Computer/phone advice/troubleshooting help thread

Discussion in 'Geek Cave: Computers, Tablets, HT, Phones, Games' started by rhythmdevils, Sep 11, 2021.

  1. rhythmdevils

    rhythmdevils MOT: rhythmdevils audio

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    Post questions or troubleshooting issues here. There are lots of knowledgable people on this forum, and this way it won't be intimidating to ask for help. And we can keep it all in one place.

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  2. bixby

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    Alright. A few times now I have experienced an issue with video on my older i5 3470 CPU with integrated graphics. Sometimes I get a small pixelated 1 in. square on the screen and last night my monitor would not get the Displayport signal from the computer. Could this be related to the shared memory even though I think by default the integrated graphics only gets about 1GB. I have 8GB on board, but at times I may have a bunch of browser tabs open.

    So my thought was perhaps a separate budget graphics card would ease the occurrence of issues like this. I have a low profile PCIE x16 slot available but the web says it is limited to 25 watts. Power supply is fixed and not replaceable with any standard supply on this HP business oriented computer. Would an appropriate used low to mid level graphics card help?

    And no games or high res video just youtube and the like.

    The net seems to rec stuff like the following:

    AMD Radeon HD7450 PCIe x16 graphics card, 1 GB
    AMD RX 460 or 470

    NVIDIA GTX 660 or GTX 750Ti

    GT 710 or R7 240 level

    I know nothing about graphics cards, your knowledge is greatly appreciated.
     
  3. BarnBurner

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  4. bixby

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  5. Metro

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    Last edited: Sep 26, 2021
  6. bixby

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  7. Lyander

    Lyander Official SBAF Equitable Empathizer

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    Def go for a GT 710. It's able to run just fine out of the x16 slot with no supplemental power (19W power consumption is amazing, haha). It'll also be very much able to stream Full HD video quite easily, but 4k video may not work out well.

    It would still be useful to know how many watts the power supply is though just in case the OEM really skimped out for some reason. Could you share the exact PC model? You can find it by opening windows search and then typing "dxdiag" then just sharing screenshots of what you see in the window.

    What speed is your RAM running at, and is XMP enabled in the BIOS (basically an easy speed upgrade for many modern RAM kits? You can determine this by going to the "Memory" tab in task manager (press CTRL+Shift+Esc to open the interface) and looking for the speed rating, measured in MHz; this ought to help loads with integrated graphics if it's not already enabled.

    Could also be thermals perhaps? The Intel 3000 series isn't exactly new so if the build has been running for years then dust buildup and thermal paste drying up could result in a very hot-tempered chip, which'd be prone to graphical artefacting.
     
  8. BarnBurner

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  9. rhythmdevils

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    I have a domain email address (ie [email protected]) and for years I never got any spam. All of a sudden I'm getting flooded with it. its like some spam company picked up my email address and they provide a service to people to send spam email. A lot have similar language and formatting.

    I'm wondering if anyone has any tips for what I can do about this. It's a domain email address, and my hosting company doesn't have very good tools for spam blocking. the only thing I can do is setup specific subject lines or email addresses that get sent directly to the trash, but I'm worried I'll have messages go to trash that aren't spam. though it's unlikely that "savage grow" won't be spam, but many others have more generic subjects.

    I prefer Spark for my email app, but it has no spam filter or any way to block email addresses. so I've switched to Edison mail, which isn't as fast, it's kind of clunky, but I can at least block email addresses. But the spammers are tricky and keep changing up the addresses.

    One idea I had was to have my domain email forwarded to my gmail address, sp gmail would filter out the spam, and then just fetch emails from my domain email and gmail email from my gmail account. but I was warned by my hosting company that gmail might decide my domain email is spam and that's very hard to undo.

    Are there any better email apps for iOS for spam? Edison mail has a new subscription for spam but it's 15$ a month which is ridiculous for an email app.

    Or maybe some kind of add on or other trick?

    thanks!
     
  10. fastfwd

    fastfwd Friend

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    If you add [email protected] to your gmail contacts and send an email from the gmail account to the myname account, you should be safe from having the myname address misidentified as a spammer. And you can mark email from the myname account as "important" to reinforce the point.

    But if you want to be sure, you can do something different: Instead of forwarding from your myname account to gmail, have gmail pull it from the myname account.
    1. Copy down your current provider's POP3 incoming-email parameters and secure SMTP outgoing-email parameters.
    2. Create a new gmail account -- say [email protected].
    3. In gmail, click the gear icon for settings, click All Settings, then select the Accounts and Import tab.
    4. In the "Send mail as" section, add your [email protected] account and set its SMTP parameters. Set that account as default, and select "Always reply from default address".
    5. In the "Check mail from other accounts" section, add your [email protected] account and set its POP3 parameters.
    6. In gmail, test your setup by sending an email to [email protected] and watching the gmail inbox. You should receive that email (it might take a few minutes, depending on how you configured the POP3 section) and it should appear to have been sent by [email protected].
    Once that's working, you can just use the gmail interface for checking and composing email, or you should be able to reconfigure your email client to check and send email through gmail's servers instead of myname's servers.
     
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    Last edited: Nov 8, 2021
  11. rhythmdevils

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    Is there an iOS app that will "shred" documents or files or images? In other words not just erase them, but erase them and then write over them multiple times, ideally the 32 time ultra safe protocol? All I can find googling for it is apps that wipe your entire phone like that, but I'd like one that would just erase sensitive files. I wound up using the one I have on my computer to erase a file that was on my iDrive. But having an app like that on my phone would be nice.
     
  12. fastfwd

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    With flash memory -- on phones/tablets, USB flash drives, memory cards, SSD, etc. -- it's more-or-less impossible for an application to reliably overwrite the area where a file was stored. And in fact this is also true, to a lesser extent, even with modern spinning magnetic hard drives.

    So file "shredding" doesn't work in those applications.

    But that's ok, because filesystem or full-disk encryption will protect your files from an attacker who has physical access to your locked device. And as far as I know, iOS encrypts by default. Are you trying to protect against a more unusual threat?
     
  13. rhythmdevils

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    I don't know much about the technical side of it, so I don't have any specific concerns, just general security. I just had a sensitive text document and was wary of just erasing it from my phone and figured there must be a more secure way. But it sounds like it's not necessary. thank you!
     
  14. santoshmanivannan

    santoshmanivannan New

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    one way to make sure you've erased any drive of a particular file/data is to fill it with something else, you could do it over and over again just in case..

    So theoretically, deleting the file and transferring say a text file with some random text in it over and over again to your phone till it runs out of memory (you can also do this within a folder to make it easier), then deleting and repeating it a few times (if you want) would be a solution.
     
  15. bixby

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    Eraser supposedly works well for Windows. I have used it many times on OS and data disks. DoD type 35 time overwrites, but no way to tell how effective since I am not a hacker.
     
  16. fastfwd

    fastfwd Friend

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    Unfortunately, no. The process you describe -- deleting a file to free its disk area, then writing to all the free area on the disk -- SEEMS as though it would necessarily overwrite the area where the file was originally stored. But flash-based drives reserve blocks of storage and remap logical-vs-physical blocks, and operating systems / filesystems often reserve blocks of storage as well. Because the hardware and OS lie to applications about how many blocks (and which blocks) are free, it's impossible for an application to reliably write to all the free area.
     
  17. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    What @fastfwd said. While there are apps that shred files by overwriting with random bits, it's pointless with modern flash memory. Flash memory has limited rewrites so fancy tech is used to level off the "wear" essentially making shredding apps useless.

    You should be fine with built in encryption in iOS. Just safeguard your PIN. And don't backup to iCloud.
     
  18. rhythmdevils

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    Thanks for the info. Can you say why about iCloud? I thought that was all encrypted too? What is the alternative?
     
  19. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    iCloud is encrypted. However, there's got to be sys admins with root access to all or parts of iCloud if even on a just-in-time or non-persistent basis. They are going to have the key, otherwise how are they going to make sure iCloud services stay up and running? Not sure exactly how Apple has implemented controls around who gets root or how they store data. Encryption is not enough. It's all about the keys and who has access to them. This is the tradeoff with having somebody else managing your data.

    For cloud services, the only truly safe way is that you encrypt your data into your own container with your own key, and that container is put into the cloud. Or you use your own cloud account and manage your own keys. I'm sure the Communist Government of China can with ease get into their citizens' encrypted iCloud accounts. That data is stored in China data centers and it wouldn't be a problem to get the key there.

    The basic rule of the universe is this: Security = inconvenience. More convenience = less security. This isn't something taught at schools or what vendors want to tell people.
     
    Last edited: Dec 10, 2021
  20. wormcycle

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    That admins have access to all parts of the cloud does not mean they have encryption keys for the data stored on the cloud.
    If you store your data on OneDrive vault there is no master encryption key, there is no master encryption key to Blockchain.
    Admin access can be used to wipe out your data, of course, but not to decrypt the content. hacking is different issue. So you may loose your data, encrypted or not but the private encryption key has to be broken, it is not accessible with admin privileges on any system. Actually is not even stored there.
     

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