Tech Advice for all, and for all subjects

[some seeing eye]

Hello Elliot!

Computers are way more stupid than bikes. Few interchangeable, user serviceable parts. They have planned obsolescence and fill our landfills with e-waste. The reason is that the Micosofts, Apples, Chromes, Firefoxen assume that we are ready for memory bloat with 8-16 gigabytes of RAM and mongo hard drives. Worse, the instruction sets are evolving on the Intel CPU chips - I have a perfectly fine laptop I cannot upgrade beyond Windows XP because Intel added an instruction and Microsoft decided they would only write future Windows to the new instruction.

1 Go to Firefox Preferences > Applications. Be sure PDF content type has preview in Firefox. Current Chrome and Firefox have a built in Acrobat Reader which is less buggy. Or you could point the content type to Acrobat Reader. I am not in front of an XP Firefox, so if anyone is and would like to correct, A-OK!
2 You might have to upgrade your computer to something newer because of memory bloat. Used ones on Craigs are cheaper than new. New ones have some support from the maker, a longer life and remote diagnostics.
3 The security updates on XP are fading out, but MS has left plenty of security holes in it they will never fix. Windows 10 is a little-lot funky on privacy, so Win 7/8.

[some seeing eye]

on the computer note:
do I need to back anything up before adding new RAM chips to upgrade me laptop RAM?
IE: is there anything on them, when the computer is off, that could be lost?

good luck, Elliot!!

No, the RAM is temporary storage, empty once laptop is powered off. The important stuff is on the hard disk drive. Hard disk drive should not be affected by any repairs-upgrades, but backups are always a good idea!

[ygmir]

on the computer note:
do I need to back anything up before adding new RAM chips to upgrade me laptop RAM?
IE: is there anything on them, when the computer is off, that could be lost?

good luck, Elliot!!

No, the RAM is temporary storage, empty once laptop is powered off. The important stuff is on the hard disk drive. Hard disk drive should not be affected by any repairs-upgrades, but backups are always a good idea!

Thanks SSE! yeah I back my system up from time to time on an external drive.
I"m going from 4 to 8 gb RAM. Hoping it speeds things up. Some say they've put 16 GB in but the machine says it'll max at 8.

[some seeing eye]

There is an obscure hacking technique where the hacker cold temperature freezes your RAM just as you are turning off the machine, steals the RAM, maintaining freezing, and reads the fading memory freezing on a different machine within minutes with special hacking software. Then decodes what is where in the RAM jumble. Just be sure there are no ninjas or NSA peeps with liquid nitrogen hanging around outside your house!

[ygmir]

There is an obscure hacking technique where the hacker cold temperature freezes your RAM just as you are turning off the machine, steals the RAM, maintaining freezing, and reads the fading memory freezing on a different machine within minutes with special hacking software. Then decodes what is where in the RAM jumble. Just be sure there are no ninjas or NSA peeps with liquid nitrogen hanging around outside your house!

I can't see them being able to get out of the black helicopters that are usually here quiet and fast enough to get away with that.
just in case, I'll put them in a mouse trap so the snap hurts their fingers.

[FIGJAM]

Your mouse trap would probably take a leg off!!!

[Roundabout]

Used to be... when I downloaded a PDF, it opened on the screen by itself. Now it disappears into Downloads, and I have to find it there. I looked at Properties, but don't see a setting I can change to fix this. This is Reader XI. Suggestions?

There should be a choice between download and open. Choose open, not download.

[JohnEBGud]

Used to be... when I downloaded a PDF, it opened on the screen by itself. Now it disappears into Downloads, and I have to find it there. I looked at Properties, but don't see a setting I can change to fix this. This is Reader XI. Suggestions?

This a browser issue. What browser are you using?

[Elliot]

Firefox. There is no "open" option, but there is "view online", and by golly, that worked. Goes to show what a creature of habit I am -- I always clicked "download" before, and it would open automatically. And I would not have guessed that "view online" could be printed, but it can.

As for XP, yes I know it is obsolete. But I will hang onto it until the problems become overwhelming. "The devil I know", you know. I understand that 7 works similarly, but now it is no longer available. I can get a pirated copy of 7 installed, but then I would still not have factory support.

Interesting thing about asking for help on this thread -- or anywhere else, on pretty much any subject: The very act of asking for help seems to encourage my mind to make a better effort on its own. And some minor thing that one of you posts will often jog my mind onto the correct path.

Regardless of the details... THANKS!

[BBadger]

Thanks SSE! yeah I back my system up from time to time on an external drive.
I"m going from 4 to 8 gb RAM. Hoping it speeds things up. Some say they've put 16 GB in but the machine says it'll max at 8.

The RAM is good, but also consider getting yourself an SSD to replace your disk drive if you already haven't. Your laptop will feel brand new. Though maxing the RAM helps a lot, an SSD is probably the single most important upgrade you can have on an old laptop. Good SSD brands would be a Samsung (850 EVO) or Crucial (MX200), each which will give you about 250GB for about $90.

[ygmir]

Thanks SSE! yeah I back my system up from time to time on an external drive.
I"m going from 4 to 8 gb RAM. Hoping it speeds things up. Some say they've put 16 GB in but the machine says it'll max at 8.

The RAM is good, but also consider getting yourself an SSD to replace your disk drive if you already haven't. Your laptop will feel brand new. Though maxing the RAM helps a lot, an SSD is probably the single most important upgrade you can have on an old laptop. Good SSD brands would be a Samsung (850 EVO) or Crucial (MX200), each which will give you about 250GB for about $90.

thank BBadger! I don't know about that, but can learn. how do I transfer the info?
*yes,I'm a computard*

[BBadger]

thank BBadger! I don't know about that, but can learn. how do I transfer the info?
*yes,I'm a computard*

With mine, I bought a Samsung SSD, and it came with some migration software to facilitate the copy (Samsung Magician). On another drive (the Crucial), it had some license for Acronis True Image, free edition, but that sucked and didn't even work. I think I may have used Clonezilla live for a non-Samsung SSD. Clonezilla live is installed to a flash disk, and then you boot to the flash disk and have that copy the data to your new drive. I'd probably just get the Samsung and use that; it's a very good drive-brand and the migration software worked for me.

Hardware-wise, I bought an external drive adapter (such as this) so that I could transfer over my existing drive's contents. I cloned the data using the software provided. After cloning, I swapped it out with the drive in the computer and was done.

Notes:

- Make sure your SSD is at least the size of the drive you're trying to clone. If you have a 500GB main disk, but a 256GB SSD, you'll want to move some of your data off. I believe Magician and other software will simply copy the real data to your drive, so if you can get the data size down you may be able to copy over even if the total used + free space is larger than the new drive.
- If you have lots of "data" (not programs) you should try to keep that data on a drive separate from the SSD (unless your SSD is much larger than all your data + system). You only want your system drive and programs to be on the SSD because they benefit the most. If your computer already uses less than the SSD capacity I wouldn't worry about it.
- Before you clone, run a drive check on the drive you're cloning to make sure you don't have any data that is lost.
- You'll just be cloning your drive, so it won't harm your existing system. At worst, the SSD just won't boot.

Another thing to consider is to simply reinstall your OS on the new drive and use your old drive as a data drive for copying stuff back over (or just as the external data drive). Note that I don't do this only because I get my system tweaked and set up over years of use and rarely want to reinstall and fix all my settings. If I didn't have much time invested in the system I'd probably just reinstall after backing up my data.

You can also go over this video just to understand the steps. He's using different software, but the steps are basically the same and the explanations are good. You could even use that guide.