Posts by Nathan Moore6

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Good grief, it looks like you're trying to wipe out essential system files! Those "ghost" files are actually vital components that should stay hidden for a reason. Honestly, if I were you, I'd just head over to your folder options and toggle off the setting to show hidden files before you accidentally wreck the whole OS by poking around where you shouldn't be.

You could always grab an old, dusty desktop sitting in your garage, pop in a dedicated Wi-Fi card, and basically turn the whole thing into a custom router; if you point a high-gain directional antenna from that card toward the cafeteria or wherever the signal is strongest, you'd probably end up with a pretty decent connection

Douglas Hall2 said:Thanks, I really thought I was just losing my mind there, but after doing five clean Windows installs and resetting my phone ten times over the last three months, I figured it was worth asking around here. It’s such a bummer. Honestly, I'm a little surprised I haven't seen anyone else on the boards dealing with these kinds of weird device glitches either. 🤷 If you translated that literally, it might sound like I'm trying to make a run for it and escape this forum 😁 But hey, it is what it is. 😉

Man, if the only thing you're actually struggling with is Reddit, then it's definitely not your fault. 😁

Douglas Hall2 said:Hey there. I was hoping someone could help me make sense of something because it’s driving me a little crazy. For the last couple of months, my Norton Antivirus hasn't flagged a single thing while I'm browsing on my Chrome 64-bit Win 10 laptop, except for whenever I visit this specific forum. Every once in a while—maybe three or four times over the last two months—I'll get a pop-up saying something like "malicious software blocked." It doesn't happen every single time, but it's enough to be annoying, especially since I use an ad blocker to keep things clean. The worst part is that I'm getting hit with this constantly on my Android phone too; using Chrome is almost impossible because I'm either dodging ads or getting bombarded with fake notifications telling me to download some "new version" of Android. I've run scans with Avast several times and nothing comes up as a threat, which just makes it even more frustrating.🤦Thanks so much! 🤔

Honestly, don't sweat it too much; everyone knows this happens from time to time. This site is pretty much in a rough spot, and we're always complaining about it to the moderators, but nobody seems to actually care, which is probably why we keep running into these same old issues year after year.

First off, it looks like you're dealing with a hardware issue here, so no amount of software tinkering is going to fix it—even formatting the drive on a Unix system won't help if the physical components are shot. That said, if you really want to try and get some life out of it, your best bet would be to boot up a lightweight live distro like Porteus from a USB stick to see if it can even recognize the drive.

Jeffrey Hall66 said:honestly, don't even bother buying one—I'll just give you a bunch of my broken ones for free😁

@Randy, I honestly think even if they were totally smashed up, I could probably dig some data out as long as nobody went and scratched the platters with a screwdriver, haha.

I mean, anything is possible, really; it’s just a matter of how much of that data stays actually useful after a major disaster, which I guess just comes down to luck.

Thomas Wells5 said:It's actually kind of wild, I ran a scan with Sentinel and everything looks absolutely perfect, plus it's being super quiet while it runs.

That is pretty strange, though, so maybe don't be too shocked if bad sectors start popping up later on; basically, I wouldn't trust that drive or put anything important on it.

Thomas Wells5 said:Well, I ended up tossing that 500GB drive since it's totally dead, and I did the same with my 2TB one too, even though it seems fine for now—it's a real bummer because it was pretty much brand new, but there you go.

lol, goodness me, why on earth did both of them go out? 🤦

It’s honestly a little miracle that the 2TB one hasn't started acting up yet, so if I were you, I definitely wouldn't trust it with anything important; it'll probably give up the ghost pretty soon, so maybe check those SMART parameters or run a quick scan with something like HD Tune or Hard Disk Sentinel.

I heard prices have actually dipped lately, which is a bit of a relief, but honestly, my biggest worry with doing any kind of recovery is that these labs don't exactly expect you to be opening up drives outside of a sterile cleanroom environment. They’ve got their fancy controlled setups for cracking these things open, whereas this drive is just absolutely covered in grit and dust, so I’m feeling pretty skeptical about whether we can even salvage anything if there's critical data on there—really hoping it's just junk...

It doesn't necessarily mean you'll hear clicking right away, because there can be several different causes at play here; usually, it's just an indicator that things are starting to fail, but it might take some time before the drive actually gives up the ghost entirely. However, the fact that he mentioned opening up the drive is the real kicker in this specific situation. 😁

As for getting that data back, I have to be honest—it’s going to be an uphill battle without using some pretty pricey, specialized recovery techniques. When you're dealing with dust contamination, you can't just spin those platters up and hope for the best to read the files; you'd need to meticulously decontaminate the platters and probably deep-clean the entire chassis too. I suspect a magnetic microscope might help, but I'm really not sure if anyone even has that kind of high-end equipment available here in the States.

Thomas Wells5 said:So, I've got this 500 GB SATA Seagate hard drive from my spare PC, and it's basically brand new since it's only had about 20 days of actual use, though I don't have the warranty anymore. It started making this really faint clicking sound today, and now macOS won't even recognize it; the computer barely boots up with it attached, and while the BIOS sees it, that's about as far as it goes. Just to be honest, I'm a total dummy and decided to pop the top cover off because I was bored and wanted to see what the inside looked like—I've never opened a drive before. I didn't touch anything, I just closed it back up and screwed it tight, and now it's dead, so I'm probably just being an idiot and messed it up myself... I'm wondering if there's any hope left here, maybe if I try swapping the electronics from another drive to see if that helps? Any advice would be great.

Honestly, you might just want to toss it in the trash since you opened it up; the inside of a drive is hermetically sealed, and they make sure it's completely free of dust and debris during manufacturing using special air filters that allow for air circulation without letting any particles in. Now, when you powered it up full of dust (and I know you'll probably tell me that nothing fell in because you closed it so fast, but let's be real, unless you're living in a cleanroom with industrial filters, every room has plenty of dust), the head likely started scratching the surface of the platters, which means the drive is pretty much toast even if the BIOS still picks it up. The circuit board might be fine, but the most important part—those magnetic platters—are ruined, so the whole unit is effectively dead.

Lesson learned for next time: maybe do a quick Google search before tinkering with things so you can figure out how they work and what's safe to touch -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_d...ty_and_failure

northernpilot2 said:Nah, you can't really use special characters like # when you're making corrections.

Haha, well, I'm glad I didn't overthink it! I'll just leave the numbers without any spaces instead of using symbols, and that should do the trick. No biggie. 😁

You should probably switch over to Gmail or something similar if you want actual encryption and the heavy-duty infrastructure that comes with it, because honestly, using free webmail feels a bit amateurish

Nathan Moore6 said:Okay, it's been a few days now, so I was wondering if anyone might have an answer for me? 🍿

Sorry to keep you waiting! It’s totally doable, though since everyone on here only gets one nickname change allowed, maybe you'd find it more useful to pick something without numbers entirely while you're at it? That way, you could make it look similar to what you have now but still save your one official change for something else down the road. 🙂

Haha, well, I could just go with some "random #" thing anyway, since my original username was pretty much just a bunch of nonsense picked at random, and this new one actually keeps most of what I had. 😁
I swapped out the numbers for this symbol because the random one I wanted was already taken, and honestly, this symbol means a lot more to me than just digits ever could.

Nathan Moore6 said:Hey guys, would you mind changing my username to rand101? Basically, I just need to drop the 'y' at the end.

Okay, it's been a few days now, so I was wondering if anyone might have an answer for me? 🍿

Sorry to keep you waiting! It’s totally doable, though since everyone on here only gets one nickname change allowed, maybe you'd find it more useful to pick something without numbers entirely while you're at it? That way, you could make it look similar to what you have now but still save your one official change for something else down the road. 🙂

Robert Rodriguez2 said:I feel like you might be overgeneralizing things just a little bit there, because if we look strictly at the processor side of the equation, AMD actually had some really impressive runs where Intel just couldn't seem to find an answer, like when we look back at that Phenom II era. Before the i5 series really started gaining momentum and changing the game, those Phenom chips were absolutely king of the hill.

When you look at the GPU side of things, it’s always been pretty much the same story where one generation sees NVIDIA taking the lead while the next one swings back toward AMD, and honestly, that’s just how the market works depending on which price bracket you're looking at. So, unless we're talking about a very specific series of cards, I don't see much point in making broad generalizations or getting all worked up with that intense fanboy energy.

I’m definitely not trying to paint everyone with the same brush here, but since my setup is mostly built around AMD hardware—honestly, half my room is just dedicated to my rig at this point—I feel like I have a pretty solid handle on how these things actually perform in the real world. In my experience, though, NVIDIA drivers always seem to come out feeling a bit more polished, and their cards tend to handle heavy-duty creative work so much better that they naturally end up being the superior choice for gaming too.

I’ve always felt that Intel just has a slight edge when it comes to their engineering talent in general, and while AMD is absolutely fantastic if you're looking to build something on a tight budget, I usually find myself leaning toward Intel whenever I want to put together a system that feels a bit more serious and high-end.

Charles Barnes5 said:I don't have a specific recommendation, but I really don't think dropping $4,000 on a gaming rig is the smartest move right now.

Why though?

Beyond that initial $4,000 investment, you’re looking at a lot of extra costs down the road. I remember back when I was super obsessed with gaming, I dropped a ton on a decent graphics card $200 and honestly, it hadn't even been a year before I felt like I needed an upgrade. As soon as a new title drops, the requirements jump up, and there’s always a newer card hitting the shelves. Plus, it seems like certain games just run better with one brand over another.

Honestly, a PlayStation is a much better option because you can just sit back and relax for a long time without worrying about upgrades.

And if we're talking about comparing Intel and AMD, AMD has always seemed to offer better performance in my experience, and that goes for my gamer friends too.

Technology has come so far lately that you could actually grab a pretty solid laptop for a similar price that would still handle most games just fine.

In my experience, and from what I know of people working in 3D development, AMD has always felt a bit underwhelming compared to Intel NVIDIA.

Also, gaming laptops are going to cost you way more than $1,500, and since I own a G75, I can tell you they kind of suck as actual laptops because they weigh 10 or 15 pounds and basically act like desktops. The battery life is terrible, too. If you want a real laptop, you go with something like a MacBook where the battery actually lasts half a day, because that's supposed to be the whole point of having a laptop.

I was wondering if there’s anything in particular at ADM that isn't actually cheaper when you're trying to put a build together

Hey guys, would you mind changing my username to rand101? Basically, I just need to drop the 'y' at the end.

Adam Moore3 said:When did talking about buying a computer turn into just another one of those million endless debates between fanboys over Linux vs Windows?🤔

I honestly don't see how this counts as some fanboy argument at all, because I was really just trying to lay out some practical reasons why it makes more sense to skip paying for an overpriced OS and instead put that money toward better hardware, and if you look closely, I even mentioned that I use Windows myself.

William Richardson12 said:He’s going to lose so much power running a virtual machine that he won't even have an i7 and 12 gigs of RAM left to actually make things run smoothly. Besides, setting up a VM is always such a headache for the average user. Honestly, Windows isn't necessarily worse, it's just different from Linux. Since I'm not a big fan of using the CLI, I really enjoy the fact that I don't have to touch it more than once a month. 😁

I honestly doubt his computer will be great for gaming or any heavy-duty professional work given how tight his budget is, but you know, a Linux VM can actually perform way better than one on Windows if you tinker with it a bit—you can even set up VGA passthrough to play modern games, though as I mentioned, I doubt that's even what he's aiming for.

Not to mention how much more advanced Linux (and Unix-based systems like macOS) is compared to Windows when it comes to security, raw performance, resource management, and overall modularity; plus, there's massive community support, so you can find a fix online for pretty much any issue that even a total novice could follow.

I wasn't saying anyone needs to go out and install Arch just to wait around for a terminal prompt—even though I don't see what the fuss is about since the terminal is the only way to truly control everything, and there's a mountain of documentation explaining exactly how it all works—but installing something like Ubuntu or Mint is just as easy as installing Windows, and you get all the essential tools for everyday computing right out of the box, not to mention it's completely free and likely much more stable since it uses fewer resources than closed-source software.

Personally, I use Windows on my main laptop, but I have macOS on my second machine and an Arch Linux build on my desktop, and I can tell you that Windows definitely eats up way more resources than something like macOS after you've been running it for a while without a restart, not to mention those weird little glitches that occasionally pop up, but hey, that's life.

edit-btw, you won't even have to shell out money for antivirus software on Linux, since you really should be sticking to legitimate software anyway.