Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[bd139]

Windows 10 success:

1. Disable sleep
2. Enable hibernate.
3. Tell power management to hibernate when the lid is shut.
4. Enter a higher plane of existence.

Good things:

1. Never goes comatose on you when you go for a shit disconnecting your VPNs, torrents etc etc
2. Never decided to suddenly go to sleep in the middle of netflix.
3. Never do you pick the laptop up and find the bastard is dead because it didn't enter sleep properly when you shut the lid and turn the entire battery into wasted heat.

[grizewald]

Windows 10 is the OS from hell.

The only way I'll run any Windows on any computing device I have is when it's safely confined in a virtual machine with a nice stable Linux base to host it.

[mnementh]

Desktop w/SSD.

Hibernate disabled because of SSD; hiberfile.sys demands an absolute address, which borks SSDs. SSDs 101, man. Windows10 now disables hibernate completely when installed on an SSD. Hibernate has been a complete HDD-raping clusterfuck on Windows ever since they went 64-bit; it hasn't been reliable since XP. ESPECIALLY since they started backing everything up to OneDrive by default. 

I have kept hibernate disabled literally for over a decade and use sleep exclusively; it is a core function of my workflow, even on spinning rust because of the lost workflow from shutting down or hibernating, which always effs up my open browser tabs. That and Windoze hibernate implementation is hooky as fuck, and destroys hard drives.

With the SSD, lost work state isn't AS BAD if I shut down due to 12-second boot times... but as I add the apps I use all the time, that boot time will creep up even on SSD.

The more they "Update", the more core functionality they ruin...

mnem
It's like they want us all to migrate to Ubuntu.

[grizewald]

With the SSD, lost work state isn't AS BAD if I shut down due to 12-second boot times... but as I add the apps I use all the time, that boot time will creep up even on SSD.

The registry was such a wonderful idea!

Windows - just say no.

[mnementh]

Windows 10 is the OS from hell.

The only way I'll run any Windows on any computing device I have is when it's safely confined in a virtual machine with a nice stable Linux base to host it.

meh. I have a life, and things to get done. You pay with your time either way; by having to fix Windoze when it breaks or by having to build your OS from the ground up with wrenches and screwdrivers. And then build it again anytime you want to add a new bit of hardware or sometimes, even software. 

https://youtu.be/YRlPTbKHIPQ

It was true 2 decades ago, it's more true now than ever.

mnem
Every OS Sucks.

[grizewald]

Every OS Sucks.

True to a point, but installing any decent Linux distro takes less time than installing Winblows these days.

I built a new computer for my daughter a couple of weekends ago and took possession of her old machine (which was originally mine).

Windows had decayed into such disarray that it took several minutes to boot from SSD and even longer to shut down. So I installed a copy of the latest release of Linux Mint, installed Steam and about 20 minutes later I was happily playing Half Life 2 with flawless sound and video.

This install won't decay into treacle any time soon! More to the point, it won't be sending private information to Microsnot without my permission.

[bd139]

Hibernate to SSD is fine. The whole hibernate to SSD thing destroying devices is a myth. The big problem is it eats a chunk of disk space which was an issue when disks were small and/or expensive.  I have NEVER lost work state in 15 years of hibernating. Not once. And I do it a lot!

Here's my current main disk in my main work machine which gets hibernated 2 to 3 times a day every day. Check out the write volume and powered up hours. Disk is about 11 months old and was in my spare laptop before that for a year. 4.6TiB written approx. Write lifetime according to [1] is 1511TiB approx so I've used 0.4% of its lifetime. Stop worrying and enjoy the speed



Also on windows feck ups, it takes me about 60 minutes to do an install from USB on this disk and run all the updates in and install all the software I use and recover the data. I lose a windows build approx once every 6 months which is fine. Total time expended on just unfucking high DPI displays on linux exceeds that.

Edit: the last two times I got a hosed windows build were thanks to HP printer drivers. This problem has been eliminated now by literally drop kicking the fucking printer on to the street and getting a Brother laser 

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/8239/update-on-samsung-850-pro-endurance-vnand-die-size

[bd139]

The registry was such a wonderful idea!

Windows - just say no.

Just to add, I fucking love the registry. It's amazing. It really is. It's transactional, session scoped, typed, has extremely strong ACL support and supports notifications and has some technical standards behind it.

On linux there is a pebbledash diarrhea attack of disjoint configuration files in /etc and your home directory, some of which are hidden away behind gnome-config which looks like a bad reinvention of the registry and a lot of the security comes from individual programs (ssh etc) enforcing security at runtime which is too late when I've swept the entire box for SSH keys  ... Also to configure it you need to learn 18 different programming languages or a new DSL for each program.

And lets not look a the striking similarity between everything freedesktop has kicked out over the last 15 years and windows. journald is event log. systemd is a bastard combination of all the bad bits of service manager+lsass+csrs. dbus is MSMQ invented by a crack monkey.

Edit: RISCOS ftw. That's about right.

[Kosmic]

Just six more months. Just six more months. Just six more months.


And I'll finally have enough money to buy a spectrum analyzer.

I feel the need.......to TEA.  It buuurns!!

If you're like me, you'll end up with more than one!! I have 3 operational spectrum analyzers (HP 8566A, 8568B, and 8569B) and 1 in need of repair (another 8568B). 

Talking about HP 8566B, Found another unit for sale locally. Unit seem to be in good shape this time, screen is bright. Will try to lowball    Something like 500$.

[mnementh]

Every OS Sucks.

True to a point, but installing any decent Linux distro takes less time than installing Winblows these days.

I built a new computer for my daughter a couple of weekends ago and took possession of her old machine (which was originally mine).

Windows had decayed into such disarray that it took several minutes to boot from SSD and even longer to shut down. So I installed a copy of the latest release of Linux Mint, installed Steam and about 20 minutes later I was happily playing Half Life 2 with flawless sound and video.

This install won't decay into treacle any time soon! More to the point, it won't be sending private information to Microsnot without my permission.

Ummm... yeah.

My current build of Windows is literally 13 years old. I know people running Mint who aren't that old; good for them, they have a lot more time to waste than I do. 

You read that right. THIRTEEN EFFING YEARS. It started out on an Athlon II/8GB Build of XP/64-bit. And has been Upgraded to Win7/64 with my Phenom II 1055T/16GB and then recently Win10/64 and at least a dozen HDD upgrades over the years. I have archived backups going back to 2008. Never once have I lost my "current" workspace. I have legacy 32-bit apps working on this machine you can't even INSTALL on it now.

My first "fresh install" on my daily driver (aside from some dozens of experimental builds of everything from OS2/Warp to Ubuntu on a dedicated drive) since then is this SSD build with an FX8350 and the same MB/16GB RAM.

I am a true believer in "Hot-Swap" HDD bay technology. 

Every once in a while I refresh core OS files from disc and clean the registry of old drivers with GHOST. I ran SPEC (Enterprise Windoze Defender) until they deprecated it, now I run Defender. I run ShutUp10 weekly when I do my backups. *NIX has similar maintenance that must be done no less frequently.

Plus, I don't have the the joy of watching other people loving the hell out of some new toy I can't play with for 6-18 months because it took that long for someone with better Kung-Fu than mine to write a driver for it.

I can just [CLICK] on slAmazon, and be enjoying it too in a day or two. 

mnem
*the lesser of two weevils*

[mnementh]

Hibernate to SSD is fine. The whole hibernate to SSD thing destroying devices is a myth. The big problem is it eats a chunk of disk space which was an issue when disks were small and/or expensive.  I have NEVER lost work state in 15 years of hibernating. Not once. And I do it a lot!

Here's my current main disk in my main work machine which gets hibernated 2 to 3 times a day every day. Check out the write volume and powered up hours. Disk is about 11 months old and was in my spare laptop before that for a year. 4.6TiB written approx. Write lifetime according to [1] is 1511TiB approx so I've used 0.4% of its lifetime. Stop worrying and enjoy the speed

   Also on windows feck ups, it takes me about 60 minutes to do an install from USB on this disk and run all the updates in and install all the software I use and recover the data. I lose a windows build approx once every 6 months which is fine. Total time expended on just unfucking high DPI displays on linux exceeds that.

Edit: the last two times I got a hosed windows build were thanks to HP printer drivers. This problem has been eliminated now by literally drop kicking the fucking printer on to the street and getting a Brother laser 

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/8239/update-on-samsung-850-pro-endurance-vnand-die-size

I've personally lost spinning rust disks to hiberfile.sys fuckerizing the MBR & FAT; it's part & parcel of the total clusterfuck that Windoze memory management has become due to the PC Hardware industry (and large fleet buyers) DEMANDING that they STILL be able to run on a fucking retarded X86 box with just 4-8GB RAM, even though a 16GB build has been affordable for a DECADE.  As a result, the memory architecture is fucked to the point where Windoze doesn't use anything above ~6GB properly; it starts hashing the fuck out of the HDD at around 3GB loaded up and will still shit a brick if you have plenty of RAM and try to disable the swapfile.

SSD manufacturers (Samsung among them) recommend disabling Hibernate to preserve your warranty. Windows does it automatically if you bother to tell it to optimize itself for SSD; it's been a switch in WinSAT since Windows 8.1 (For those of you who don't know; WinSAT still works, it's just a command-line tool now). If you do a fresh install on an AHCI-enabled drive, it confirms the drive parameters and optimizes itself for SSD, disabling hibernate.

I think you've been lucky. 

mnem
*back out into the suck*

[med6753]

Wow, the police/fire scanner just exploded with activity. A PI (Personal Injury) auto accident involving a police car at a major intersection down in town then not more than 5 minutes later a car into a tree on another road about .5 mile away. Multiple agencies both police and fire/EMS responding.

Quick subject change......the parts for the scope showed up. Finally.   

[worsthorse]

Windows 10 is the OS from hell.

The only way I'll run any Windows on any computing device I have is when it's safely confined in a virtual machine with a nice stable Linux base to host it.

Only Windows 10 could make me love Windows 7, which by comparison has a straightforward user interface, is free of bloat, network friendly, and easy to administer. I also run a small program called GMX control panel that blocks Windows 10 upgrades, which helps a lot.  I have it on four or five Dell business class machines and given how many Windows programs I use that don't run on Linux, it is a pretty good solution.

Microsoft will quit supporting 7 in about fifteen months. Given how I use these machines, I figure they are good for five years after that, at least for non-internet-related activities.

[mnementh]

Wow, the police/fire scanner just exploded with activity. A PI (Personal Injury) auto accident involving a police car at a major intersection down in town then not more than 5 minutes later a car into a tree on another road about .5 mile away. Multiple agencies both police and fire/EMS responding.

Quick subject change......the parts for the scope showed up. Finally. 

Sounds like a car chase. That they weren't able to keep "discrete".    Maybe it was your parts courier... made the delivery "on time", but not without a few "casualties"...

mnem
*SEVERE penalty for late delivery*

[med6753]

The Heath OL-1. New binding posts installed. Front panel is now complete.



The line cord was in good shape except for one spot burnt with a soldering iron. Repaired with shrink tubing. The original plug was in poor condition so it was replaced. The scope will remain as original 2 wire ungrounded. If you're a 3 wire advocate you'll be preaching to the choir. My decision is final. I verified complete isolation to the chassis.



Next step is to start on cap replacement. This is the bottom side of the 4 section can for the B+. Will remove all these resistors/wiring and pull the can. Intention is to gut the can of the original capacitors to either install new caps inside or use the tie points on the bottom of the can. That will be the next installment.   

[mnementh]

tzzzt.

mnem
 

[bd139]

I've personally lost spinning rust disks to hiberfile.sys fuckerizing the MBR & FAT; it's part & parcel of the total clusterfuck that Windoze memory management has become due to the PC Hardware industry (and large fleet buyers) DEMANDING that they STILL be able to run on a fucking retarded X86 box with just 4-8GB RAM, even though a 16GB build has been affordable for a DECADE.  As a result, the memory architecture is fucked to the point where Windoze doesn't use anything above ~6GB properly; it starts hashing the fuck out of the HDD at around 3GB loaded up and will still shit a brick if you have plenty of RAM and try to disable the swapfile.

SSD manufacturers (Samsung among them) recommend disabling Hibernate to preserve your warranty. Windows does it automatically if you bother to tell it to optimize itself for SSD; it's been a switch in WinSAT since Windows 8.1 (For those of you who don't know; WinSAT still works, it's just a command-line tool now). If you do a fresh install on an AHCI-enabled drive, it confirms the drive parameters and optimizes itself for SSD, disabling hibernate.

I think you've been lucky. 

The memory issues only persist with 32-bit processes running on 64-bit hardware as the x86 in 32-bit mode can only address 4Gb of RAM with a big hole in it. Our SQL Servers run about 212Gb active memory as an example without touching disk. They have SSDs (4x HPE PCIe attached 4TiB units). The more that stays in RAM the faster they go.

powercfg /hibernate on

Job done. It's fine. Not luck. I've seen it on a corporate deployment with over 500 machines and no failures related to that. At this point it's definitely religious since windows 8.1 pro at least.


Grr here.

Well I'll give you one thing here. Fuck powerpoles. I just had an argument with a dicky one. I figured it was the 2.1mm DC jack on the other end of the wire. Nope it was the fecking powerpole connectors. FIRED.

So figured I'll knock up a new nice little 4A fused switchcraft 2.1mm to spade cable up for my SLA to replace this and guess what? I managed to bugger up the switchcraft plug sneezing while soldering. One Elecraft shipped £5 damn 2.1 DC jack and I ballsed it 

[med6753]

tzzzt.

mnem
 

I warned you.   

[xrunner]

My decision is final.

Hold on wait ... ! 

[mnementh]

Desktop w/SSD.

Hibernate disabled because of SSD; hiberfile.sys demands an absolute address, which borks SSDs. SSDs 101, man. Windows10 now disables hibernate completely when installed on an SSD. Hibernate has been a complete HDD-raping clusterfuck on Windows ever since they went 64-bit; it hasn't been reliable since XP. ESPECIALLY since they started backing everything up to OneDrive by default. 

I have kept hibernate disabled literally for over a decade and use sleep exclusively; it is a core function of my workflow, even on spinning rust because of the lost workflow from shutting down or hibernating, which always effs up my open browser tabs. That and Windoze hibernate implementation is hooky as fuck, and destroys hard drives.

With the SSD, lost work state isn't AS BAD if I shut down due to 12-second boot times... but as I add the apps I use all the time, that boot time will creep up even on SSD.

The more they "Update", the more core functionality they ruin...

mnem
It's like they want us all to migrate to Ubuntu.

Interesting. doodling around in my spinning rust drive, I noticed that hibernate no longer exists there, either. Not even as a hidden option. It appears that in their infinite wisdom, somewhere along the line MS has decided that since their default power-up mode is to return to last-used state, that "Hibernate" is superfluous and doesn't need to be. At all.

bd, you may find that as your "delayed" update time runs out, it disappears on your machine too. I wonder if this effed-up "Sleep" mode is them trying to force us to try this "tablet-style" power-up mode.

mnem
*time to pick up the kiddles*

[mnementh]

tzzzt.

mnem
 

I warned you.       

Actually, I was agitating about the idea of you rebuilding that stacked capacitor with "penis fingers" ever-near, just waiting to strike... 

mnem
"Hallelujah, Hallelujah...
Baby I've been here before;
I've seen this room and I've walked this floor..." ~ Leonard Cohen

[med6753]

The service manual for the RCA WO-505A scope showed up and I'm impressed. Nicely bound and excellent copy. I guess it was worth the $24 USD after all. 

[bitseeker]

Hibernate to SSD is fine. The whole hibernate to SSD thing destroying devices is a myth. The big problem is it eats a chunk of disk space which was an issue when disks were small and/or expensive.  I have NEVER lost work state in 15 years of hibernating. Not once. And I do it a lot!

Here's my current main disk in my main work machine which gets hibernated 2 to 3 times a day every day. Check out the write volume and powered up hours. Disk is about 11 months old and was in my spare laptop before that for a year. 4.6TiB written approx. Write lifetime according to [1] is 1511TiB approx so I've used 0.4% of its lifetime. Stop worrying and enjoy the speed

Yes, nothing wrong with hibernate on SSD. However, the option to use it is often disabled by default and hidden away. My work laptop will not provide a menu item to hibernate, but it's accessible as an option for the power button. So, that's how I get it to go.

Since I want my personal laptop's SSD to last as long as possible, I use a hybrid approach. If I know I'm going to be using the laptop again in a short period of time (i.e., next day or sooner), then I put it to sleep, which is its default action when closing the lid while on battery. Otherwise, for longer downtime, I hibernate it.

According to CrystalDiskInfo, after 10970 power on hours, I have 5429 GB total writes to my SSD. Not bad.

[mnementh]

I've personally lost spinning rust disks to hiberfile.sys fuckerizing the MBR & FAT; it's part & parcel of the total clusterfuck that Windoze memory management has become due to the PC Hardware industry (and large fleet buyers) DEMANDING that they STILL be able to run on a fucking retarded X86 box with just 4-8GB RAM, even though a 16GB build has been affordable for a DECADE.  As a result, the memory architecture is fucked to the point where Windoze doesn't use anything above ~6GB properly; it starts hashing the fuck out of the HDD at around 3GB loaded up and will still shit a brick if you have plenty of RAM and try to disable the swapfile.

SSD manufacturers (Samsung among them) recommend disabling Hibernate to preserve your warranty. Windows does it automatically if you bother to tell it to optimize itself for SSD; it's been a switch in WinSAT since Windows 8.1 (For those of you who don't know; WinSAT still works, it's just a command-line tool now). If you do a fresh install on an AHCI-enabled drive, it confirms the drive parameters and optimizes itself for SSD, disabling hibernate.

I think you've been lucky. 

The memory issues only persist with 32-bit processes running on 64-bit hardware as the x86 in 32-bit mode can only address 4Gb of RAM with a big hole in it. Our SQL Servers run about 212Gb active memory as an example without touching disk. They have SSDs (4x HPE PCIe attached 4TiB units). The more that stays in RAM the faster they go.

powercfg /hibernate on

Job done. It's fine. Not luck. I've seen it on a corporate deployment with over 500 machines and no failures related to that. At this point it's definitely religious since windows 8.1 pro at least.


Grr here.

Well I'll give you one thing here. Fuck powerpoles. I just had an argument with a dicky one. I figured it was the 2.1mm DC jack on the other end of the wire. Nope it was the fecking powerpole connectors. FIRED.

So figured I'll knock up a new nice little 4A fused switchcraft 2.1mm to spade cable up for my SLA to replace this and guess what? I managed to bugger up the switchcraft plug sneezing while soldering. One Elecraft shipped £5 damn 2.1 DC jack and I ballsed it 

Condolences on the nuked plug. Done that more times than I'll admit. 

Powerpole/SERMOS connectors are supposed to "float" under spring tension inside the shell and "self-align". But in reality, they're very sensitive to misalignment due to preload applied by the wire soldered/crimped to them. Soldering makes it worse, as the stiffening of the wire from solder wicking up the strands give added leverage to any lateral loading from position or crooked wires. This can make the "overlap" region of the contacts "miss" each other, or can cause them to be rotated out of phase with each other so contact is only made on one side edge. And sometimes, the damned things just want to be dicky. 

Looked in on the command line and of course you're right; HIBERNATE is still a powercfg supported switch. OTOH, why bother? Might as well just shut it down. 

mnem
How many monkeys?

[GregDunn]

I feel the pain of everyone running Windoze.  To the point that I went around and patted all my Macs on the monitor and thanked them.   

Oh, and before the chorus of "but the cost..."  starts up: all my Macs (including the one I'm typing on) are PCs running MacOS.  The last one I installed took less time than any Windoze build I ever suffered through, and has been 10x as reliable. It was also cheaper than any desktop Mac because I could choose my components for quality and compatibility.  The latest Linux builds are OK (I'm using Raspbian for some testing on the network), but still lacking a lot of the software I need and use every day.  For a basic networked computer, though, they do work pretty well as long as you understand and enjoy the Unix philosophy.  If not, well, they can be agonizing.

You do you, of course, but realize that there's a third choice with reasonable cost and usability.  I've used all 3 major OSes since about 1984, and this one fits me the best.  I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I retired and sent my work laptop back; even with the employer maintaining it, Windoze was no fun.