an hour ago when it hit 72 finally. I called Microsoft when it was stuck today and the guy tried to convince me to cancel out of this install, but patience has always rewarded me with…[Read more]

Is the laptop upgradeable? I ask because SSDs are finally at reasonable prices for doing things like that. RAM is sort of reasonably priced as well.

The whole laptop is only 4 years old. It’s an Acer. It was fine until the Windows update in May and it failed that one and didn’t get that one until July, but even when it finally got the update it has still been as slow as molasses.

there’s some other problem there too.

How old is the hard drive?

Depending on drive size, type, and speed, a full format, where every bit gets overwritten, which also allows the drive to mark bad sectors to not be used, can take a long time.