Computer tech: gotta love it!

On the expensive HP Omen 35L desktop computer I set up this June, I also purchased a year of McAfee anti-virus software that was less than $100. It has been quick to block several questionable sites I landed on. Recently received an email, supposedly from McAfee but when looking at the raw email text showed it was from a gmail account. Email stated I had 12 hours to call them on a provided phone number or if not, a charge of $496.99 would be automatically charged to my account.

I went online and found the real McAfee sales phone number, called them and they agreed it was a scam. I suspect if called, they would have lowered the annual cost significantly and had charges sent to some bogus address.
 
my old dell desktop is about to go out to the rustheap....not
able to up date past the win 7 prgrtm that is on it now...have
lost some functions recently that I can't get back, so will rely
on the laptop i got from dell auction some time ago...wish I
had gotten a bigger screen LT tho...ah well...soon I'll prob
only be paying bills on it anyway, as my hands are so bad I
cant do very well on here...
 

@David777, I took a peek at the Omen 35L, nice gaming machine.

David777 said:
Email stated I had 12 hours to call them on a provided phone number or if not, a charge of $496.99 would be automatically charged to my account.
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It's funny, the $496.99 change is almost exactly what my Paypal account was allegedly changed for a crypto currency purchase, according to a bogus email some months ago.
 
I am writing this on my Windows 7 PC that I upgraded a couple of years ago from XP. I liked XP and didn't want to move up to 7, but I've got used to it now. The rest of the family are all on Win 11, but I'm happy to stay on 7, as it's what I'm used to, and there's nothing on the PC that's not irreplaceable if it got wiped.

I've also got 2 screens. They're iiyama 22" as far as I am aware, and having the two of them side by side gives me the option to slide pages between the two, or have three readable pages open side by side, with the centre one split.

I used to be a programmer (mainly SQL in the later years) although I also used VB and VBA quite a lot in the early days for stringing various bits together, but since I retired nearly 8 years ago, I've forgotten most of what I did, and how I did it.
 
Nathan said:
@David777, I took a peek at the Omen 35L, nice gaming machine.

It's funny, the $496.99 change is almost exactly what my Paypal account was allegedly changed for a crypto currency purchase, according to a bogus email some months ago.
Click to expand...

What I bought for just $1574 not including the $630 for an ASUS ProArt Display 32” 4K HDR Monitor (PA329CV) ASUS ProArt Display 32” 4K HDR Monitor (PA329CV) and $40 Cherry keyboard. Eventually when they finally belatedly appear, will buy an 8k PC monitor (NOT a TV) of at least 55 inch diagonal in order to exhibit large image photography. Will be able to do so because the AMD Radeon RX 7600 Graphics card can drive three 8k displays. These powerful gaming systems are about the only one's capable of driving 8k.

What have you bought recently?
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Too much to be just a coincidence, thanks for that input.
 
@David777 , nice setup! (y)

Edit: I'm trying to get more use out of my iPad Mini, bought a USB-C to HDMI adapter to display video with my old 27" ViewSonic monitor. This so I can watch while on the treadmill. Youtube works fine, but Netflix fails to display, with the following(see attachment). Perhaps a better adapter is the solution, got several possibilities in googling. I had an idea to look for an Apple monitor...ohmygoosh, for what they want for a standalone display I might as well just get an iMac. :unsure: Hmmm, I've never had an iMac before , and it's been awhile since I bought a new computer. ;)
 

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The last 3 days have been straightening out backups for my desktop and 4 large external hard drives. My Sony a6000/a6700 digital camera files I've been accumulating since 11 years ago contain about 140,000 image files within 850 folders. Some files go back decades that have been piece meal saved over years transferring from old media like CDs to newer USB drives. I've been working towards having at least 2 media sources. I have many more files than subjects photographed due to focus stack blending and stitch blending that combines files into one output. All my work has used .jpg outputs and not RAW because years ago there were not RAW functions for blending files so. In any case, the result of focus stack blending at optimal apertures like F5.6 is much better than single shot RAW outputs.

Fixing errors between two hard drives that are intended to have the same files but are folder structured differently is difficult. Besides much File Explorer use, notepad, have been running Command-Prompt, cmd.exe, command line commands and Excel for much of that work.

Currently, have 2 each newer 4 TB external USB drives, 2 each older 2 TB external USB drives, a 500 GB internal SSD drive in the HP Omen 35L, and a handful of USB memory sticks including several over 100 GBs I've used for temporary storage. Everything could fit into each the 4 TB drives, given folder restructuring and moving files around. Unfortunately, a few years ago, I began only updating same folders on one of the 2 TB drives, that then accumulated differences. Thus have been working to discover the differences and make folders identical.

A typical process is to look at the Properties popup for two folders to verify the numbers of files, folders, and bytes used is identical. If not, I have to figure out what is different. Given dozens to hundreds of files in many folders, just poking at each file would be inefficient. Sometimes if one folder shows say 453 files and another 455 files, discovering what is different was not too difficult just using file explorer after filename sorting. One can sort on Date Modified to show any newer files, then transfer the newer files into the other drive.

Sometimes file names had been changed or the byte counts are so close as to be difficult to notice. What I do then is create listings that I run comparison formulas in Excel. The new Yahoo AI has been a great help creating command line commands. I web searched with:

cmd.exe, file explorer, list folder name, folder size

That spit out:
for %F in (*) do @Echo %~nxF %~zF >> fileA.txt

That creates a 2-column output separated by Spaces. In the old days, I would use UNIX ls piped into a grep command. The Microsoft commands are much more ugly syntax wise, especially the "for" command, due to historical reasons going back decades. Then in Notepad, would replace all Spaces with Tabs. Copy/Paste into a blank Excel Worksheet page will be 2 columns, one with filenames, one with file sizes in bytes. So would perform that on the same folder in the other drive, so then 4 columns of data. Would AZ Sort columns A and B with A. Would AZ Sort columns C and D with C. Thus, all rows when correct will have the same filenames in each row. In column 5 at E1 for each row would put the formula.
=IF(A1=C1,"","Q")

And in column 6 F1:
=IF(B1=D1,"","W")

Then drag the formula down through all the data rows. The result will show any byte size differences as a Q and or a W as a filename difference. Most rows will be blank if correct. Then is easy to identify errors.
 
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Yesterday completed copying all files between the two drives so next will run cmd.exe on each hard drive with dir to create folder listings without filenames. Then will paste into Excel and create long mov batch bat files to move folders around making the two 4 GB drive file structures the same. Will delete duplicate folders on same drives.
 
Raspberry Pi OS got an update May of this year. I've been using the legacy 32-bit version because the mainstream 64-bit version has terrible wifi support/performance. Fixed now, so I installed the latest 64-bit version and it works perfectly.

Still lean and mean, my Raspberry Pi 4 feels almost as snappy as my Lenovo tablet. The 32-bit legacy version had a few compatibility issues with some software, newest version seems to work with everything. You have no hint you are running an ARM processor, functionality and compatibility seems equal to x86 architecture.

Using it as my daily driver, haven't noticed any issues or compromises yet.
 
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Partial retraction here:

Newest Raspberry Pi OS is running Wayland by default. No screensaver, no screenshot program, very limited taskbar options, and I'm sure all of the other Wayland broken crap issues.

Video performance is excellent, better than it's ever been. Switching back to X11 fixed everything, but video performance (especially youtube playback) is dismal.

So for now I guess I'll use Wayland and deal with the broken programs. There is a command (grim) you can use from the terminal that gives you a screenshot. The power button on my monitor will have to work as a screensaver:(
 
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