Ghosthunter

[GHOSTHUNTER]

Thanks Reg, wonder if he does collect the 'Yesteryear' Rolls-Royce Y-7(3), we will never know!

Ghosty.

[GHOSTHUNTER]

Update on my hard drive issues.

The hard drive with all my Years of hard work has been sitting in a drawer waiting for a practical and cheap way of retrieving all my files etc. The final option was to take it apart and remove the actual platters, (where your information is stored), and put them into a known working hard drive chassis. For this I needed an anti-magnetic T6 hex drive. This was not forthcoming, so the idea was dropped for the time being.

Roll forward a few Months and my No.1 laptop, the Sony VAIO was still arsing about with various issues of locking up, slow operation etc, etc. I searched for a good second hand Macbook Pro on 'Gumtree' and several were available in my area, but at too higher price, but I saw one example at a good price and contacted the seller and offered a price £100 less than advertised.

Long story short, got the Macbook and thought what a stylish piece of kit, very well built and very slik operation and have been using it as a Secondary laptop and main storage area for what new files and folders I have been creating.

I must now confess that I should have saved my Money, it has proven to be far less reliable than my Microsoft based laptops, not due to the condition of the machine but due to some operating software issues, only fixable with the correct Mac 'OS X' discs, which I don't yet have!

However, during one evening when it was working fine, not locking up, not dumping me off the home network, not switching off my internet access icon, not freezing when I ask it to go to sleep etc, etc, I happened to have my VAIO hard drive by my side, I'd probably been trying to get my files off of it again and a thought crossed my mind...what if I plug it into the Macbook, will it be seen as external storage media, I plugged it into one of the USB ports on the Macbook and up popped an icon on my screen suggesting it has recognized it, I opened it as you would a normal folder and I was amazed to see all my original files and folders, sitting there waiting to be rescued...

It took me all night sitting up with the Macbook on my lap (it is a laptop after all!), copying all my files from the hard drive into a folder on the Macbook Pro and praying the thing would keep going and not freeze or do something else silly.

During the following Day, I checked the new folder and sure enough it had all my files and folders, this was the biggest moment of relief I have ever experienced.

I am now happy that I brought the Macbook Pro, because professional file retrieval from hard drives is expensive, easily the amount I spent on the Macbook.

So for all you computer buffs out there, keep a fully updated Macbook laptop in good working order, it can rescue information from stricken PC hard drives.

Ghosthunter.

[nickjones]

Hi Kevin. I have lost all of my photographs 3 times due to hard drive fails. Only once was I able to save some of the lost files, I now save everything to a dvd disc which costs under £1. problem solved!.

[kwakers]

Good lesson to all PC users here Ghosty and Nick. I only wish I had the computer savvy to use or need these tips, but being nearly computer illiterate is much easier. My stoneage paper Guides never lock up, the info I add there is only as good as I know at the date I write it in, so I gleefully carry my collection bible with me to shows. I have learned to store a second copy in hiding though, just in case! Nothing to worry us here in the 'Cave' on our ancient Dell........kwakers

[GHOSTHUNTER]

Thank's Guys.
Nick.
I tried the DVD storage idea and found it did not work for me, too many other DVD's in my ownership, waiting to be given correct labels of identification.

Kwakers.
I used to carry a bundle of little note books with me to toy fairs to check on variations and this worked well until I found I was carry an encyclopedia of information on Corgi, Dinky, Matchbox and Lledo models and this then became impractacle, so now I carry nothing to toy fairs except whats in my head!!

I do still use a lot of paper and A4 pads for my collecting purposes, so many bits of paper lying around with scraps of information with no real place for it all to go and to type it all into a computer is very time consuming, I'd rather be standing next to some models waiting for verification to which version it is...

Ghosthunter.

[GHOSTHUNTER]

Still getting used to how the Macbook Pro works against what I am used to on Microsoft based laptops. During the screen-grab session about the artwork on boxes not matching the models inside, there was one incident where I had to make Two screen-grabs of One post, then stitch them together later on for reposting. On the VAIO this is dead simple, on the Macbook, this is not, for a start there is no equivalent to 'Paint', so I had to download an 'App' to the Mac (I'm a Poet and didn't know it...!), and thought great, that's just fine, but now having opened the app and tried it, I find the Mac 'Paint' is simply the old Windows XP version of 'Paint' which was not particularly very good and this is one area where the Windows Vista version of 'Paint' was much better and something I got the hang of and used nearly every time the computer was on.

So next thing to do is search for a Mac version of Windows Live Essentials 2011 or 2012 to get the 'Vista' version of 'Paint' I like!!

Ghosthunter.

[GHOSTHUNTER]

Hi Guys. Right, my computer issues seem to go from bad to worse. I have not been on the forum as much due to my laptop being struck by a virus. This blocked all my attempts to get on-line including not able to open my email accounts.

Trying to get rid of a virus is not easy. You first have to do a deep scan to let the software find the bugs and then depending on what anti-virus software you have, get rid of the bugs completely or just move them into a safe 'Chest' folder.

I also deleted as much dead-wood as possible such as unused desktop icons, old folders and files not in use and condense the desktop shortcuts and folders into a single folder named VAIO 3, which then was sent to a back-up external hard drive.

Next stage is to defrag the onboard hard drive, a process designed to tidy up the remaining information code that goes towards being your files and folders.

After doing all the above, I could access the internet, my email accounts and my model car forums, so it has worked. The problem od the laptop dragging it's feet and being so slow then freezing had not been fixed and as this was happening mostly with website and general internet work, it had to be my browser.

I went into the properties folder of Google Chrome to see if there was an earlier version still available and there was, so clicked on that to install it, reboot the laptop to activate everything and keep my fingers crossed.

WOW, what a difference in performance, access to the net and navigation around websites etc was blisteringly fast for the rest of the evening, but I wondered how long this would last!

Next Day with the laptop brought out of it's 'Sleep' mode, I went through the usual actions and thought something was not quit right, seemed to be taking a bit longer to carry out my requests and sure enough during the Day, it was back to normal, normal in this instance meaning Slow, Slow, Freeze Freeze, Slow...!



OK, a bit of searching the net using my Macbook to see what can be done and apparently the recent version of Chrome is conflicting with some of it's own security codewhich then has issues with bit defender, more security code most of have on our computers, so this explains why the earlier version of Chrome I used that evening worked great until during the Night it updated itself to the newer version.

I had a brainwave and thought I would stop using Chrome and download Mozilla's 'Firefox' browser. This turned out not be the brainwave I thought it was as during the first time I used it it crashed then later it crashed again and they clearly are embarrassed when this happens because a nice little notice is flagged up about how sorry they were that 'Firefox' did not work properly...Hmm, that's nice!

When it was working it seemed OK but not the performance I was expecting and looking into this it was clear, they actually shake hands with Google Chrome for the actual browsing part of your internet experience, so really all I have done is put on a different coat...Hmm, back to square One!

The only answer now is to stop Google Chrome from updating itself, so went searching the net again and found the answer and it is tricky disabling the update function because you have to find the actual folder with the update code inside it and rename the folder so it can not be found!

While I was at it I also uninstalled Javascript, as the number of websites using it these Days is shrinking and this software gets updated every time you switch on your computer, more baggage to slow it down, so out the window with that.

I am now typing this to you on a superfast laptop with just a few more debugging issues to take care of and I am using Firefox as my default browser as it is now working properly and is very responsive.

Thank's for reading this, now go and have a relaxing drink and I'll see you soon.

Ghosthunter.

[fixer]

just had a txt from Marmaduke saying that his lordship is coping ok,
still sorting things out and will be looking in when the valves warm up in the old radiogram
hope to see you soon mate

[motorman]

just had a txt from Marmaduke saying that his lordship is coping ok,
still sorting things out and will be looking in when the valves warm up in the old radiogram
hope to see you soon mate

Good to hear the old toff is still thinking of us.

[mmi]

just had a txt from Marmaduke saying that his lordship is coping ok,
still sorting things out and will be looking in when the valves warm up in the old radiogram
hope to see you soon mate

Yes good to know...been too quiet with out him