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Author Topic:   Computer Help Please?
Percy
Member
Posts: 22392
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.3


Message 175 of 236 (771745)
10-29-2015 9:12 AM
Reply to: Message 173 by PaulK
10-29-2015 7:03 AM


Re: stuck with a lemon?
PaulK writes:
I'm afraid you've missed the fact that Faith doesn't have a voice telephone connection any more. It all goes over DSL.
In the absence of an actual manual describing the 5031nv, it doesn't seem impossible that, as Jon suggests, it merely has a passive DSL filter, and that VoIP connections would be to the Ethernet ports. That's how it was done at the alst place I worked. Every phone had only a single Ethernet wire connected to it. It was a modified Ethernet connection that also provided power.
But I did find a manual (AT&T U-verse® Voice), and it says you need battery backup if you want phone availability during a power outage (so it's obviously not a passive DSL filter inside the 5031nv box).
Faith, a battery backup is just a box with plugs that has a battery inside. It plugs into the wall. While your power is working it keeps the battery inside your battery backup unit charged, and it sends electricity to anything plugged into the plugs of the battery backup unit. When the power goes out it seamlessly switches power over to the battery for the devices plugged into your battery backup unit. When the power comes back on it seamlessly switches back to power from the wall.
I highly suggest a battery backup for your modem. If your phone also requires power (plugs into the wall), it can use the same battery backup. The manual suggests you go here: Learn About Battery Backup - AT&T Digital Phone Customer Support. I've already gone through it, I found it exceedingly poorly organized, but here's some helpful information that it provides:
quote:
To support your U-verse voice service the battery backup you purchase should provide a minimum of 75 watts and 125 VA (volt amps.) You can purchase a battery backup from a variety of retail locations. Pricing starts at approximately $39, but will vary depending on the amount of time the battery provides backup power.
Now here's what I suggest. Assuming you can afford it, buy a battery backup for less than $100 that would power all these devices for several hours in the event of a power failure:
  • Modem
  • Phone
  • Computer
  • Computer monitor
If you did this then when your power goes out you would still have full phone and Internet capability in the event of a power failure. I have set up my work area in this way and it is wonderful, though of course I'm working in the dark by the glow of my monitor.
If you can't afford a large enough backup battery for all that then at least buy a small one that can handle your phone and modem.
Here's one AT&T suggests: APC - Back-UPS 125VA Network UPS. It's small and inexpensive ($30) and would power your modem for several hours. If it also had to power your phone it might be half that.
Bigger battery backups are, of course, more expensive, but the other ones suggested by AT&T are way overkill for you. If you'd like to power your modem, phone, computer and monitor with a single battery backup then I suggest you just go down to your local Best Buy, tell them that's what you want to do, and that you don't want to spend more than you have to, and I bet they can suggest one for around $60 or $70. Or maybe have your brother or someone do this for you.
If you ever have power outages that last several days then you'll need a bigger battery backup unit. The more hours you need it to work, the more devices plugged into it, the bigger is has to be.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 173 by PaulK, posted 10-29-2015 7:03 AM PaulK has replied

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 Message 176 by PaulK, posted 10-29-2015 9:37 AM Percy has seen this message but not replied
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 Message 178 by Faith, posted 10-29-2015 6:28 PM Percy has seen this message but not replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22392
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.3


Message 184 of 236 (782838)
04-29-2016 12:41 PM
Reply to: Message 183 by kjsimons
04-29-2016 12:36 PM


Also, she can open My Computer, then click on System Properties if it is there.
I don't think she should ignore the encouragements to upgrade to Windows 10.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 183 by kjsimons, posted 04-29-2016 12:36 PM kjsimons has replied

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Percy
Member
Posts: 22392
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.3


(1)
Message 197 of 236 (782964)
05-01-2016 12:12 PM
Reply to: Message 196 by Theodoric
05-01-2016 11:33 AM


Maybe they don't mean that he can't access new email messages, but that he can't access his old email folders. I can see this happening with Outlook. Their email folders are cloaked in mystery. I breath a sign of great relief every time I upgrade to a new Microsoft OS and I can connect to old email folders after reinstalling Outlook.
I'm not sure I trust the Microsoft claim that the upgrade to Windows 10 is transparent and that I won't have to reinstall and reconfigure my software. I need Apache, PHP, Perl, Apache, MySQL and Cygwin (for Linux emulation). A quick Google reveals problems with Apache after upgrading to Windows 10, I didn't check the other programs.
So I'm going to be very cautious and stay with Windows 7 for as long as I have this computer. My usual course of action when a computer begins to fail is buy a new one, then transfer all the data over and install all the programs again. I've been fortunate in that I haven't yet had a computer fail catastrophically, and all my important data is continually backed up to the Cloud anyway, so I should be able to survive a catastrophe.
Apparently Ubuntu runs native right alongside Windows 10, which will be very welcome when I finally do begin using Windows 10. Cygwin is mostly fine, but it has its idiosyncrasies. But I have to have XEmacs - without it I'm helpless.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 196 by Theodoric, posted 05-01-2016 11:33 AM Theodoric has not replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22392
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.3


Message 204 of 236 (785011)
05-27-2016 10:07 AM
Reply to: Message 202 by dwise1
05-27-2016 1:04 AM


Re: Windows 10 seems to have installed itself without my permission
I don't know if Windows 10 has the same flexibility as Windows 7, but Windows 7 can be configured to look and behave pretty much like Windows XP.
Much of the development software I use is pretty fragile and old. I'm not planning to upgrade to Windows 10 on this machine. My plan is to at some point in the future purchase a new Windows 10 machine and get everything working on it and transferred over (takes about a week, including testing) before "decommissioning" the old machine.
If I'm automatically upgraded to Windows 10, well, I just hope that doesn't happen. The "Upgrade to Windows 10" popup comes up every few days and I just click it off.
I work on a Mac, too, and I just got my first uninvited install of ad software a couple days ago. Completely fooled me, wasn't expecting it. A popup asked if I wanted to upgrade to the latest Flash software, and if I was on my Windows machine I would have thought about it, but I was on the Mac which has never even had an invasion attempt before, so I clicked yes. Before I knew it ad software had been installed. Fortunately it was easy to get rid of, it was listed in the Applications folder and I just deleted it.
The popup came from a webpage I visited about the Civil War.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 202 by dwise1, posted 05-27-2016 1:04 AM dwise1 has replied

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 Message 205 by jar, posted 05-27-2016 10:58 AM Percy has seen this message but not replied
 Message 206 by dwise1, posted 05-27-2016 1:47 PM Percy has replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22392
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.3


Message 207 of 236 (785074)
05-27-2016 2:39 PM
Reply to: Message 206 by dwise1
05-27-2016 1:47 PM


Re: Windows 10 seems to have installed itself without my permission
dwise1 writes:
And the command prompt window, CMD, is much harder to read which is a problem for me since that's where I do most of my C programming.
Are you already using the largest cmd window font size?
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 206 by dwise1, posted 05-27-2016 1:47 PM dwise1 has replied

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 Message 208 by dwise1, posted 05-27-2016 3:14 PM Percy has seen this message but not replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22392
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.3


(1)
Message 216 of 236 (785258)
06-01-2016 8:41 AM
Reply to: Message 211 by dwise1
05-30-2016 9:55 PM


Re: Windows 10 seems to have installed itself without my permission
dwise1 writes:
On XP and before, you could search by filename and/or by contents, both of which could be, and most commonly would be, different from each other. Plus you could specify a range of dates for when that file was last created or changed.
I don't use this myself, but just now on my Windows 7 machine I clicked the Start button, entered a file name, and hit enter. This opened a folder of search results. I clicked on the Search box in the upper right and a drop down displayed several options: "Kind", "Date Modified", "Type" and "Size". The "Date Modified" option allows you to specify a range. It still has the annoying quality of behaving like a combination of "ls" and "grep", returning any file whose name or content produces a match.
I use Cygwin on my Windows 7 machine when I'm doing any real work. Cygwin emulates a Linux environment and works pretty well, XEmacs is available, as are various versions of vi. The version of "find" they provide has the "-newer" and "-newerXY" options, but I've never used them myself, there's no "-older" version of these options to define a range, and "-newerXY" looks complicated.
I have a simple shell script that lists the newest files in any directory. This is helpful because it tells me the files I was most recently working on, but even better you can feed it the output of "find" to list the newest files in a directory hierarchy that match a string. Here's an example that finds the 12 most recent files in my directory tree whose name contains the string "test":
% lfttl `find . -name "*test*"`
-rw-rw-r--+ 1 Dir None   198 Jul  3  2015 ./styles/main/templates/arraytest_integer_keys.php~
-rw-rw-r--+ 1 Dir None   198 Jul  3  2015 ./styles/main/templates/arraytest_integer_keys.php
-rw-rw-r--+ 1 Dir None   198 Jul  3  2015 ./styles/main/templates/arraytest_string_keys.php~
-rw-rw-r--+ 1 Dir None   538 Jul  3  2015 ./styles/main/templates/arraytest_string_keys.php
-rwxrwx---+ 1 Dir None   261 Feb 23 17:36 ./test.php~
-rwxrwx---+ 1 Dir None   736 Feb 26 09:56 ./test.html
-rwxrwx---+ 1 Dir None   132 Feb 27 10:48 ./Util/test2.php
-rw-rw-r--+ 1 Dir None    57 Mar 10 09:58 ./transform_test.data
-rwxrwx---+ 1 Dir None   103 Mar 18 15:23 ./Util/test.php~
-rw-rw-r--+ 1 Dir None    57 Apr 17 10:49 ./transform_test_20160311.data~
-rw-rw-r--+ 1 Dir None    66 Apr 17 10:49 ./transform_test_20160311.data
-rwxrwx---+ 1 Dir None   558 Apr 26 09:48 ./Util/test.php
--Percy
Edited by Percy, : Typo.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 211 by dwise1, posted 05-30-2016 9:55 PM dwise1 has replied

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