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OT: Misc computer related questions


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As many of you know from my previous thread I lost my job and am transitioning accounts over to a personal email from work, had to turn in work laptop and car but kept the phone, and am trying to get everything up and running post job loss. I've been posting a bunch of stuff on Facebook and have gotten some responses but I thought I would just dump all my remaining issues in one place here in case there are suggestions:

 

1) Home Desktop PC. It's an HP/Compaq core 2 duo 2.66 GHz with only 2 Gig of the max 8 gig RAM configured as (2) 1 gig sticks of the 4 total slots, 1 TB spinning drive of which about 550 Gig is full. I'm using AVG Free antivirus. It's so painfully slow it sometimes is barely usable. I need it for the office applications at least (word, excel, etc). I also use it in music for my DAW which surprising still works well, but used to use it for video which has become practically unusable. I occasionally get the BSOD. Being jobless now I have no budget for a new computer or much for software. My approach is to start by maxing out the RAM which is DDR2-800 PC6400 hard to find but a FB friend thinks he has some he will give me. Ideal would be (4) 2GB sticks for a total of 8. See where I'm at, then consider imaging the drive and putting in a SSD for boot, OS, and apps, with files on the spinning drive. Next step would be looking for more efficient antivirus. Plan is one step at a time and see where I am before spending any money. Thoughts? Am I on the right track? Suggestions?

 

2) Updated my iTunes account with my personal email and reauthorized the devices I turned into the company (laptop, iPad). iPhone I kept and old Macbook seem to be fine, allowing me to login with the new ID and PW, but on my macbook it keeps popping up problems with iCloud and wants me to enter a PW, but with my OLD email. If I try to log out (thinking I can log back in with my new apple ID) it warns me that it will delete all files from my macbook that are in the cloud, which scares the shit out of me. Why can't i keep my local files? What's the safe and appropriate way to update iCloud on my macbook to my current credentials without risking losing all my files?

 

3) As I mentioned I kept my company iPhone and am transferring financial responsibility to myself but keeping my number. Since everything was tied to Office 365, they wiped out all my contacts including personal. I managed to export my contacts from outlook to a .csv file before getting cut off. Is there any way to import a .csv file into my contacts on my iPhone automatically or do I just have to go through he tedious process of manually entering?

Dan

 

Acoustic/Electric stringed instruments ranging from 4 to 230 strings, hammered, picked, fingered, slapped, and plucked. Analog and Digital Electronic instruments, reeds, and throat/mouth.

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Can't comment on the Apple bits as I don't use Apple for anything, but as far as your PC goes, it's a dinosaur for efficient DAW and video work. Maxing out the RAM is obviously the first thing to do, but that won't help your video bottleneck. You'll need a good graphics card to handle it. No way around that. How a DAW handles heavy loads is also dependant on bus speed. 2.66Ghz is very slow. My DAW for example is running at 4.5Ghz, (16G RAM) and I can easily run a hundred tracks with multiple VST's and loads of plugins and it's not even close to breaking a sweat. But, depending on how you work and how big/small your projects are, you might be ok for the time being if you add in a good graphics card for your video woes.
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Forgot to mention a couple of other important bits relating to your DAW. To get the best performance out of it you should add at least a 2nd drive for all your projects to stream from. A standard 7200rpm drive is all you need for that. If you have virtual instruments with large sample libraries, then you really should have 3 drives so the samples can stream from their own drive. A standard 7200rpm drive is fine for that as well. Make sure your power supply is adequate, especially if you add a good graphics card. You'll need it. Probably 600 watts min. if you add in a good graphics card. Hah....the list goes on.....all that in an old Core 2 duo will need better cooling than the stock cooling that came with it. They run hotter than the newer PCs. Fans are cheap though. Good luck!
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2) Updated my iTunes account with my personal email and reauthorized the devices I turned into the company (laptop, iPad). iPhone I kept and old Macbook seem to be fine, allowing me to login with the new ID and PW, but on my macbook it keeps popping up problems with iCloud and wants me to enter a PW, but with my OLD email. If I try to log out (thinking I can log back in with my new apple ID) it warns me that it will delete all files from my macbook that are in the cloud, which scares the shit out of me. Why can't i keep my local files? What's the safe and appropriate way to update iCloud on my macbook to my current credentials without risking losing all my files?

 

Call the Apple support. I once managed to lock myself out of my iTunes account and someone from Apple talked me through it over the phone. Went very smoothly.

It's not a clone, it's a Suzuki.
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1)

A 2 core CPU will continue to struggle especially as Apps are improved, the improvements that developers make often demand more resources. Performance will also depend upon which version of Windows you are using ie Windows 8 is a dog and best avoided. Updating RAM will help, but not by a vast amount and as a general rule a PC needs a minimum of 2Gb of RAM for each CPU core.

 

Migrating the operating system over to an SSD will give faster boot and in use read and writes of system files

 

Retaining the 1Tb drive and use this just for file storage so that the boot drive only has the operating system and program files will give a significant improvement.

 

RAM, before you upgrade do check the BIOS version you have will support the Max RAM, this is frequently not the case in practice. Flashing the BIOS to update it is not a task for the faint hearted.

 

2)

Cloud services scare the hell out of me, I have two portable USB powered where I store all my files. These two drives contain exactly the same files as there are on the Store drive on my Computer. So in essence I have belt, braces and a piece of string and hence as safe a backup plan as a home user can have. I would download all your files into your own drive and cancel subscriptions to cloud services and turn off using it.

 

3)

There are Apps available such as Copy Trans that you can use to import and transfer data.

 

You can also use this App with Apple"s Cloud services hence it may also enable you to transfer the files from the Cloud to your Computer, if you try this only select a few at a time.

 

It took me two days to recover a mates files from Microsoft"s Cloud following a hack the mate had suffered, as I did not want the system to lock up through data overload. Hence little and often.

 

Good luck.

Col

 

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Dan - if you want to simply "refresh" your PC, then maxing the RAM and SSDing the disc is the way to go. I did this with an ageing Lenovo desktop about a year ago, and it runs Windows 10 fine (for basic "Office Productivity" and light games). Ideally you'd put everything on the SSD, but 1TB is a little pricey imho. I would probably go 500GB SSD and retain your 1TB spinning disc (or invest in a 1TB+ 7200rpm disc at minimal cost), but move your commonly used files onto the SSD.

 

However, if you want an audio/video workstation, I think - as the old joke goes - "I wouldn't start from here". If your PC dates back to the Compaq brand, then it will miss out on a lot of the modern processor capabilities which are important in digital media processing.

 

Final question - before letting iTunes trash your Mac, copy everything (from / down) onto an external disc. Unplug before iTunes threatens to do anything.

 

Good luck in your job search.

 

Cheers, Mike.

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Dan - if you want to simply "refresh" your PC, then maxing the RAM and SSDing the disc is the way to go. I did this with an ageing Lenovo desktop about a year ago, and it runs Windows 10 fine (for basic "Office Productivity" and light games). Ideally you'd put everything on the SSD, but 1TB is a little pricey imho. I would probably go 500GB SSD and retain your 1TB spinning disc (or invest in a 1TB+ 7200rpm disc at minimal cost), but move your commonly used files onto the SSD.

 

However, if you want an audio/video workstation, I think - as the old joke goes - "I wouldn't start from here". If your PC dates back to the Compaq brand, then it will miss out on a lot of the modern processor capabilities which are important in digital media processing.

 

Final question - before letting iTunes trash your Mac, copy everything (from / down) onto an external disc. Unplug before iTunes threatens to do anything.

 

Good luck in your job search.

 

Cheers, Mike.

Agree, max out the RAM, 550megs of data on the hard drive; remove unnecessary data from the hard drive and transfer the data to an external HD. Things like picture and videos can take up alot of space and if you only occasionally need to pull that data then move it to an external HD and just store the data there. removing that data, reorganizing the remaining data via. a disk defrag and you should see a VAST improvement in speed.

57 Hammond B3; 69 Hammond L100P; 68 Leslie 122; Kurzweil Forte7 & PC3; M-Audio Code 61; Voce V5+; Neo Vent; EV ELX112P; GSI Gemini & Burn

Delaware Dave

Exit93band

 

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Largest problem is the amount of RAM available. Recent versions of Windows require 4GB minimum, so yours is probably an older OS. That type of RAM is available used on eBay, I just checked (lots from China, but some US based, usually someone who has upgraded and no longer needs the RAM. It is also easy to install, as long as one observes proper static electricity precautions. No point in going to an SSD until it has enough RAM to work with.

Might also consider looking eBay for used business PCs. My whole home and shop are now HP (except for the 2 Macs) Z-200 series small form factor high end workstations. All but one are Xeon quad processor, and last Z220 I picked up cost me about $150 shipped, with a fresh Windows 10 install on it. Last one I bought was dual core i5 with 4gb RAM Z200 for $42 plus about $20 shipping. There are huge numbers of business machines available that get returned after a 3 year lease. I haven't bought a new machine in a decade or so.

 

Someone mentioned GPUs, many of the older high end ones can be found cheaply there also. I standardized on AMD FirePro V3900, which was a rather expensive card new, and last spares I bought cost me less than $20 each. I won't even suggest changing processor, although a quad core 2 would be cheap, you have to know just how to safely remove the old and replace with the new, plus there might be heat sink differences and even potential power supply overload.

 

NEXT: iCloud and removal of local storage. Simple cure is to copy any files you want to keep that are on iCloud either to the Macbook, if it has room, or to an external flash drive. Absolutely everything I have in iCloud, OneDrive, Box, DropBox, and Google Drive also exists separately somewhere they can't delete it. Apple has a good reason for deleting: someone could steal the Mac, but it is an annoyance.

 

Third: on the iPad, Microsoft Outlook is available as a free app. Apple's Mail program (both IOS and MacOS) can read CSV files to import data. There are lots of links on a search, this is one of them: Import contacts

 

Next: AVG free. I was using that for a while after dropping the paid commercial version. Now, on anything running Windows 10, I use Microsoft's Security Center, which is greatly improved. I also have the paid version of MalwareBytes on any PC that I use for mail (I copy the PST file when Outlook is not running to one of my notebooks before going out of town for things like a vacation or project, then use the notebook only till I get back, copy the PST back to the desktop). I bought in the early days when one got a lifetime license.

Avast owns AVG now, and I don't like either of them. I also don't like McAfee. I was using Panda on the old Windows XP computer (along with MWB) and it seemed to work, had a lot less impact on the computer.

 

Imaging the HD: Macrium Reflect has a free version that should be able to image the PC. I was using the paid version on a Windows 8.0 HP tablet that nothing else worked on, and it was successful in restoring (the ultimate test). The free version wouldn't work in that particular application.

 

Hope that is all helpful. I have tested all of the above in my own environment, which has 2 Windows 8.1 MCE computers, 2 Macs, and 7 Windows 10 computers (plus three virtual running on the Mac).

Howard Grand|Hamm SK1-73|Kurz PC2|PC2X|PC3|PC3X|PC361; QSC K10's

HP DAW|Epi Les Paul & LP 5-str bass|iPad mini2

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

Jim

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Great advice above, was going to type much of the same. Just wanted to throw in a couple of other ideas (my small research lab has LOTS of old instruments that still run on Windows 95, so I'm always scrounging up old computers).

 

- even if you are stuck with a small amount of RAM, an SSD will dramatically improve your boot up and read/write times.

- as noted above, look into buying used business machines on ebay or Craigslist. You can get amazing deals on old, ugly but still reasonably powerful computers.

 

Example:

- some of the older Lenovo ThinkPad laptops were massively overbuilt, and thus while now "obsolete", they are pretty robust, powerful and a good deal. There is one on ebay right now for $440 (a Lenovo W510 15" Workstation i7 QUAD Turbo 2.8GHz 16GB RAM 2TB SSHD NVIDIA VRAM39. Those are still respectable specs!).

 

What is great about the old Thinkpads is nothing is welded down, you can swap out batteries, memory, hardrives, wireless cards, etc. They come with firewire, ethernet, USB, USB3 etc. all built in, and because they made so many (and are now "obsolete"), docking stations, extra power supplies, etc. can be had for ~ $30. A W510 with lower specs can be had for ~ $200. They incredibly tough, I once dropped one ~ 20 feet (by accident, different story), where it landed on a couple of flattened cardboard boxes. Opened it up, worked fine - still using it! I'm currently playing around with a different Thinkpad. Scrounged it up for free, added $50 for 16 Gig of memory, $90 for a 500 Gig SSD hardrive, and this thing is good to go.

 

Last comment: given your technical nature, you might want to consider loading up an older laptop with Linux. Linux is WAY less resource hungry than Windows. The ease-of-use for Linux distros has also increased dramatically since last time I tried using it for Desktop work (~15-20 years ago).

 

Due to extra time during this lockdown, I downloaded Ubuntu 20.04 and put it on the above-mentioned Thinkpad. Very fast, and the overall experience is amazingly better than Linux of old (of course you can still dig into the command line, but you really don't have to for the most part). You never know, some Linux skills may come in handy (I'm trying to re-learn because a lot of scientific software is written for Linux).

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Just a few points:

 

The PC is running Win 7 - DAW works just fine, probably because it's really old software but if it isn't broke, don't fix it. The video software used to work but barely works now, but I'm not all that concerned with AV stuff right now. I just need it to use office and email, so yes I'm just trying to get it fast enough to be more productive. Sometimes basic page loads take forever.

 

The iTunes that I'm using to manage my phone is on a mid-2009 macbook pro running El Capitan (the newest it will support). I only use that computer for recording over firewire from my Presonus Mixer, and syncing with my phone.

Dan

 

Acoustic/Electric stringed instruments ranging from 4 to 230 strings, hammered, picked, fingered, slapped, and plucked. Analog and Digital Electronic instruments, reeds, and throat/mouth.

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2) Updated my iTunes account with my personal email and reauthorized the devices I turned into the company (laptop, iPad). iPhone I kept and old Macbook seem to be fine, allowing me to login with the new ID and PW, but on my macbook it keeps popping up problems with iCloud and wants me to enter a PW, but with my OLD email. If I try to log out (thinking I can log back in with my new apple ID) it warns me that it will delete all files from my macbook that are in the cloud, which scares the shit out of me. Why can't i keep my local files? What's the safe and appropriate way to update iCloud on my macbook to my current credentials without risking losing all my files?

 

Call up Apple Support ASAP and tell them that you need to get that email changed to your new one. They've been very helpful in the past.

Yamaha: Motif XF8, MODX7, YS200, CVP-305, CLP-130, YPG-235, PSR-295, PSS-470 | Roland: Fantom 7, JV-1000

Kurzweil: PC3-76, PC4 (88) | Hammond: SK Pro 73 | Korg: Triton LE 76, N1R, X5DR | Emu: Proteus/1 | Casio: CT-370 | Novation: Launchkey 37 MK3 | Technics: WSA1R

Former: Emu Proformance Plus & Mo'Phatt, Korg Krome 61, Roland Fantom XR & JV-1010, Yamaha MX61, Behringer CAT

Assorted electric & acoustic guitars and electric basses | Roland TD-17 KVX | Alesis SamplePad Pro | Assorted organs, accordions, other instruments

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