Evolv-ing Thread

[BillW50]

I've never had a machine "wake up" in the middle of the night for anything from MS. That includes the Windoohs 10/Pro that runs my backups. That machine gets turned on twice a week in the evening to do its backup chores overnight, then gets shut down in the morning so it's running maybe 24 hours per week total. I've never heard that MS is waking up machines so they can "update" things to, what they claim, is the latest and greatest. There are ways to prevent that, just unplug it from power or the network.

I don't think they will wake up if you turn them off, off! But they sure wake up from Standby or Hibernation. Try that sometime. One day you will find Windows 10 wide awake just sitting there and fully exposed to the dangers of the Internet. And when it happens, check your build number. It probably updated. Tibs also mentioned this happens to hers too. It happened to my HP in hibernation mode while it sat 2 months in the case. Of course the battery was dead because they never shut them back off again. Never mind all of the air vents are blocked sitting in the bag.

Oh yeah, the third party antivirus disables Defender, but that can also be done, manually, inside Windoohs 10.

Had Avast running since day one. But Defender still needs to scan every few months or so. Why? I have no idea.

 

[TrollDragon]

Yup, I thought about it. If it is only going to be a problem when it cries it really, really has to run bad... I dunno.

Yup, I've been using Avast for about 15 years now and it was the best out of the lot. And yes, turning off the extra stuff makes it less annoying. Although it still tries to annoy you by telling it you found broken registry links, programs slowing your machine down, etc. And I assure you that on a machine that is barely able to run Windows by itself, it's Avast that is slowing the machine down looking for stuff to tell you about. And on my gaming PCs, there is nothing slowing them down any except Defender. Otherwise they are usually running with less than 10% CPU use and virtually no disk use and fan speed idling.

I run CCleaner (Free Version) to fix bad registry entries, it's also great for cleaning out the stuff that accumulates. But just like every other tool out there they want to be a one stop fix all, I just don't use any of the other features except for file & registry clean. It's another utility that needs a custom install so you don't end up with all the baggage. I wish they would just stick to the basic functionality they had when it first came out, instead of setting up a time limited full blown version that I would never use.

 

[tiburonfirst]

see what you can still get for those units?

not much

 

[BillW50]

I'v been working on some old macs my kids don't use any more.
A 27" iMac from 2009 & a13" Macbook Pro from 2010, there a little slow now, but still solid units! Sure we paid a lot for these new, but over this amount of time, they were a bargain Over all this time. I changed a fan in the Macbook & a HD in the iMac ! Only issues software or hardware we have had with both units
BTW there are 1496 cycles on the battery in the Macbook & it still works!

I still have lots of computers from the 80's and 90's that are still running just like new. Some of them never had anything done to them. My earliest Windows machines are two Compaq Concerto Windows 3.1 machines from '93 and they are still running fine and everything still works and nothing ever done to them. Windows 3.1 with Pen support no less. A machine way before its time.

Heck that Gateway M465 with Windows 8.1 (originally had XP SP2) I still have running at least 4 hours a day 7 days a week. It never updates, never reboots, I just wake it up from Standby and it is ready to go. And it is from 2007. And it was my main machine until May 2019 when this Lenovo Legion Y530 had taken its place. But the way things are going with Windows 10, these Windows 10 might retire soon and that Gateway back as my main machine again.

 

[awsum140]

There's the big difference. I never put a machine in sleep or hibernate. When I get done using them for the day they get powered down. They do get turned on, first thing in the morning, and allowed to boot at their leisure while I do other things, like make coffee, so it's never been an issue for me.

My desktop runs 24/7/365. The surveillance software keeps the CPU at 10-20% depending on the amount of motion and time of day. Then there's the three instances of folding@home which take another 12% each. Then, throw in the few odds and ends needed to keep things running and the CPU sits anywhere between 50 and 70% constantly. It's been running that way for years now. Network utilization runs between 50 and 100 Mbps and the drives run at around 8% utilization. 200cfm external fan system and all the case fans I could stuff into an Obsidian case keeps it, relatively, cool.

 

[BillW50]

There's the big difference. I never put a machine in sleep or hibernate. When I get done using them for the day they get powered down. They do get turned on, first thing in the morning, and allowed to boot at their leisure while I do other things, like make coffee, so it's never been an issue for me.

Why? Standby only usually uses 1 watt or less and Hibernation mode uses 0 watts. Both when you turn them back on, everything is just like before you put them in Standby or Hibernation mode. They boot faster and depending on the hardware, can be instant on.

Besides the 1 watt of power, the only drawback (besides a power outage, but you run UPS anyway) is if the power fails. Hibernation isn't affected by power. There is normally no reason to boot every time. You can if you want to of course, but you aren't really gainning anything. Unless the OS has bugs or something and has memory leaks that the OS can't clean up, then you probably have to.

My desktop runs 24/7/365. The surveillance software keeps the CPU at 10-20% depending on the amount of motion and time of day. Then there's the three instances of folding@home which take another 12% each. Then, throw in the few odds and ends needed to keep things running and the CPU sits anywhere between 50 and 70% constantly. It's been running that way for years now. Network utilization runs between 50 and 100 Mbps and the drives run at around 8% utilization. 200cfm external fan system and all the case fans I could stuff into an Obsidian case keeps it, relatively, cool.

What kind of processor is that again? My poor Dell ST (they are 10 inch Windows tablets) running Windows 7 and 8 almost always running the poor Z670 CPU at 100%. My Asus netbooks running XP and Linux running a Celeron 400MHz I think also runs most of the time at 100%. Now contrast this with my i7 which is currently running 4% at 4GHz.

Gaming on this Lenovo Legion Y530, I raised the feet up higher about 7mm it looks like. I don't know why they place feet that is nearly flush with the bottom for? As the fans run at max when gaming that way. When raised up, the fans hardly work at all while gaming. I don't think the CPU ever sees passed 40% while the GPU can hit in the 90s. I just checked the GPUs now. The Intel 630 is at 0% and so is the Nvidia GTX1050Ti. Does your desktop use GPUs?

I run a watt meter on this machine and it averages 30 watts per hour. It can drop as low as 18 watts at times and can go over 30 watts too (135 watts max). And running the meter, it averages at a cost of a buck of electricity a week or 52 bucks a year. I figure that is very reasonable and I can live with that. Contrast this with my HP 360 15br which costs 30 cents a week to run. But I rather pay more and have things happen instantly unless Microsoft hijacks it.

 

[awsum140]

It's an i7-6700K, more than a few generations old now, running on an Asus ROG Maximus VII mobo. The video card GPUs all run at 85% or higher, depending on what F@H gives them to work on, and can hit 97% for hours on end when the F@H "Gods" give me good work units (high point work units). The video processor on those cards are running under 10% because all they really do is process the H264 and H265, four cameras are H264 and seven are H265 and, of course, the 1080P, 27" monitor is on the 2070. Temps on the video cards are all different,, depending on the card, with the 2070 at around 155F, the 1060 at around 110F and the 970 at around 135F. The CPU sits around 130F all the time. In terms of power, the UPS reports it's using around 540 watts and it's the only thing on that UPS.

I don't mind letting them boot and, obviously, I don't worry too much about the power draw. I find it just as convenient to boot them. Another thing is that all of these machines were "bare metal" installs which is another advantage.

 

[BillW50]

 

[tiburonfirst]

 

[dwcraig1]

 

[ShamrockPat]

Happy Birthday TrollDragon

 

[awsum140]

Definitely! Have a GREAT birthday TD! Just don't do anything I, allegedly, wouldn't do and, if you do, don't get caught at it

 

[tiburonfirst]

. ..

 

[tiburonfirst]

 

[dwcraig1]

 

[BillW50]

 

[mikepetro]

 

[SlickWilly]

What the hell Windows 10!​

At 3AM, I went to make a cup of coffee. Came back to my Lenovo Legion Y530, i7 with 16GB of RAM and the screen was blank and the hard drive was chugging along like crazy. I was using it for the past 4 hours prior and everything was running just fine. It continued for another 10 minutes before the screen came to life and it logs on to Windows and the desktop appears. What just happened? Windows update or something? No warning whatsoever! Everything I had opened was just gone!

Clicking on the desktop and nothing happens until minutes later after the click. Hard drive still chugging along. I manage to coax the Task Manager open and I checked what was going on. The disk drive is at 100% and a program called MsMpEng.exe is the cause of it all. What the hell, that is Microsoft Defender! It is scanning every freaken file on the hard drive. Does it also reboot your computer without warning?

You know whatever I see supposedly unbiased third parties test Defender against other anti-malware programs, Defender always scores last. I don't know why Microsoft even does anything in the security business? They are really bad at it. They should leave it to the experts who knows what they are doing. As far as I am concern, it shouldn't even be on any of my machines and it is just a waste of disk space.

So I did a Win+R and typed winver and it reported back build 1803. So the build didn't change. I got to the Windows event logs and I can't find anything related to why Windows rebooted without warning. I don't know how you people put up with this Windows 10. Thank goodness I have plenty of machines that if one goes down it isn't a real big deal for me. But what about people who only has one machine?

Been fighting the last day and a half trying to get Win 10 to dual boot with Win 7, followed the instructions to a T and it just won't work, even did another clean install of 10. I have to jump into BIOS during boot and manually tell it which drive to boot, sick of fighting it, I'll just jump into BIOS each time.

 

[SlickWilly]

Been wanting one of these for a longgggg time, 95% sure I'm gonna pull the trigger, sale end on the 1st.
https://www.harborfreight.com/40-Lb-Capacity-Floor-Blast-Cabinet-68893.html

 

[tiburonfirst]

and here i thought christmas was over