Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

computers have come with smart-capable hard drives for most of 15 years now, & windows still doesn't have a smart monitor or notifier of its own.

Folks, I just had to tell a customer that they likely lost everything on their computer. They brought it to me saying one day it was working fine and the next it went black. I couldn't get their HDD to recognize at all in any of 3 testing environments.

Make backup copies of your files, and save them on removable disks. If you haven't done it in a while, do it today.

today's #techsupport patient: "sfc /scannow" -> "Windows Resource Protection could not start the repair service"

A quick look in services.msc showed half the services, nearly all of them microsoft services, disabled. (i guess they should be automatic? they're not well documented, & that seemed to work.)

also, the inspiration for my entry is a pangram shorter than the fox test.

i decided to try my hand at strawberry jam* this year. my entry will be a twine game, and it's giving me a renewed appreciation for the effort that goes into writing good furry smut.

* https://itch.io/jam/strawberry-jam-4

did you know it's possible for a PC's hard disk to have a capacity of zero bytes? :3 ... :<

today's #techsupport patient: "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device"

NASA brings Voyager 2 fully back online, 11.5 billion miles from Earth:
https://www.inverse.com/science/nasa-brings-voyager-2-fully-back-online-11.5-billion-miles-from-earth

hacking over a connection with a ping latency of 122,400,000 ms.

i don't think it's related, but an almost-coincidentally timed incident of microsoft being microsoft was just brought to my attention: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/05/windows_10_binged/

fast startup can be disabled, but manually rebooting once a week or so for decent daily use does the job, too.

there's no permanent solution for that because, since #windows 8, microsoft cheated to get decent startup and shutdown times: the fast startup feature.

when you tell windows to shut down, it goes into a hybrid sleep/hibernation state instead, & the next startup is basically a wake-up instead of a true kernel startup.

reboots don't do that. windows goes through a proper shut-down & actual startup.

go long enough without a proper reboot, & windows does strange things. this is one.