Posts by Alex Johnson4

Sandra Stewart3 said:Greetings everyone,

I was wondering if anyone here engages in IT services on the side—perhaps as a hobby, through your own LLC, or even full-time? I’m specifically talking about hardware servicing for small businesses or nonprofits, general maintenance, installations, database management, or web development (whether you're building sites from scratch or just handling the upkeep).

I am quite curious about how you all structure your pricing, what kind of terms you typically operate under, and your preferred workflow—for instance, whether you insist on a formal service contract or work more informally.

Please, do share your insights! I have a potential opportunity on the horizon that fits this description perfectly, and I want to make sure I am thoroughly prepared for it.🙂

Thanks so much,

Man, you're casting way too wide a net here. Every single one of those topics is its own entire career path.
Generally speaking, you definitely want everything in writing via a contract. As for pricing? It's all over the place. You might bill some things by the hour, while other projects are strictly flat-fee based...

restlessdrifter12 said:Look, this guy calls himself a coach, but he isn't giving me a single clue about what I actually need to know.

Yeah, my bad. It only works on satellite view, and even then, you can barely make out the streets.

restlessdrifter12 said:Is there any way to get rid of all those empty labels on my map? Like, I don't need to see every single apartment complex, grocery store, bank, or school cluttering things up.
I just want the street names to show up, that's it.
Here's @43.5156245,16.4362306,654m/data=!3m1!1e3" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">an example of what I mean.

Just isključiti them in the menu settings.

Henry Sanders30 said:I get it... Have you ever actually gone through with that imaging session?

Nothing major, just a bit noisy. Honestly, I didn't have the patience to sit there perfectly still waiting for the whole thing to wrap up. 🙂

rapidpanther68 said:Regarding those aneurysms and all the other symptoms (yeah, obviously I’ve done my deep dive on Google, lol),

That’s not "haha" territory, though. That’s actually a massive deal.

rapidpanther68 said:I’m wondering if this could actually be normal, like, maybe linked to panic disorder or anxiety?

It could totally be normal, especially given everything else you mentioned.

rapidpanther68 said:Please, someone just calm me down because the anxiety is killing me. I don't even know how I'm supposed to show up to work like this.

Step one to actually calming down: get off the internet entirely. Just stop scrolling.
Step two: get a second opinion. If you really can't handle the suspense, just pay out of pocket for an MRI of everything and then you can finally breathe easy.

Elizabeth Sanders64 said:Or I'll just plug the external drive straight into the tower like you guys suggested, since that's obviously the safest bet. 🙂

Look, just ditch those USB hubs already and plug the drives in directly like everyone else told you to.
It’s not some perfect setup anyway—those drives are meant for backups, not for heavy daily lifting. If you've got anything actually important on there, double-check everything and stop cutting corners with cheap cables and flimsy USB hubs.

Kate Jones84 said:You think it's not worth even bothering with this whole mess involving the USB port?

I'm pretty sure it isn't.

Kate Jones84 said:My only real prayer at this point is that I can track down those specific circuits, wire them up, and just hope to god the BIOS password isn't hardcoded somewhere else deep in the system. If that's the case, I guess I’m just starting the "save up for a new MacBook" fund and paying the ultimate price for my own stupidity. 🙂

Pulling the battery or messing with the CMOS won't do squat here; passwords are way more secure than those old-school "tricks" nowadays.
Before you go dropping a bag on a brand-new laptop, maybe check with an authorized service center—they might have some official procedure they run before jumping straight to a full motherboard replacement.

Drew Ramos77 said:Yeah, good luck trying to explain that to some IRS agent when they show up at your door looking for their cut... 😁

It’s not necessary, and honestly, he isn't even looking for it or using it anyway.

Larry Ortiz5 said:Just a little Windows sticker with the serial number stuck onto the case or the laptop.

Look, that hasn't mattered for a decade. Honestly, most licenses are sold without any of that junk anyway...

quiettiger9 said:I've completed the installation, but I don't see an option to enable the Wi-Fi; instead, I'm just seeing a long list of battery settings.

Do you have that ThinkVantaga app or whatever it's called? You know, the one used to get those Fn keys and all those extra options working properly.

silentdriver18 said:
There’s zero chance I messed up the installation because there isn't really a choice in the matter.

The only thing... The data cable has two connection points. The HDD sits at one end and the SSD is right before it. That’s the only way I could have botched this. It’s basically my life story—whenever the odds are 50/50, I somehow manage to pick the wrong side.

If I recall correctly, that P35 chipset is stuck on SATA II speeds (around 300 MB/s).

ironmason18 said:honestly such a joke, since I picked up that HP
last summer and if people actually knew the deal with these things, they wouldn't even touch it 😠

I mean, you rarely see a desktop coming with a Wi-Fi adapter right out of the box anyway.

William Richardson12 said:Cloning works best if you’re moving from one drive to another identical twin—same speed, same capacity, same model... basically, grab an exact match SSD if you want zero headaches. Otherwise, you could just run daily backups to a massive external hard drive, but honestly, you'll have to spend some time digging through the settings to figure out how to actually set that up properly.

Look, you can definitely clone onto different sized drives or mix types, like moving stuff from an old HDD over to a snappy new SSD...

As for backing things up, it really depends on what you're actually trying to save. Doing a full system recovery isn't exactly a walk in the park.

Andrew Gomez40 said:Alright, thanks, but what if they actually are? Look, I get it—a hard drive is just a disposable piece of hardware, but the data sitting on it? That’s priceless. Is there seriously no way to move my stuff without dealing with these pathetic, snail-like transfer speeds?

Just grab the essential files and pray the thing doesn't kick the bucket before you're done.
You’re supposed to back up your data while things are still working right, not when they're already falling apart. Consider this a "bonus" opportunity.

Michael Diaz5 said:Jack Alvarez, can you actually back up your answer like Alex Johnson4 did?

And maybe both of you could weigh in on this table from the link here: http://www.translatorscafe.com/cafe/...gabit-kilobit/
regarding what happens after you plug in the numbers—specifically, how much KBajta does 20 Mbps actually equal, since the chart claims:

20 megabits = 2,560 kilobytes = 2.56 MB

Look, you really need to pull from some more legit sources than this. I’m talking about, say, SI / IEEE standards.

The whole base-1024 thing was never part of the SI nomenclature. Sure, you might see it in old ANSI specs, but even those ditched it ages ago. That's why these "newer" prefixes were brought in. They might confuse people more, sure, but they actually reflect how things work in the real world.

Telecommunications is its own beast entirely; if I recall correctly, the base-1024 logic was never used there, not even going back to basic serial ports. On the flip side, using base-1024 today mostly only makes sense when you're talking about memory modules (and even then, it's debatable). For anything else, it's just nonsense because it doesn't align with how computers actually function or how data moves through communications.

Also, the way people use the lowercase "b" is pretty questionable too.

shadowlynx102 said:It’s definitely not the same thing if the drive the game is sitting on is fragmented. It’s gonna take way longer to pull those files, and since the game is pretty snappy, most of that stuff loads "on the fly."

Nah, it's basically the exact same deal. You're reading from the same sectors, dealing with the same (un)fragmented data. I don't care if there's other random junk on the drive that's fragmented; it doesn't change anything for the game itself.

When you're copying new data onto a drive, the old data isn't moving an inch—it stays right where it was, so it can't suddenly become fragmented.

The only real headache you might run into is if the Hard Drive is getting hammered by other background processes at the same time.

shadowlynx102 said:Look, I don't know, but that's exactly how it went down for me. The game was running totally fine until I started doing a ton of heavy reading and writing on that Hard Drive. After that, the stuttering was absolutely insane, but once I ran a defrag, everything smoothed right back out.

So there's a different issue at play here. As far as the actual games go, the drive is performing just like it always has.

shadowlynx102 said:Easy mistake, Jack Alvarez. I actually fell for the same thing—I thought my drive was doing just fine with only 7% fragmentation, until I tried running Just Cause 3. I’d installed it on a 1TB SATA hard drive because my SSD was basically maxed out. Everything ran smooth right after the install. But then, after I dumped about 20 GB of movies onto that same drive and wiped them later, the game started stuttering like crazy. Once I ran a defrag, things went back to normal.

How exactly do new files mess with old ones if they aren't even touching them? 🤔

Michael Diaz5 said:If my internet speed is clocked at 20 Mbps, what does that actually look like in terms of download speed in MB/s?

a) 20 Mbps (20x1000=20,000 kbps / 8) = 2,500 KB/s = 2.50 MB/s

b) 20 Mbps (20x1024=20,480 kbps / 8) = 2,560 KB/s = 2.56 MB/s

Can someone please tell me which one of these is actually correct, option a or b?

US ISPs always stick to the 1000 base.
Regardless, ever since the late nineties, you’ve gotta use the 1000 base whenever you're dealing with standard SI units—that's pretty much why we even have those newer binary-based measurements like KiB or GiB now.