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The Tech Help Thread

Discussion in 'Technical Board' started by rei, Oct 19, 2009.

  1. Celos

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    Not to mention they usually go by an estimated guesses and manufacturer specs for max power draw rather than any real world data. That PC under any reasonable load will use at most around 300W and that is perfect for a 460W PSU.
     
  2. rei

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    If anyone has any pointers on how to fix this it'd be great - Steam Support isn't mailing me back and googling has been almost useless (some have solved it without explanation, or with a different solution than what works for me)

    I try to start steam and I get "Fatal Error: VGUI_Setup failed"
    thats it, nothing else. I've tried to purge my steam folder of.. everything, I've reinstalled it (even on different drives) because apparently reinstalling the instance in the same place might cause issue, nothing works, even after reinstalls. Still get that, still cant't play my games
     
  3. mad5427

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    I've got two tech questions for you guys.

    1. I'm finally getting back to getting my freenas server up and running properly. I set it up in an old pc and only have one hard drive so far for it. I want to buy a couple more to set it up as raid. The drive I have is a Western Digital 1.5 TB WD15EADS drive. I've read conflicting things about heterogenous drives and homogenous drives in a raid server. It would be cheaper for me to buy 1.5 TB drives from either other manufacturers or if I go with WD, their 1.5 TB WD15EARS drive is cheaper. Tomshardware has a nice article saying it's possible yet you will not have the same performance as if they were all identical. I'm not a big company and just having a backup/media storage server for my home.

    What is the difference between EADS and EARS? It seems they switched over to EARS from EADS. Can I have 1 drive be EADS and the rest as I buy them be EARS? I want to make sure this works.


    2. My home setup when I finally get this crap done is as follows: My main work computer is a Mac Book Pro with 500GB of storage. I have a Mac Mini that I use as backup with 300 or so GB and as a second machine. My wife has a PC laptop also with about 300GB of storage. We have a cable modem and an airport extreme wifi. This freenas server will be used as backup for all three computers along with storing our media files that we want all machines to share.

    We want to get a media box to hook up to our tv to stream movies/tv shows/music, etc. With the freenas server holding all of our data and having 2 macs and a pc connected to it, what would be the best device out there to buy to hook up to the tv? I know little about these media boxes out there like Apple TV, WD Media Plus, etc. Any recommendations or advice would be greatly appreciated.

    Thanks.
     
  4. Frank

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    Not sure if this is the right spot, but am I the only one that has been consistently getting this message:


    very frequently (almost every other click) when surfing TIB? I get it on multiple machines too.
     

    Attached Files:

  5. Juice

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    Moderately Gender Fluid

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    I had this same problem a while back; it's probably not Steam, it's Windows.

    Do a search for the dciman32.dll file and see if it's there. If it's not, pop in a Windows disk and copy it over. If it is there, name the original one "dciman32.old" and copy the new one and reboot.

    If that doesn't work, you can force an update refresh for Steam by deleting the clientregistry.blob file from the Steam\bin folder and see if that replaces the file it says is in question.

    Otherwise, you'll have to reformat your entire box.
     
  6. Nettdata

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    It seems that the server has been a bit overwhelmed in the last day or so. I've been getting database errors and some disconnects as well. It's happened in the past, and it's been handled by the hosting provider.

    Let me know if it's still happening in a day or so.
     
  7. Binary

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    It's actually been happening consistently for probably a couple months. For me, it's happened several times a day, and while I haven't tracked it, my gut impression is that there hasn't been a day when it hasn't happened.

    I most frequently browse at work and we have a pretty fucked up firewall, so I chalked it up to the router misbehaving and clipping or interrupting connections, but probably not if others are experiencing it.
     
  8. Nettdata

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    Maybe one day a week I get the SQL error (cannot connect to the DB) as it's apparently doing an automatic database restart, and a hang on a web request a few times a day. I always chalked that up to the fact that I do a fair bit of torrenting, and my QoS implementation is flaky at best at home.

    There was only one time that I was aware of the site being down for long periods of time.


    The problems haven't really made the site unusable, in my experience... only requiring a refresh or a bit of a delay.

    If anyone else is having more issues, let me know, and I'll get Chater to rag on the hosting company.

    Mind you, we're hosted at a CHEAP service, and we are kind of pushing a bit of traffic, so it's not like I have high expectations from them.
     
  9. rei

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    I already had forced the updates, and had dciman lying around - but other applications were dying left right and centre with "could not open application 0x00007b" so I just did a repair install and that seems to have sorted all my issues
     
  10. Binary

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    Yep, it's just a refresh. I usually have to hit refresh 2-3 times and then the site will come back and I can resume normal browsing.
     
  11. Frank

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    Just for the sake of clarity, this was the issue I've been having, needing to refresh every other click or so. For me it's only been about two weeks, not two months.
     
  12. Nettdata

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    I'm going to make this a separate thread, because it's not like it's simple or anything.
     
  13. silway

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    I need a way to receive incoming Faxes as an e-mail. Preferably without having a normal houseline phone if that's possible (my wife and I use cell phones and since she's about to be unemployed I wouldn't mind avoiding the monthly fee).

    Thanks!
     
  14. thabucmaster

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    eFax is where it's at for this kind of thing.
     
  15. dubyu tee eff

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    So I'm going to have to transfer a whole bunch of files back and forth from an external hard drive to a mac running OSX lion. Only problem is, the external is in NTFS format which I am told OSX can read from but not write to. I thought about converting to FAT32 but I'm not entirely sure how to do that and I don't really want the external in FAT32 format so I'd prefer something else. I would also prefer to do it without data loss if that is possible, but it's ok if I can't. What is the best route for me to go and how do I do it?
     
  16. scootah

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    Can you install software on the Lion machine? If so - <a class="postlink" href="http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/2010/10/ntfs-3g-for-mac-os-x-2010102.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/2010/10/ ... 10102.html</a> - Apparently with Lion you might get an error on first mounting the disk that it's taking too long - but it will get there eventually and work fine.
     
  17. dubyu tee eff

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    Hmm I did some more reading and I found that OSX Lion supports exFAT which is easy to convert to. I think I might go with that instead instead of the NTFS support software. I'll have to reformat it, but nob biggie. Seem like a decent solution?
     
  18. AlmostGaunt

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    Oh man. Through a combination of the hard work of some very skilled Professors and a lot of luck, I find myself moonlighting in a role I am totally unqualified for. This is my idea of fun, so that's all well and good, but I don't want to disappoint my colleagues since they have mistakenly placed their faith in me. I am Project Manager for a moderately sized University grant, and one of the things I am responsible for is this:

    A networking website will be developed to: facilitate communication among participants and project applicants following the workshop: gather evaluative feedback on the application of the quality principles and the professional development workshop; and disseminate project outcomes.

    I'm not wholly sure what a networking website is - does it mean a website with a forum, or a comments section, or what? Who knows? Certainly the academics involved don't know, as they aren't especially technologically inclined - hence they decided to involve me. I've been reading the advice you guys have given to Rob4Bronco's about building a website, but I'm not sure it applies to my situation. My question is: is it reasonable to attempt to build this website myself? I have a ton of free time and am highly motivated, so I'd like to at least give it a shot. However, the last website I wrote was in notepad, and I am almost totally unfamiliar with WYSIWIG editors/bulletin boards. This is going to be a fairly high profile study, and I don't want to produce something that will embarrass me or my colleagues. Should I outsource to a reputable web design company? I have a reasonable budget to do that if necessary, it just seems ... wasteful... when I spend so much of my day job bored wishing I had something challenging to do. Any help from people with experience building websites or running forums would be much appreciated!
     
  19. Celos

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    You can't do anything without first figuring this out. Surely someone has an idea, since someone wrote down the goals of the website. Go around to your colleagues and find out what it is they expect from this website, what features it should have etc. Be as detailed as possible. Odds are, if they aren't technically inclined, their expectations are fucking unreasonable and doing it yourself while working out how to do it is going to be difficult.
     
  20. Aetius

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    Can anyone explain to me why it seems like TV remotes are way shittier than they were ten or fifteen years ago? It used to be I pushed a button and the TV responded almost instantly, no matter where I was aiming the remote. Now I have to aim carefully, hold the button down for several seconds, and then wait for extremely noticeable delays. I suppose some channel switching delay can be chalked up to the switch from an analog signal to a digital one, but it seems like the whole system has degraded in performance way more than is reasonable. Am I taking crazy pills?