Steven Hayes26 said:I think I might be onto something here... I'll let you know once I've double-checked everything.🙂
Here’s the reality of the situation: most laptops should have a BIOS jumper meant for resetting things. However, even if you locate it and bridge the connection, there's a good chance the password will still be sitting there waiting for you—on some older models, it might clear, but those are pretty rare nowadays. Honestly, your best bet is probably just taking it to a repair shop and having them reflash the BIOS for you. It’s going to be significantly cheaper than shelling out for a whole new machine. If you want to dig into the specifics, feel free to shoot me a DM.
I just sent you a DM. It’s a little more complicated to break down here in a public thread, but yeah, I honestly think everything can still be salvaged.
Grab a Linux live CD on another computer and boot the laptop from that. Copy everything you need onto a USB drive and then just take it to a repair shop 🙂
fadedbear92 said:Does that depend on which provider I'm using? (like Xfinity) Are those $6.75 monthly fees? Honestly, 40 GB feels pretty small to me.
I was just using that as an example. You get unlimited storage there—even if you need something massive like 1,000 terabytes. It’s a monthly fee, and it doesn't matter which provider you use.
Take a look at the URL bar in Google Chrome. I'm running this on Windows 2000 inside a virtual machine. I didn't mess with any of the program settings—though, looking back, maybe I should have, just to ensure it doesn't strip all the active links from the page. Either way, everything seems to be functioning perfectly fine.
With any paid service, you basically get as much space as you need. Take Amazon, for example—they offer virtually unlimited storage, and you just pay for what you actually use plus data transfer fees. For about 40 gigabytes, you’re looking at $6.75. If there's something specific you're curious about, let me know and I'll walk you through the details.
I’m always a big advocate for using a paid cloud service for data storage. Honestly, you just never know what kind of chaos life can throw at you—house fires, floods, a break-in... anything can happen. If your files actually matter to you, get them off your local drives and onto the web.
It basically grabs entire webpages and saves them so you can browse them offline later. Within the software itself, you can actually customize how deep the crawler goes when following links.
There shouldn't be any issues at all when it comes to formatting the partition, regardless of whether there are multiple ones sitting on the drive. If you can't get it sorted, just shoot me a DM and I'll help you walk through it.
analogwalker2 said:You’re just as bad, coming in here a full year after the original question was even asked to offer advice. It’s pretty obvious the guy isn't even asking questions anymore; he probably just took one of the simpler suggestions because dealing with this specific software was clearly too much work.
If you’re actually looking to do some proper archiving—meaning you intend to set these files aside and not touch them for years—then I’d strongly suggest looking into Amazon S3. Their Glacier storage is incredibly cheap, sitting at about $0.004 per gigabyte, which works out to roughly $4 for an entire terabyte. That rate applies to your first 50 terabytes, too. Personally, I’ve moved everything vital of mine over there. Some people tend to think the cloud isn't the safest place to stash data, but I couldn't disagree more. Amazon is a massive corporation focused on serious business; the odds of them just vanishing overnight are slim to none. I’ve been using their services for years now (including Google Workspace), and I can tell you, I’ve been more than satisfied.
I’ve never been much of a fan of these smaller Mega-style services. They seem to pop up everywhere like mushrooms after a rainstorm, only to disappear just as quickly, taking all your data along with them.
Look, you guys are 🙂 honestly, someone asks for help with a specific program and you just bury them under a mountain of random recommendations. 😁 I figured I’d just put together a quick three-step tutorial to clear things up:
1. Navigate to the folder where your yt-dlp is located (that’s also where the video will end up saving) and type: yt-dlp -F https://link-to-video 2. Give it a few seconds, and you'll get a full list of every available format. 3. If the quality you want is listed under number 137, for example, you just type this to grab the video: yt-dlp -f 137 https://link-to-video 4. And there you go...
Actually, if you don't feel like messing around with choosing formats manually, you can just run: yt-dlp -f best https://link-to-some-great-video and call it a day.
There are probably a million other little tricks to learn, but I think this should be more than enough to get anyone started.
As ironcyclist58 pointed out, was this machine on a corporate domain, or just a standard home PC? I'm going to need a few more specifics to make sense of this.
Could you elaborate a bit more on what you mean by cleaning up your hard drive? Are you using some kind of dedicated software for that, or have you just been manually hunting through folders and files to delete things? As for Bill Gates, my honest advice would be to just start from scratch. I mean, wipe all those user accounts—just make sure you back up any important emails first—and then reconfigure the account from the ground up. If that doesn't do the trick, let me know exactly which error messages you're seeing, and we can figure out our next move.
Have you tried clearing the cache on your phone yet? Most phones pull everything from the web and store it locally, so the data might just be sitting there on your device. Try this: kill the connection on your phone first, then go through and wipe whatever junk you don't need from your Google account settings. After that, log in to your Google account via a desktop computer to see if those old entries are still hanging around in the cloud. If they are, scrub them all out right there. Once you're done, reconnect your phone to the internet.
I don't have much experience with Google since I don't really use their ecosystem, but hopefully, this helps you clear things up.
I ran into this exact same headache myself. After digging around a bit, I realized Evernote was actually the culprit—specifically its keyboard shortcuts clashing with other things. Did you notice this happening before you installed any specific software? If you have a hunch about a particular program, I’d suggest diving into its settings and checking the 'keyboard shortcuts' section. There's a good chance the conflict is hiding right there. Anyway, hopefully that points you in the right direction. 👍