My 'mean' machine chucked a wobbly on Saturday.... Dunno what happened, but those wonderful BSODs referenced 'asmtxhci.sys' which is an ASUS USB3 driver. I have a vague feeling it might have been caused by plugging in a mem card reader earlier that day. Being a 'devoted' user of  True Image 15, I had incremental backups of the OS and a last full one that dated to Wednesday ... which is ultimately what I restored to. Being clever, I also have in place ever...

....and you'd rather Microsoft didn't push it down your throat....   http://www.ghacks.net/2015/04/17/how-to-remove-windows-10-upgrade-updates-in-windows-7-and-8/   Microsoft.... it's actually polite to ask.

I 'really' only have it on my Laptop...[the 2 installs in VMware and VirtualBox don't really count]... ....and now Internet Explorer is in a death-spiral of crashing...and telling me it has...and telling me it will restart....and do I want to restore the last session...and then it crashes...and tells me it has....and telling me it will restart.... The IT Crowd will tell me to... "turn it off and turn it on again..." ...which I'll try first....   ...but I...

Following on with ID's thread re new PC build.... and I'd only hijacked Starkers' one to describe what I'd been doing to date...so here's my own thread with the ins and outs of what's what. My old machine [also home-grown] was a [then] reasonably OK machine.... Lian Li PC-A6010 case [black] Antec TruePower Quattro 1000w PSU ASUS P6T-se  X58 i7 MoBo Intel i7 920 2.66Ghz LGA1366 CPU 12G OCZ Triple [6x2G] PC12800 DDR3 Gold Ram CoolerMaster V8 CPU Co...

No matter how clever you are with doing backups...and even redundancy backups.... There comes a time when it all goes pear-shaped. Simplest error - 'CRC' Cyclic Redundancy Check - Error.   What happened.... I noticed a Syncback log showing a file-backup failure due to a CRC error. I checked and found the same file had caused the True Image backup of the drive to fail. I didn't have an even vaguely recent copy of the file....it was a still-to-be-worked-on ...

As some will know....I've been doing the hand-me-down process with computers after getting a Core 2 Duo for $6.40 that was better than several machines I already had. Now, one of them is a sad old P4 1.6 with 1gig of ram and a 20gig HD.... running Win 7 Pro 32. And there's the trouble...the little HD ....the OS was 'struggling' [to put it mildly]. A little proggy called 'scanner' a pie-chart display of disk usage [files] soon made it well and truly clear.... F...

I took a hole pile of 'junk' to a 'thrift shop' called Savers today....bit of a New Year's clean-up.....which entitled me to a 20% discount on anything I bought there.... I found a little desktop PC that said 'for parts only'...for $8 ....and looked inside [it's a pop-top] and said 'what the heck....can't lose...even if it's fried' [it wasn't]. So.....$6.40 later....got it home....plugged various junk in....and fired it up. No OS .... ...

For those who suffer from eye-strain due to glare... [whilst on the computer, I mean]... Set-and-forget [except if doing digital graphic editing]. http://justgetflux.com/   It works...

Well...I guess it takes/took 10 days or so of over 30c weather... but after x years of almost permanent running my V8 Coolermaster fan decided to bugger off and go troppo. It's not like it was ever an issue.....until a shutdown/reboot ...cos I never shutdown..... But then silly old me did. So the fan said time for a holiday and shut up shop. I got it kick-started one time with some compressed air and a poking or three.... ...but today it said 'no way, Jose,  find some...

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The sanity of a good 'backup plan' cannot be stressed highly enough...or often enough. As some might know...I skin aircraft in the MS flight sim...'FSX', and have recently got into extensive/complex and detailed graphics with 'a lot' of layers. The images are 4096x4096 pixel resolution...so a single bitmap isn't exactly tiny.  Currently the multi-layer sets have up to 57 layers, which means the saved filesize in psp format is a bit over 200meg. Now that ...

I remember one of my first games for PC ...that I was eager to try....Mechwarrior II the demo..... it fitted on 4 floppies [1.44 meg each - for those who might not know what a floppy was....I'm sure there's some]...   I just checked my FSX install [Microsoft's Flight Sim 10].... It's 143 GIG .....255,137 files.  Now ignoring 1024 and just going with 1000 [I'm lazy] that's about twentyfive THOUSAND times larger. Like I said.....big ....

Always seem to get sidetracked when I'm wandering around YouTube.... Kinda liked this one, though...

As you may have guessed by now....I'm kinda into Microsoft's FSX [the flight sim] .... because the scope for 'skinning' is pretty much limitless.   All those planes ...all those liveries.... But, along with high-end graphic cards, etc. you need input [as Number 5 would say] ....via something half-decent as a throttle and stick. I've been using the Saitek X52 Pro for a couple of years...     ...but there's another one....and it has a hig...

OK....getting frustrated with frame rates in FSX [am still skinning planes] ...and the 'old' XFX GTX285 isn't the biggest kid on the block anymore. Either way it'll cost a few bob...but the 'boss' says I'm flying around enough to warrant it.... and F1 2010 will look pretty bloody spiffy too..... The MoBo is an ASUS [P6T se] ... the Monitor's ASUS too...so am leaning to ASUS vers of the cards....[devil you know] PSU won't be taxed....it was 'future...