Posts by wiredcanyon94

swifttinker40 said:You’re right, I didn't explain myself very well. Let me try again.
Imagine I open a real estate site looking for apartments, and there are 10 listings. I need to open all 10 links, and then I'd have to hit "File > Save As" ten separate times just to get them over to my sister.
I heard there are programs that can grab everything in one go so I don't have to manually save every single link.
The idea is the software asks how deep you want to crawl, and in my case, I just need it to grab the content one level deep.

So, some guy tells me I can use wget. I downloaded it and tried to scrape the page, but I keep getting this error message:

* * MIRROR ERROR! * * wget has detected that the current mirror is empty. If it was an update, the previous mirror has been restored. Reason: the first page(s) either could not be found, or a connection problem occurred. => Ensure that the website still exists, and/or check your proxy settings

Hopefully, that makes more sense now.

Some websites aren't exactly easy to scrape. You have to do a little digital wizardry—try this, tweak that...
At the end of the day, ten pages isn't exactly a massive workload for "Save As." It's literally ten clicks.

Or, if it's really being difficult, just tell your sister to come over and look at the listings on your screen.

swifttinker40 said:I opened this website where I clicked two different links (two subpages), and now I need to lug my laptop over to my sister's place—she doesn't have internet access—to show her those pages.
Is there any way to open them there without being online? I heard they get stored in some kind of temporary cache or something.
Anyone know how to pull this off?

Just use "Save As" and select "Web Page, Complete" for both of them.

rustyraven18 said:I wouldn't have even bothered installing it if that "websearches" junk hadn't hijacked my life. It kept popping up constantly in Firefox, driving me crazy, so I ended up hopping on YouTube to find a fix. That's actually how I stumbled upon a video for this specific program. It found a ton of viruses, asked for a restart, and once I did that—poof—it was finally gone...

But now, after clicking around all sorts of things, I'm staring at an "error loading operating system" message every time I boot up...

A clean reinstall of macOS will fix all your problems.

Sandra White10 said:I have a Dell Latitude laptop equipped with an i5 at 2.40GHz, 8GB of RAM, a SanDisk SSD 500, integrated Intel HD 3000 graphics alongside an AMD Radeon hd 7470 m, running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit.

So, yesterday I went ahead and updated both of my graphics drivers, and suddenly, I’m facing this bizarre issue regarding how long it takes for Windows to boot up.
Normally, this laptop fires up in maybe 5 to 8 seconds—it's practically instant. But after these updates, it’s taking closer to a full minute and 30 seconds just to get to the desktop. Honestly, it didn't even take this long back when I was still using a clunky old HDD!
Everything else seems to be functioning perfectly fine, which makes this one specific hiccup all the more frustrating.
I tried digging into msconfig and stripped everything out of the startup list, leaving only the essentials like my antivirus and mouse software, just like I had before. No luck. I even ran CCleaner to clean up the registry, but that didn't do a thing either.
I went as far as performing a complete uninstallation of both drivers—using the AMD cleanup utility for the AMD side and going through Device Manager for the Intel graphics.
Then, I installed what I believed were the most recent compatible drivers using the Driver Update Utility and the AMD autodetect utility.
Logically, there shouldn't be any issues here, yet this boot delay persists. It’s quite a mystery; I can't fathom what is dragging the system down during the boot process because msconfig isn't showing any new programs cluttering the startup.

I feel like I've exhausted every single suggestion found on Google, but nothing seems to stick. 🙂
In the end, I actually rolled back to the older drivers from 2011. 😢 That is the only way it runs without this headache.
I would truly love to use these newer drivers if there is any way to make them work. According to the Windows Experience Index, the new drivers bumped my graphics score up to a 6.5, whereas the old ones only hit 5.7. I'm not entirely sure how much that impacts gaming performance, but it's a noticeable jump!

If anyone happens to have a clue on how to fix this ridiculous problem, I am all ears!

Honestly, it sounds like you've already tried everything under the sun.
The only thing left would be to reach out to the manufacturers directly, explain the situation, and see if they have any advice or a fix.
If you're hitting this wall, I'm willing to bet someone else has run into the exact same thing.

Also, judging by your post, you clearly know your way around a computer. Is this your job, or just a hobby?

coastalwalker5 said:So, I tried setting up a mobile hotspot by following the steps on this page http://www.wikihow.com/Create-a-WiFi...Command Prompt but everything went sideways—not only did the hotspot fail, but now my laptop has completely lost its wired internet connection. I was panicking a bit and thought maybe running "System Restore" might fix things, but after the reboot, nothing on the laptop will actually run... like, at all. I can't even get back into "System Restore" to try again. If anyone knows how to fix this, please help me out 🤦

Based on what you wrote, the only actual advice worth giving here is this: hand it over to someone who can actually look at it and fix it.

All those other suggestions—the "try this, then try that" stuff—probably won't do much because nobody can actually see what's happening on your screen. Remote troubleshooting is pretty much useless when things are this broken.
Sorry.

Check your settings to make sure there isn't some random proxy configured for your connection.
It happens more often than you'd think—everything looks perfectly connected on your end, but you're still staring at a dead end when you try to actually get online.

crimsonridge44 said:What difference does 100MB or 10MB make? It only matters if you're running on a 10GB hard drive.

Look, my point is I don't want an extra 100 MB of useless junk that serves zero purpose for watching a movie, especially when it might clash with something else I actually need on my PC.

I’m not interested in having a million random services spinning up in the background every single time I boot my computer. That kind of bloat is just annoying.

That's why whenever I install something, I never just click "recommended." I always go in and manually pick exactly what gets installed and what doesn't.

Simple as that.

People always claim that VLC Media Player and Windows Media Player are the gold standard for watching DVDs on a PC.

The latest versions of both programs are huge—over 100 MB just for the installation. Both of them.

What are you guys actually using to watch DVDs on your computer (besides Windows Media Player)?

I’m looking for something simple, lightweight, but still high quality. To me, those two programs feel like massive bloatware packed with features that 95% of people will never touch. They’ve honestly outgrown their original purpose of just playing a damn DVD.

Thanks!