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Living Room / Re: nearby lightning skrike kills neighbours computers (and mine)

« Last post by nudone on July 01, 2011, 03:25 PM »

Got to agree with everyone above. I've been trying to keep my girlfriend's computer in sync with mine regarding software configs, plus keeping notes on what those settings are. Problem is I'm always a month or two late with it all, which then becomes several months late - okay, I'm lying, it's more like a year.

Update on my new pc that arrived today. It doesn't work. Now expecting a long drawn out saga to unfold repeatedly having to take it back to the shop to get it fully functional.

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Living Room / Re: nearby lightning skrike kills neighbours computers (and mine)

« Last post by nudone on June 30, 2011, 11:45 PM »

Yes, good point about unplugging the reserve machine - I had already thought about it and taken it one step further in my head:

only one machine is ever allowed to be plugged in at any one time, i.e. there will always be a machine safe from a power spike. Therefore data transfer between the two machines will have to done via a third storage device, which could just be a hard drive.

Sound advice about the psu being damaged from shades; I will try to test it.

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Living Room / Re: nearby lightning skrike kills neighbours computers (and mine)

« Last post by nudone on June 30, 2011, 06:49 PM »

Yes, I can live with that. The new machine has enough inside to work without me having to swap anything over.

Something just occurred to me. The psu out of the dead machine works fine - shouldn't it have blown up?

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Living Room / Re: nearby lightning skrike kills neighbours computers (and mine)

« Last post by nudone on June 30, 2011, 06:29 PM »

Oh. That's a bit worrying. I was intending on using the sound and gfx cards out of the old machine to put inside the new setup. Oh and all the hard drives too.

I think I'll take the risk. Or maybe not. I don't know what to do now.

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Living Room / Re: nearby lightning skrike kills neighbours computers (and mine)

« Last post by nudone on June 30, 2011, 12:04 PM »

Yes, that's what I'll do, good idea: from the ashes of the old machine, I'll rebuild it into something perfectly decent as a standby machine. Because of the way I've ordered the new pc I'll have a case a psu spare to start with if nothing else.

My income does now depend on the data on my machine so that really has to be my priority in protecting. Combined with the downtime a dead machine causes, a backup pc makes a very great deal of sense.

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Living Room / Re: nearby lightning skrike kills neighbours computers (and mine)

« Last post by nudone on June 30, 2011, 06:14 AM »

thanks 40hz. that's great information - but pretty much makes me conclude that data is god and the machine can simply be sacrificed. it'll be cheaper for me to replace the computer parts than have a proper electrical system installed.

and, as we all know, our data is irreplaceable so it simply must be backed up somewhere safe - but done conveniently enough not to make it a "chore".

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Living Room / Re: nearby lightning skrike kills neighbours computers (and mine)

« Last post by nudone on June 30, 2011, 06:05 AM »

i'm having a rethink about all this.

nothing is going to provide a guaranteed solution, well, nothing except for unplugging the machine. plus, maybe next time it won't be a lightning strike, maybe it will be a house fire or a gas explosion or a plane crashing into the roof.

so, as the data is really the only crucial thing about the whole computer, i think a remote backup solution is the answer. that is the only sure way to have piece-of-mind. my problem then becomes that my broadband is so slow (1 meg) it's not convenient to use online storage except for a few small files.

weekly (or daily) backups to external drives that are stored off-site is the way to go.

i suppose a good UPS won't do any harm though. it could save time, stress and money at the very least.

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Living Room / Re: nearby lightning skrike kills neighbours computers (and mine)

« Last post by nudone on June 30, 2011, 05:50 AM »

interesting. thanks, eleman, i shall look into an online UPS. as i mentioned, this needs to be a "set it and forget it" solution.

british weather tends to be capricious at best. today's weather may report "sunny with a hint of showers" only to find that at 4pm we have a torrential downpour - which could quite easily become a thunder storm.

because of the earlier "reliable" weather report i may have decided to go out and leave the computer running, i may be away for only 30 minutes but it's still time enough for an accident to occur - so i really need something like the UPS.

(a few years ago i had a computer drown under the amount of rainfall that came in through a slightly open window - the blocked drain pipe above the window didn't help . normal rainfall would have been fine, but this was like a waterfall forcing its way in through the half inch gap the window was ajar. i was out when that happened too.)

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Living Room / nearby lightning skrike kills neighbours computers (and mine)

« Last post by nudone on June 30, 2011, 04:11 AM »

a few nights back a lightning strike hit a tree about 50 metres away from my house. it was a rather surreal event, which reminded me of the death-rays in Spielberg's War of the Worlds; their was a strange humming sound then a brilliant white light and then a sound that made me think the house had been hit by a bomb (all that was obviously the tree being hit and its branches exploding off).

as i'm in England, thunder storms tend to be rather unineventful and i just leave all electrics plugged in and powered on. which is exactly what i did this time, except the computer was powered off - i thought this would be sufficient. my error.

the lightning strike has killed my computer and several of the neighbours computers. our broadband is dead, though the phone line works fine. the neighbour living next to the tree has been without power after their entire electrics were damaged, a few plug sockets charred and melted.

Now, the point of this little story is that i'm wondering how can i prevent this rare event happening again; i don't like the idea of having to buy a new motherboard/cpu/etc each time there's a bad thunder storm. you may say, just unplug the computer from the mains power supply, which is true; the problem is that i may not be there to unplug the machine if i've left it running and an unexpected storm arrives.

as it goes, i think it was a freak storm, but i'm not going to take the view that lightning never strikes twice. the weather patterns around the world appear to be changing so i'm sure there will be more "freak" storms over my house in the next few years.

okay, enough waffling. the question is, would anything have prevented the damage whilst keeping the computer powered on?

would an "uninterruptible power supply" have saved the computer? that's about the only thing i can think of trying. i obviously don't want to buy one if they aren't going to prevent the same thing happening again.

thankfully, none of my data was harmed. but i shall be building the new computer with several redundancy and backup layers built in as the lightning strike has made me realise just how catastrophic the data loss could have been.

(i'd been toying with the idea of upgrading the pc for a while so nature simply stopped me from procrastinating further: new machine will be: i7, 12 gig ram, solid state main drive, etc. Which, i hope, will be a noticeable improvement on the athlon 4800, 4 gig ram, raid 0.)

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Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Bvckup 2

« Last post by nudone on June 29, 2011, 12:08 PM »

I agree with Deozaan. My first reaction was "html5, css3, responsive, etc., etc." I've not looked underneath to see if it is.

After the "apple" comments I now see that too. Overall, I think I still see the site as a nice subdued single page site rather than an apple site. But I admit, I'm sure it's because I never really see an apple site and see plenty of single page portfolio sites.

(I know the site isn't a responsive design, it just looks like it should be.)

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General Software Discussion / Re: What is Mozilla trying to do?

« Last post by nudone on June 23, 2011, 09:11 AM »

we really need more toilet analogy reviews, daddydave. sums them up perfectly.

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Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Bvckup 2

« Last post by nudone on June 23, 2011, 01:16 AM »

I love the new website.

413

Living Room / xkcd - why we should fear the cloud

« Last post by nudone on June 06, 2011, 05:30 AM »

xkcd, succinctly, demonstrates the problem with the cloud...

<img src="http://imgs.xkcd.com...comics/the_cloud.png" />

http://xkcd.com/908/

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Living Room / Re: Will Apple Tell You What You Can/Can't Take Pictures of?

« Last post by nudone on June 04, 2011, 03:01 AM »

Apple's legendary 1984 advert told us everything we needed to know, we were just too dumb to realise they were Big Brother. They ought to relocate to China (or worse) and have done with it.

415

Living Room / Re: Phone scam - pretending to be Microsoft Engineer

« Last post by nudone on May 24, 2011, 09:43 AM »

Good points both of you. It would be fun to try and keep one of these scammers on the phone for as long as possible, see how far they'll go with someone acting really "confused" and "gullible"; make it sound tempting to the scammer...

..."oh no, I'm so glad you called, I know it will cost a lot of money for you to mend my computer and I'm more than happy to pay. Now, please tell me what I need to do..."

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Living Room / Phone scam - pretending to be Microsoft Engineer

« Last post by nudone on May 24, 2011, 06:15 AM »

I've just had a call from a friend describing how their distraught daughter has had her computer "hacked" AND it was a phone call from a Microsoft Engineer that told her so...

...the "MS Engineer" then went on to tell her how to remove the virus from her machine and, no doubt, do several other things to it as the same time. Oh, they also told her that her "operating system license" had expired and so would need to renew it for the cost of £150.

Obviously, this is a total scam aimed at the non security savvy pc user. I've told her to change all usernames and passwords, etc. and will be wiping/restoring the hard drive for them later.

Seems it's a growing problem: http://www.computing...-targeted-phone-scam

(No doubt, there are better links and information elsewhere.)

417

Living Room / Re: Strange phone problem - can anyone help?

« Last post by nudone on May 23, 2011, 01:25 PM »

It might be something weird like you are assuming but until you try the phones at someone else's location I don't think you'll really know what to blame. I mean, what if it's a design fault with the 3 button? I suppose you could test a phone from Argos, see if that works then take it back - if they allow it on phones.

418

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for whiteboard photo cleanup software

« Last post by nudone on May 21, 2011, 05:42 AM »

It looks like you could get the same results with the software you have by using The Levels features - or Auto Levels. Or by using some other image manipulation tool you find easier to use, as they are all likely to have some kind of Levels function built in.

You could tweak things further but 99% of the work will be done with a very quick click on Auto Levels. Maybe that's what you've already tried though.

419

Living Room / Re: So Apple really is a religious thing...

« Last post by nudone on May 20, 2011, 11:27 AM »

Going to watch it on the iPlayer now...

420

Living Room / Re: So Apple really is a religious thing...

« Last post by nudone on May 19, 2011, 04:53 PM »

I don't think we need to start becoming apologists for Apple - you lot are going soft in the head :-)

I use my iPad, everyday BUT I know it's rubbish. Well, maybe not total utter rubbish, I wouldn't use it if it was but as a product from the "gods" of design, i.e. Apple, I honestly think it's a total joke.

Honestly, there's nothing good about an iPad other than it being a tablet. It would be nothing without a few decent apps available for it. It WILL be so easy to make a tablet a million times better than the iPad, simply by making one that takes into account people are going to use their fingers to poke it. I honestly believe the Apple designers never tested the iPad for more than a few minutes - sure, they tested it in a virtual way, on a Mac (or pc) using a mouse to click the simulation with. They didn't use the real hardware for testing as after a few minutes they'd have realised the interface totally sucks when trying to do anything with text - or hit buttons with anything wider than a pencil tip.

And, and, I've recently experienced the totally sucks balls nature of OS file storage. I tried out a few mp3 player apps in an attempt to avoid itunes - none of these mp3 players is aware that there are mp3 files already on the machine, they are also blind to each others mp3 files - how. dumb. is. that. It's beyond moronic - totally utter crap.

I know a few Apple fans too. They've moved away from using PCs because PCs were "too much trouble", "too many infections", "Apple just works". We need the Myth Busters TV show to do an expose on Apple products - maybe then people will start to see through the myth and stop lying to themselves. Hmm, maybe not, well, of course not.

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