PC Tech Thread

Check monitor to make sure you've selected the right input. Mine often defaults to VGA for some reason, even though there's nothing plugged in there.

1. Synology if you don't want to get your hands dirty
   
2. No, but use it for one of your backups
   
   

Longer answer is dependent on how much data and whether you are doing anything intensive like transcoding video streams.

@moocher laptops we have at work use Alt+F4 to toggle between external and mirror etc

Anyone need a decent but low profile cooler? I have a spare Noctura N12 or something... one of these...

https://www.quietpc.com/nh-l12?countryid=gb&gclid=CjsKDwjw0cXIBRCxjqnE3K3sHhIkAL1LezTNaTLsTY1h84LJSl3-QPUpNjYtlnfHph3rszJpZXs7GgJ3yfD_BwE

HP microservers are perfect if you fancy rolling your own FreeNAS box. You can often find them with cash back deals.

Agreed although I have UnRAID on mine. I think I paid about about £140 for the basic dual core Celeron model and then another £40 for a low power quad core CPU on eBay. You can fairly easily add a 5th or 6th drive too.

Ta, I'll have a look.

It's just static backups of audio, video, text files. Nothing special at all.

Don't want to do anything to it, just bang it in, quick config and have it automatically backing up my stuff.

I have a 2 bay D-link DNS-320 NAS that's sitting unused if you're interested?

Maybe. Is it any good? How much you want?

£30 without drives, £100 with 2x2TB? It's currently sitting unused so PM me.

Worked perfectly well until I filled it up and got a larger NAS (HP microserver). Can run as striped, mirror or separate disks.

So it has fallen to me to try and sort out an extended family Windows computer which appears to have malware. There are no backups but it's not completely knackered, most files are readable. I guess I will clean-install Windows on a completely new SSD (as it's a powerful machine but still has HDs) but how do I get the old files off the HDs without risking whatever I attach them to in order to read them?

I'd boot into a Linux Live CD (or use a linux machine) and do it that way.

Yep I can do that, do you mean install Windows on the SSD first, then reboot with the Live CD and copy the files from the old HDD straight to the new SSD?

The old HDD actually appears to be a mirrored RAID pair so I guess I should also test first whether I can mount one in Linux OK.

(An extra annoyance is that the situation has probably come about from owner's employer's helpdesk telling them to circumvent browser security settings to get their VPN working. I guess that calls for a VM for that sole purpose...?)

I'd either do that or just boot into live CD and copy to a flash drive.

Beforehand I'd use something like either the Bitdefender Rescue disk or install Avast or ClamAV on the Linux livecd installation and scan for viruses there too.

Great, thanks for pointers.

Bought a Ubiquiti UniFi UAP-AC-LITE after getting fed up of crappy Plusnet One Hub after @Velocio recommended it.

So far very impressed - was easier than I thought to set up using the Android app and I've got everything connected except my Nests which don't want to. This seems to be a known issue and I've tried the steps set out in this Reddit post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubiquiti/comments/5oc405/problems_connecting_nest_v2_thermostat_to/?sort=confidence

My network was originally called Wi-Fi, now it's WiFi, but still no joy. I can't find some of the settings mentioned in the Reddit post in the Android app, so am trying to access the settings from the Mac UniFi Controller app but it can't find the access point (it says no devices found), even though my Mac is connected to its wireless network.

I've also tried the Discovery Utility and it just says 'Discovering UniFi devices...' and doesn't find it.

Halp?

Don't worry, fixed this by turning off my existing 2.4Ghz Wi-Fi and switching the channel to 13. Not sure which did it but they've connected now.

Microsoft have decided to remove 90% of the capacity of my onedrive account and won't give me any options to buy more.

I was just using it to sync my backup drive. Are there any good services for online backup sync? Dropbox is rather expensive for what I need, but that's more for more regular use and sharing, I just need somewhere I'll do a bit dump to then sync bits of data now and then, then do a big download should everything fail.

Any recommendations? I need about 1.5Tb.

every thought to use a proper cloud back up and the google drive for the small things you use a lot ? I have about 600 Gb stored with Crashplan, and only really resort to ~500Mb with Google.

Oh I should say Amazon Drive is pretty good for unlimited storage, 55 gbp ( $59 ). I have it as well just to be sure my photo's don't get trashed.

is there any way for the current virus to get all inside your computer if you don't click on a dodgy e-mails and ting

what are the ways one can get infected

• dodgy website
  
• click on infected e-mail
  
  

any more ways ?

If you receive an email in a desktop mail client which saves it to disc, triggering scanning by MS Defender which has an exploitable bug.

I use AWS Glacier w/ FastGlacier app. It's good for backups that you're unlikely to need (cheap to store, the cost comes to retrieve).

Wannacry was spread using a file sharing exploit in Windows, so for now I wouldn't connect to dropbox or anything until you've got all anti-virus software up to date and Windows updated.

every thought to use a proper cloud back up and the google drive for the small things you use a lot ? I have about 600 Gb stored with Crashplan, and only really resort to ~500Mb with Google.

Yes that's exactly what I'm thinking of - I don't need it for file sharing, purely for backup.