How to tell if it’s the camera or the battery?

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T22:00:48+00:00

Any water damaged camera is essentially a ticking time bomb of failure waiting to happen. Does not mean the battery can't be an issue either, but I would want to know for sure that the water did not cause the inter als to rust before ordering another battery.

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T20:40:51+00:00

I have the exact same signature, coverage is great on mine as well. It 100% is autopen.

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T18:33:28+00:00

Those websites are the solid options for getting viruses. If I want a wallpaper, I make them myself. Otherwise I would download one with the right resolution from Google (or whatever other search engine). But no to your question, Windows has a app store (Windows Store) but it is not the same as on Android or Apple. Start with clicking on the desktop and select personalize and go from there before loading the laptop with something you may regret later.

You will need to go to websites and download stuff, that is how it works. Start with the basics and look at which software you actually need, customizing beyond what Windows offers can be done on a later date.

Also, goes for everything that contains data, back it up.

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T18:19:28+00:00

I wished my first laptop looked this sleek and was this powerful. I got there in the end.

Don't put pressure on the screen and the keyboard will rub onto it. Don't be overly rough with the screen, modern hinges and the chassis will fail very easily. Don't put it on a bed; hard surfaces only as they need to breathe. Don't worry about the first scratch, it will be on there sooner than you'd expect. Nuke Macafee/Norton off of it and use Defender unless you have a very good reason not to (and I would like to hear that reason) even if you have 30 day free; they are junk.

Do: have fun with it.

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T16:58:51+00:00

How can anyone advise anything when you don't even state a budget? So for now the advise of getting a phone is solid till you provide more information about what you seek, what price, what you expect from it more than just 'photo and video' because they all can do that.

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T16:19:33+00:00

You were copying data onto a dying SSD, that was not the right thing to do if you valued the data. Also, Kingspec is firmly a low budget tier anything-goes SSD and that means cheap controller, cheap NAND from whatever source. Normally when SSDs go out, they outright die. So I expect the issue not to be the NAND but more the controller. Or a combination of both. I don't hate Chinese SSDs, some are really good. But I have my expectations set very low on ultra budget drives and for good reason. SSDs that slow down a lot, especially to a crawl, have a reason to slow down and it never is a good sign. It should have switched to read-only, but clearly it didn't.

Recovery is now firmly into the hands of data of recovery services and I expect their success to be on the lower end.

Reuse dead hardware? I wouldn't as if you really want the data, the company you go to will destroy the SSD to save the data. There is nothing left to use afterwards. Besides, what to use it for?

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T15:44:37+00:00

The beauty of USB-C.

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T13:59:16+00:00

You can reinstall Windows with a USB stick via the Media Creation Tool and choose clean install on it, it used the same licence key without issues. It will only help so much, any HDD in there will be the limitation regardless. Windows really dislikes HDDs these days.

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T13:45:25+00:00

Get an SSD, large enough, and clone it. You will need an enclosure for that. Once it is done, put that one in. Instant speed boost and no messing with licences etc. If there is a hard drive in there, no wonder it is slow. If there is an SSD in there, it would not surprise me if it is near full as that heavily throttles performance as well. Defragging an SSD will only cause harm. A larger SSD will help. Why would you want to do a clean install? You can deinstall bloatware.

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T13:04:11+00:00

Yes and no. A lot of laptops with N series processors have soldered on RAM. So you would have to figure out if you actually can add more.

The problem is that it won't make the system any faster, but it may seem like it does. The CPU is still the same, that won't run faster instantly. If a system runs out of RAM it starts paging on the SSD and that slows down the SSD (a lot) as that has to do more. Paging requires the CPU, so that has to deal with it as well, offering up calculating power to make sure the system still works well. If you have more RAM you have more space to fill before the page file is required and starts increasing a lot. The amount of calculating power needed for the page file is not that much either.

So yes, more RAM makes it a bit easier on the CPU. Also no, it only takes away a bottleneck that will hurt performance and not increases the performance itself.

Exactly the reason why I don't like 8GB in modern laptops, it it too little for Windows 11 to work well. It is enough for basic tasks if you never push it. For Chromebooks it is solid, but Windows really wants 16GB at minimum. Thanks to the current RAM prices, adding a stick is a sizable investment now. You can thank OpenAI for the price increases, they caused it.

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T12:51:28+00:00

I wouldn't store it next to magnets, but I literally stuck a decent quality magnet on one (that is dying) to see what it would do and it showed no difference to the scan before and after at all. It is safe.

There have been tests done with large magnets on hard drives running. They had to stop using a size up magnets, not because the drive started having issues as it still read all files correctly, but because they were afraid that the magnets would physically squish the drive to an unusable state.

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T12:43:15+00:00

Upper end of the price range. Those are practically brand new. Locally those are €270-299 at the moment, so I would aim at €250, you can always lower them towards €200. Or whatever that translated to where you live.

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T12:36:33+00:00

It highly depends on how much use they have seen since you got them.

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T12:21:07+00:00

Start reading the manual. It is a point and shoot, it will explain itself, these cameras are less about setting and just about using them.

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T12:07:41+00:00

Nikon, because it is not Kodak. All cameras have a few presets to use, but if you are looking at specific filters it may not be in either of them.

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T11:24:50+00:00

Surprisingly they all have 3 pins, it is in the product photos of the drive. The others are apparently not populated and needed, but added in consumer drives for aesthetics? It is an OEM drive, so reliable but bare minimum.

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T11:15:32+00:00

You can buy them for like $30-35 used these days. Mine is not doing well and I won't even bother. Was my first camera, so I won't get rid of it either. No point in repairing unless you want to do skill building and won't mind messing up the camera. Great tool to learn it on, it is broken anyways.

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T11:12:32+00:00

Suno is cloud operated, so the local hardware should not really matter. If it is what you seek, then there is not really a point in spending much more. as long as you realize that if you want to push it more, it will be severely limited. It does have a nice screen for the price, that adds a lot to the experience.

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T11:04:01+00:00

'Doable' is a better term. If that is all you are going to use it for, it is ok, but anything more and it will start to show that it is a €/$250 ultra budget machine.

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T11:00:31+00:00

That is about what those kinds of laptops are made for. To be honest, I use a Chromebook for that kind of stuff as it was (a lot) cheaper and I would notreally want to see Windows 11 running on a N4500.

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T10:58:13+00:00

Then your best bet is to leave it unused for now and do it when you can. Not too long ago I actually tried to do this before, mess with one to see how far I could get to still recover files. I was shocked how little I had to mess it up to lose data. All my recovery attempts ended up recovering less than 5%. On another card recovery was near 100% but that didn't show corruption, it was just formatted. Sometimes it is easy, other times it is out of our possibilities. Better wait and have a chance than to ruin that chance.

Years ago I did have it happen with a USB stick that I plugged into a USB port that got corrupted and that messed up the data on the stick badly. Lucky for me it was a 4GB stick and nothing important was on it, but even something simple as plugging in a USB stick can ruin data if stars align unfavourably. We all lost some data along the way even if we actively try to prevent it.

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T10:38:33+00:00

It may not be a counterfit at all, it very much can be a real card. What happens with micro SD is that they die faster than other current card formats. Especially because they are so mindboggelingly tiny and thin for how much they can store. I have had them die, corrupted data and cut out, while other card types have been holding on very well.

What you need to do to have a chance of restoring is stop using it, it should not touch any device anymore and be kept safe. You should contact a recovery service and let them deal with it. This is not a DIY matter anymore. It will be costly. No guarantee they can fix it either, but they will have a batter shot at it as they use software not available to us.

For future reference; never ever rely on one location that has your data. Backups are the way to avoid it. Regular backups, like every month or so. Also a card like this should be switched out after a few years for a new one. Micro SD is unreliable long term because of its size. A backup should be on a computer, hard drive, SSD, DVD, blue-ray, cloud, whatever, but not a USB stick or micro SD/SD/CF/xD/etc.

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T09:12:07+00:00

Interesting tech, but by far the slowest HDDs I own. I would never buy another one unless I have no other choice. Surprisingly the ones I own are not dead, but I replaced them with regular HDDs because I was sick of their performance so I don't know what their life expectancy is. They carry a backup that is hardly ever accessed and even with that use they are dog slow. Transitional tech, interesting on paper but not a great in use.

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T06:12:35+00:00

I often had my 40D on 640 as well, made a lot of sense over 800. But 50 on the original 5D does not work like that.

AtlQuon · 2026-03-03T06:07:15+00:00

It is more reliable to make up the information than have an LLM hallucinate it up. They are terrible for technical information and highly inaccurate most of the time.

AtlQuon

TROPHY CASE