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  • Showing only topics with the tag "windows". Back to normal view
    1. Is there a markdown editor which let me open .md files from Windows?

      I have looked at various editors, but those I came across all had their own build-in file navigator which they insisted you'd use. I always hate that; it's the one thing I dislike about Godot. So...

      I have looked at various editors, but those I came across all had their own build-in file navigator which they insisted you'd use. I always hate that; it's the one thing I dislike about Godot. So is there one where you can simply open your .md files directly from Windows?

      Edit: What I'm after is WYSIWYG, not just synstax highlighting.

      20 votes
    2. Help with strange Windows 10 behavior/files. Do I have a virus?

      Edit2: I'm a mac user who doesn't understand how windows explorer works. Leaving the post for some hapless mac user who may come along. Windows explorer doesn't report how it is traversing the...

      Edit2: I'm a mac user who doesn't understand how windows explorer works. Leaving the post for some hapless mac user who may come along. Windows explorer doesn't report how it is traversing the directory tree, leading to some confusion about where the search result is, which happens to be waaaay down in a zip of a mac application installer I had inadvertantly archived on the Windows disk. I would ask any windows users, how do I make powershell ls | select-string "text" behave like ls | grep "text" on unix?

      edit3: Also, why the fudge would windows explorer search find <weird characters>net but not dotnet when typing 'net' into the search box?

      So I download the occasional, um, linux distro installation video. I use a vpn and private firefox windows for most.

      I'm doing some clean up today, and find a file with a bunch of strange characters, including the text characters, "net." "M⌐⌐v├▒├┼⌐▒net" is the filename listed in the properties window. Inside are a series of .ase files with mostly unrecognizable names.

      I don't see the filename when doing an ls in powershell of the directory reported in explorer.

      doing ls | select-string "net" in powershell results in an unending peristalsis of weird text like you might get from a binary file viewed in a text editor. I do notice, however, that some of the text might be from inside a zip file. But why is select-string searching inside the zip file? ls seems to ouptut only filepath information. Upon further investigation, the zip file is several directories down, it appears adding | select-string to ls makes ls travel the full tree. Wut?

      And when I say undending, I mean it kept going until I hit ctrl-c.

      Any ideas to what is happening here?

      Incidentally, I opened one of the ASE files by right-click->view file in notepad+, which never launched.

      Edit: lots of edits.

      12 votes
    3. Building a home media server on a budget

      Hi I figured before I start venturing into other forums dedicated to this sort of thing, I'd ask here on Tildes since I'm at least comfortable with the community and how helpful they can be here....

      Hi

      I figured before I start venturing into other forums dedicated to this sort of thing, I'd ask here on Tildes since I'm at least comfortable with the community and how helpful they can be here.

      I'm tired of all of the subscription services I have, movies and TV shows disappearing from them, buying a film on Prime and only being able to watch it offline through a specific app. Even then, half the time we're watching comfort TV shows that we have on DVD already (X-Files and Friends for instance).

      So I figured that building a home media server would give me the chance to cut the cord with a couple of these services and allow us to start using and controlling our own data again.

      I have a budget of around £300 (I could perhaps push to £400 if needed) and I'm honestly not sure at all where to start. I have knowledge on how to build brand new, medium to high end gaming PCs as I've done it since I was in my late teens and built my first PC with the wages from my very first job but building a budget minded PC for use as a home media server goes completely over my head.

      I've noticed that a lot of the pre-built NAS or media server boxes are very expensive so my first thought was to buy a refurbed workstation or small form factor PC that has enough "oomph" to do the trick but I don't know what ones to even start looking at and then I start to feel a little bit out of my comfort zone.

      Things like getting the right CPU in these refurbed machines that offers the features I'm looking for like hardware transcoding etc., integrated GPU's, ensuring there's enough SATA ports for multiple hard drives and an SSD for a boot drive, and then to top it all off ensuring that while achieving these features the thing shouldn't draw too much power when idling as it'll be on for long stretches of time, if not left on 24/7.

      I've also got no knowledge of Linux, I've never even looked at it but if it's genuinely easy enough (for someone with next to no Linux experience) then I'd be happy to give it a shot if it offers better performance compared to using Windows 10 or something.

      All the server will be used for is watching TV shows, perhaps the odd film, listening to a bit of music perhaps and the odd podcast now and again. Simultaneous streaming will be fairly minimal, perhaps 2 streams as me or my partner watch one thing and our daughter watches another on her tablet. In regards to streaming outside the house that will also be almost non-existent, perhaps, again our daughter watching a kids TV show like Pokemon or Fireman Sam on her tablet when we're out but me and my partner don't tend to watch anything when we're outside the house, certainly not TV shows or movies anyway.

      Redundancy isn't something I'm too horrendously worried about, I wouldn't be storing anything like photos that we wouldn't want to lose on it and while it'd be annoying, losing a drive with TV shows or films on it wouldn't be the end of the world.

      Any help would be massively appreciated, thanks.

      36 votes
    4. swapping my motherboard and processor resulted in losing my Win 10 Pro license?

      So, last night I undertook some surgery, and replaced the motherboard and processor in my old gaming rig with a slightly upgraded combo so that I can squeak in under the minimum specs for Star...

      So, last night I undertook some surgery, and replaced the motherboard and processor in my old gaming rig with a slightly upgraded combo so that I can squeak in under the minimum specs for Star Citizen. After the bootup, windows started telling me that my copy was no longer licensed.

      Now, I had used the free upgrade from win 7 Pro, and as such had a win 10 pro install for the last 3 years or so. All above board. Now, the system is telling me I only have a win 10 home license showing on the system, and that I need to install home to use it.

      Why would this happen, and how can I get my win 10 pro license back in good standing on the new hardware? Again, only the motherboard and processor have changed...

      EDIT

      I ended up purchasing a new license from StackSocial as suggested by pseudolobster below, and the issue is now resolved. Thanks to everyone for all the helpful responses!

      16 votes
    5. Windows 10 Admin account loses all functionality?

      I recently started having an issue on my windows machine with folder permissions. The start menu folder suddenly became inaccessible to any program that tried to create a shortcut there. I worked...

      I recently started having an issue on my windows machine with folder permissions. The start menu folder suddenly became inaccessible to any program that tried to create a shortcut there. I worked around it by just taking ownership.

      Now I'm facing a much worse problem where many operations that require admin elevation suddenly doesn't work even after a UAC prompt. This has really become a problem now that I want to install wsl on this machine. Running wsl --install just returns the wsl usage info and wsl --update throws a UAC prompt, but fails saying "The requested operation requires elevation" even while logged into the built in Administrator windows account.

      Normal programs can still use admin elevation (mostly), but everything that windows prompts for behaves as if I'm a regular user despite still giving and accepting a UAC prompt. The Microsoft Store has also seemingly lost the ability to update or repair itself also so that's probably related.

      I've tried all the usual stuff with /DISM, /sfc, every Microsoft troubleshooter. They found no issues. Creating a new admin account lets me create the account but then it inherits the same issues. I can't even gain admin elevation in safe mode. I'm really at a loss. I don't want to have to do a system refresh because it takes so much time to get set back up, but at this point I don't know what else to do.

      Has anyone else ever encountered an issue like this? I've tried searching for this and just end up on a bunch of identical 'help' pages telling me to right click -> run as admin or the generic Microsoft employee pointing me to reinstall again.

      Windows version 10.0.19045 Build 19045 in case that matters

      Edit: I never did find a solid reason why this was happening. It wasn't my university Maya account. While reinstalling windows on a freshly formatted drive I kept getting errors that eventually led me to discoving my ram was going bad. Got it replaced and installed windows just fine. I have to assume the problem started because of memory errors. Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

      10 votes
    6. SSD Cloning: Burned by Macrium Reflect, looking for options (Data drives to SSD)

      I want to keep this short and sweet: I used Macrium Reflect to clone a Windows 11 install from one bad SSD to a new one. I had to reinstall to repair the Windows install, but it's a done deal, but...

      I want to keep this short and sweet:

      I used Macrium Reflect to clone a Windows 11 install from one bad SSD to a new one. I had to reinstall to repair the Windows install, but it's a done deal, but I feel burned by Macrium and want to find an alternative.

      I was wondering if anybody had any leads on great cloning software for general use? I'm willing to pay money, and it can be online or offline software (in OS or via USB).

      I have two drives, a 4TB and 1TB HDDI'm cloning to 4TB SSDs to have on newer devices, since these two are quite old and I got a deal on a pair of Crucial SSDs on Amazon (a brand/line I'm familiar with, they're good drives). These largely have games that aren't installed, legacy data old music rips I want access to, and currently active user profiles.

      My goal: clone the partitions over to the new drives, pop them in with hopefully the same drive letters, and expand the partitions to use all free space and be done with it. Ideally I would also have tool I can recommend to others without concern, assuming they have basic computer literacy.

      Will CloneZilla do this just fine? Is there anything better, proprietary or otherwise? Any idea how long this can be expected to take over Sata II (I've got a hotswap port I'll be cloning to outside my case, then popping it open to swap the drives).

      13 votes
    7. PySide vs .NET WinForms for a Desktop GUI App in 2023?

      Hello Folks, For an upcoming side project - a Desktop GUI app, open source, Apache 2.0 licensed, I'm slightly confused regarding what technology to use. Skills wise, C#/WinForms should be my...

      Hello Folks,

      For an upcoming side project - a Desktop GUI app, open source, Apache 2.0 licensed, I'm slightly confused regarding what technology to use.

      Skills wise, C#/WinForms should be my natural choice as that was the primary technology I had worked on before losing employment at my former company few years back and getting into freelancing. But post my freelance experience, I taught myself things like open source and Python as it came with the territory, and now PySide2 is also a running candidate in this race.

      The goal here is to be as much ubiquitous as possible - that my app should be easy to just "download, extract and run" by as many people as possible. A couple decades ago, a .NET GUI library targeting Microsoft Windows platform would have been the clear choice here as most people used Windows OS and targeting that platform meant being ubiquitous.

      But over the last few years, I've observed that Windows OS has been continuously losing its market share to Linux Distros and Mac OSX, mostly due to some incorrect decisions and strategic blunders by the former than some ground breaking or revolutionary innovation on part of the latter. This means .NET or WinForms is no longer the ideal choice today if you want to be cross-platform and ubiquitous.

      This lead my research to some other toolkits like the Java Swing library, for example. It's old but classic, not a bad choice at all in this case, platform independence is Java's biggest selling point. However, the app I'm making is non-trivial and slightly performance intensive, and Swing GUIs are known to be sluggish on PCs unless you ensure a good supply of RAM by tweaking the JVM settings. I'm also not very experienced in Java to be able to handle those situations in case they arise.

      I also considered Lazarus IDE/Object Pascal, it is also not a bad choice. It is open source, used as the primary course language across many Universities in Europe and most importantly, still maintained and developed. But guess I will have to teach myself a whole new paradigm along with a programming language in case I go this route.

      Finally, Python is something I've almost settled on for this project. It's a language that I'm very fond of and it has helped me survive through the tough times in the freelance market. It also has a vibrant ecosystem and rich repository of user contributed packages at PyPI.

      Now, I've worked on the default Tkinter library in past but somehow felt that it's quite limited in terms of making the GUI more flexible and "tweakable", especially a non-trivial one having several container widgets, syntax editors, menus and drop-downs, trees and list views, etc. PySide2 is, from what I understand, a better choice in this regard as it is comprehensive and based on the time-tested Qt interface. It is not only very easy to code and maintain but also very easy to port across various platforms.

      What do you think? In which direction should I go here?

      18 votes
    8. Can Windows make the jump to ARM like Apple did?

      I'm seeing a lot of news in my feed about Qualcomm chips approaching laptop performance, such as...

      I'm seeing a lot of news in my feed about Qualcomm chips approaching laptop performance, such as

      https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/10/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-elite-looks-like-the-windows-worlds-answer-to-apple-silicon/

      https://www.anandtech.com/show/21105/qualcomm-previews-snapdragon-x-elite-soc-oryon-cpu-starts-in-laptops-

      https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/24/qualcomm_x_elite/

      Will this turn out any better than the last few times Microsoft tried to break away from Intel? Would you want such a laptop? Will it wake Intel out of its complacency?

      33 votes
    9. Computer savvy people of Tildes, do you have any advice re setting up a new MS Windows personal computer?

      Any advice should be suitable for a non tech person who knows how to google and follow instructions but not code in any way. Can anyone suggest which firewall and or antivirus might be best? All...

      Any advice should be suitable for a non tech person who knows how to google and follow instructions but not code in any way.

      Can anyone suggest which firewall and or antivirus might be best? All suggestions for making life easier while dealing with a new machine are welcome.

      37 votes
    10. Messaging programs: which is better privacy - browser versions or dedicated apps?

      I use Slack, WhatsApp, Discord and Facebook's Messenger. On my computers, rather than installing dedicated apps, I've always just used these services' browser versions. It allows me to block ads...

      I use Slack, WhatsApp, Discord and Facebook's Messenger. On my computers, rather than installing dedicated apps, I've always just used these services' browser versions. It allows me to block ads with my browser's ad blocker and modify the UIs with other extensions that I use.

      But in terms of privacy — and more specifically, in terms of what the service has access to outside of their own walled gardens — is there a difference between using these services through a browser or their dedicated apps? I use both Windows and Mac computers, if that makes a difference. My browser of choice is Firefox and I run the services in their own containers.

      On my phone, I just use the provided apps and get notifications that way. I am well aware that most of these protocols are not great for privacy to begin with, but I'm not currently looking for other messaging systems.

      21 votes
    11. Which OS to pick for my first home server?

      Edit: I've just purchased an Unraid license. I'll give it a go and it may not turn out well, but for the time being, the question is settled. I appreciate everyone for providing insightful and...

      Edit: I've just purchased an Unraid license. I'll give it a go and it may not turn out well, but for the time being, the question is settled. I appreciate everyone for providing insightful and informative answers!

      Hey everyone,

      I've recently bought myself a NUC (NUC11TNHi3) that I intend to run as a home server, using many of my external USB drives as the storage.

      My use case is very narrow. I'll use it as a Plex server and seed/leech torrents with it.

      I've never built a home server like this before (I did dabble with it on a RPi, but that was just for PiHole), so I've never had to research what operating systems are available to me. After some research, I narrowed it down to two options.

      1. Windows
        This option is the most straightforward given that it's the system I'm familiar with the most. My use case is also very narrow, so I could set everything up in a couple of hours. All I'd have to do is install Plex server, a torrent client, exposing them to the outside world with port forwarding or Tailscale (never used it before but seems easy enough), and share my external USB drives locally so that I can access them using my regular desktop computer at home. The downside of this is that Windows can be finicky. I'd also prefer to have my drives pooled under a single drive. A cursory research suggests that Windows can do this as well, but not in a way that inspires confidence.

      2. Unraid
        I hadn't heard about this since last week, but it seems like a nice option. It costs money, it's proprietary, and I'd likely have to reformat all my NTFS drives to be able to use it but I was wondering if this would be the best long term solution. The learning curve will be there. Arrays, cache drives, share drives etc. are terms I'm not familiar with (though I can guess what purpose they serve) so it will be more time consuming to set things up properly. But given how narrow my use case is, as elegant a solution as it seems, is it necessary? I'm only considering this because seems like this is the best purpose built OS in the market right now.

      Some clarifications:

      • I'm sure someone will suggest a Linux distro. I have used Fedora as my main OS for a couple of years and I was quite happy with it, however I could never wrap my head around the Linux permissions structure, which Plex is awful with, as it creates its own user and look for drives under that user. I must have spent hours and hours to make Plex read my external drives properly before, but I've never managed to make it do so without some sort of hacky way and I don't want to do that with my home server. I don't want to have any doubts that things can go wrong. I want something that just works. (If only Synology had a capable device that could handle multiple simultaneous 4K transcodings. I'd have just throw my money at them instead of buying a NUC.)

      • My use case will remain narrow. Maybe way down the road I can automate stuff with Sonarr or Radarr or stuff like that, but I don't think I'll ever consume enough recently released stuff to justify it. One thing is for certain, I'm never going to host my password server, feed reader, or something like that on this device.

      That's about it. What should I do?

      Given that I'm a novice is this area, I'd be all ears to listen any other related or unrelated advice for someone who's just starting to build their first home server.

      Thank you in advance.

      27 votes
    12. Suggestions for a good math epub reader on Windows?

      I have tried Calibre & SumatraPDF, I was so excited for Calibre until it never worked properly on the one textbook I needed. For example, whenever I went to the next page it would stall on loading...

      I have tried Calibre & SumatraPDF, I was so excited for Calibre until it never worked properly on the one textbook I needed. For example, whenever I went to the next page it would stall on loading forever, and this is apparently a known issue that's [according to the posts I read from the owner] caused by a graphics driver that I'm not interested in delving into just to read an ebook.

      The ebook itself is pretty large with a lot of mathematical equations and images, but nothing my computer should be stalling on. The issue with SumatraPDF is that it can't seem to render the mathematical equations properly, and I couldn't find any simple way to load them without having to do more work.

      5 votes
    13. DOSbox help for a noob - mouse doesn't work at all

      First, forgive me for I am a first time DOSbox user. My O/S is Windows 10 home 64-bit I went to old games and grabbed Doom & Doom II. I use to play these quite a bit and remember them fondly. I...

      First, forgive me for I am a first time DOSbox user. My O/S is Windows 10 home 64-bit

      I went to old games and grabbed Doom & Doom II. I use to play these quite a bit and remember them fondly. I did the easy setup which added DOSbox 0.74 and the game. It loads up and runs just like I remember with the keyboard, just no mouse.

      I did searching online, but the only solutions seem to be making sure autolock=true in the config file, and using cntl-F10 to capture the mouse. Toggling cntl-F10 does seem to grab the mouse in that the cursor disappears, but the mouse still will not function in either full screen or windowed mode.

      I seem to be missing something obvious, but for the life of me I just don't see it. I'm reasonably computer savvy, but feeling stupid at the moment.

      Any advice would be appreciated. TIA

      Edit: Forked over the 5 bucks and went with the Steam version. Works perfectly.
      Thank you everyone for your advice.

      9 votes
    14. If you are using Android apps on Windows 11, what is your preferred installation method and use case?

      I've seen some tutorials that suggest installing the Amazon app store and then using a workaround to sideload apks. There's also emulators like Bluestacks. I'm curious as to what people prefer and...

      I've seen some tutorials that suggest installing the Amazon app store and then using a workaround to sideload apks. There's also emulators like Bluestacks. I'm curious as to what people prefer and what apps they've found useful.

      6 votes
    15. Dual-boot with a shared partition?

      Hey, I use Windows 10 and Arch in a dual boot configuration. I use both of them for software development and want a shared partition to store all the projects. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as I...

      Hey,

      I use Windows 10 and Arch in a dual boot configuration.

      I use both of them for software development and want a shared partition to store all the projects.
      Unfortunately, it's not as easy as I had thought.

      Initially, I tried NTFS as the Linux support seemed fine. I tried both, ntfs-3g and the kernel implementation.
      Besides the issue that hibernate could lock the drive - which you can disable - it periodically caused problems during compilation and other stages.

      Especially Rust based projects have thrown weird errors during builds, but I also had this on certain Go projects as well.
      It sometimes felt like, that the NTFS driver returned the wrong files when the compiler asked for them. Unmet dependencies, missing files, etc. Usually, when the project is huge.

      In certain scenarios symbolic links didn't work and permissions were not set correctly - which you can fix by adding some args to the fstab mount - never got it really stable though.

      I then tried to format to Ext4, and all issues were instantly gone on the Linux side.

      Fortunately, there are tools such as Linux FileSystem from Paragon which promise to make it work (I even bought a proper license) - and it did for a while, until it didn't.

      I once copied a bigger folder that included a bigger node_modules folder and during copy, files were missing, corrupted, the copy process hung - then crashed.

      I was so desperate that I even tried out FAT32, but I quickly found out that it doesn't support symbolic links at all, and therefore breaks Git and other tools depending on it.

      Is it still so hard in 2023 to have a shared partition between two OS? Has anyone made better experiences?
      I really don't want to split the partitions as I sometimes work on the same project on different OSes.

      Thanks in advance!

      7 votes