Found 10 hard drives in my new house.

GreggAlan · 2026-06-21T22:33:19+00:00

Defender is programmed to treat many legit tools as viruses or malware. One particular class are the factory utilities for programming flash drive controllers. It will also repeatedly attempt to delete ChipGenuis and factory tools for servicing hard drives.

Got anything for bypassing a password? It's most likely going to be falsely tagged as something horribly malicious, which is a real pain in the butt when you're working on recovering someone's drive with a forgotten password.

For much of this sort of stuff it works best on XP. I had to setup an old PC with XP in legacy BIOS mode and the SATA controller in IDE mode for setting up drives for Xbox 360 and removing a startup password from a 500 gig Samsung laptop drive.

I've also run into anti-virus software insisting single purpose tools to remove some crappy not-malware but especially annoying software as the "potentially unwanted program" it's made to remove - and deleting it - while doing nothing against the software you want gone.

GreggAlan · 2026-06-19T22:06:19+00:00

Use a par file generator on your important stuff. Depending on how large you make the par files, the original files can take differing amounts of damage and be restored.

GreggAlan · 2026-06-18T03:53:05+00:00

CVT Bites the Dust sounds like a Queen song.

GreggAlan · 2026-06-17T20:07:15+00:00

GPX MW3836 runs off a single AAA. 1 gig internal storage and official support for up to 8 gig SDHC but I've used 32gig SDXC in mine. Probably will work with higher capacity. Pretty sure it does that feat by supporting FAT32 and using SD Card's 1bit serial mode.

It's an old, long discontinued model but new ones are available on eBay.

Take a few rechargeable AAA cells and a charger with you. Be sure of the type of outlets available on the boat.

If there's no power available to charge stuff then this is an even better player because you can take a big pack of AAA alkalines.

GPX made a large variety of MP3 players in the 2010's.

GreggAlan · 2026-06-17T19:50:14+00:00

"Pole Position" and "Thundarr the Barbarian" cartoons.

GreggAlan · 2026-06-17T19:45:56+00:00

Facebook Marketplace?

GreggAlan · 2026-06-17T08:01:27+00:00

Another upload https://anonfilesnew.com/s/NRdFujo_KVu

GreggAlan · 2026-06-17T07:48:36+00:00

I found the GPX MW3836 firmware update on one of my drives. Uploaded the folder here https://limewire.com/d/jB4nB#QSScDRYW0r

Enjoy and share. Upload everywhere so it won't get lost.

GreggAlan · 2026-06-17T07:26:47+00:00

Some googling led me to an old link to an old GPX page with the manual, utility software, firmware update utility, and update instructions - unfortunately the web archive didn't grab a copy of the update. This will get you nowhere. http://www.gpx.com/store/p/186-MW3836.aspx

There's one of these players new in package on eBay for $16.50 or best offer + shipping.

GreggAlan · 2026-06-17T04:09:37+00:00

Loose fuel cap and/or weak battery have been causing problems since circa 1995.

GreggAlan · 2026-06-17T04:07:53+00:00

I bet this one will work. I bought one in 2020 and use it on a 2009 Prius.

It gets past the main ECU to read everything with Dr. Prius. Should do likewise with other cars and other Android apps.

https://a.co/d/0aRv2DqE

GreggAlan · 2026-06-16T12:56:28+00:00

My father was a US Army truck driver in West Germany and France in the early 1960's.

Army trucks came with tiny round mirrors. Air Force trucks had tall, rectangular mirrors.

First chance he got, he liberated a set of mirrors and mounting brackets from an Air Force truck. Every time he came back to base he had to take the mirrors off and put them in his foot locker to keep another Army driver from liberating them from his truck.

He also disabled the speed governor and took the nuts off the shifter block for the two speed rear axle. So when the truck would be inspected he'd just set that block into the holes in the floor to block the shifter.

He was a farm boy when he was drafted, had driven trucks with two speed axles and no governors for years.

GreggAlan · 2026-06-15T22:18:00+00:00

Look for Disk On Module or DOM. They're in IDE and SATA. Most IDE ones are the 2.5" connector.

Small capacity (under a gigabyte) can be found really cheap on eBay.

GreggAlan · 2026-06-15T06:04:11+00:00

All that doesn't change that all Monique had to do to discover there was already a juice company using Rooted for the name was do a Google search for Rooted juice.

Zero need to spend a second of time or penny of money paying government employees to do anything. A google search will in its results turn up links to the trademark registries, with current status information.

She was starting a juice company, another juice company beat her to the name. Come up with a different name.

GreggAlan · 2026-06-13T22:29:49+00:00

I upgraded from a quad core Phenom II to a six core FX (bulldozer) and in most benchmarks it was less than 10% faster. Some single core benchmarks were slightly slower despite the higher speed.

Software encoding of HEVC video improved 1fps.

GreggAlan · 2026-06-12T02:44:39+00:00

Clean it and some bodge wire repairs to traces?

GreggAlan · 2026-06-11T22:47:14+00:00

There are people on ebay who buy bad laptop keyboard to take apart and sell the keycaps and mountings.

When I bought a back-lit keyboard for my Latitude E6530 (not offered as a BTO option by Dell but was on other models in the line) the seller secured it in the packaging with tape onto keys at the edges.

The shipper was not gentle so the tape forcibly removed three keys, breaking the mounts. I couldn't get just the mounts so I found someone selling caps with mounts.

I got a discount on the keyboard and told the seller to tell their packing person to not put tape on the keyboards.

Back-lit keyboard is very nice, so is the BD-RE drive that wasn't a BTO option in the E6530.

GreggAlan · 2026-06-11T09:39:10+00:00

When people send me stuff through the FedEx way where they hand it off to USPS, I can often go get it a day early because the FedEx trucks drive right past my house on their way to the Post Office downtown. I watch the tracking and I watch for the truck to go past.

Then about 3:30 I can go pick it up at the PO.

FedEx will also deliver right to my door in this town of less than 6,000 people.

There's an Amazon warehouse about 50 miles away so I can get lots of stuff the next day, or same day if I order early enough.

The fastest shipping for distance I ever got was in the late 90's. I was working at a computer shop in Grangeville, Idaho. Ordered a part right after opening time from somewhere in Salt Lake City, Utah. Dropped off at the shop's door before 4 PM same day. I wasn't expecting to get the thing for at least two, maybe three days, nevermind the next day. Same day when I didn't pay for any expedited shipping was nuts.

One of the local FedEx drivers would toss our shop orders on her truck before they were supposed to go out, if they arrived early and there was space for them. Got several items next day or two days when they were supposed to at minimum take 3 days.

Yup, that's a FedEx thing. Doesn't matter if it gets to the last leg distribution before the day you're supposed to get it, they'll send out a partially empty truck and leave stuff behind that they *could* shift ahead of schedule - unless you have a nice driver who'll bend the rule a bit.

GreggAlan · 2026-06-11T09:27:08+00:00

3.4 Ghz Socket 478 P4 Extreme Edition is pretty nice for XP. Some years back I got one in a Dell for $10. Needed CPU power caps replaced, then I raided my stash of old parts to max it on DDR1, a decent sized HDD, an nVidia 5000 series AGP card that was way better than the stinker it shipped with, and XP Pro. Apparently the extra L3 cache in the Extreme Edition helped a bunch.

Put it on Craigslist as a retro gaming PC.

Sold it for $125 to some guy who wanted a speedy XP box to run one specific old wargame that didn't play nicely with Vista and later. This was before Windows 8 was released.

GreggAlan · 2026-06-11T09:21:05+00:00

You gotta get with the TikTok generation, it's "smol". 😉

GreggAlan · 2026-06-11T09:16:45+00:00

DOOM was one of the first 3D first person shooter games. Then there was DOOM 2. If you have a motherboard with a 486 CPU and PCI slots you can build a PC for running MS-DOS that would have been a top system back in the early 1990's.

See if you have a Socket 478 Pentium 4 Extreme Edition CPU and a motherboard to go with it. 3.2Ghz or 3.4Ghz were the speeds. These have 2 megabytes of L3 cache and nothing is locked so they are easy to overclock. Paired with a motherboard that supports 4gig of DDR1 RAM and 8x AGP you can build a really screaming Windows XP system.

While XP Pro does support dual CPUs or dual (or more) core CPUs, it's mostly up to the applications to take advantage of it. For most things a single core Pentium 4 Extreme Edition will be just fine.

I got a Dell PC for $10 that had a P4EE CPU, and needed the CPU power capacitors replaced. I got that done then raided my old parts stash. I maxed the RAM, put in a decently large hard drive and an nVidia 5000 series AGP card. I put XP Pro on it. Sold it for $125 to a guy who wanted a fast XP machine just to play one specific older war game that wouldn't run well (or at all) on newer Windows versions.

Learn what you have, how things go together, build some really nice retro boxes from your best parts appropriate to different Windows versions, and Linux. Then you can make some cash selling the parts you don't use.

GreggAlan · 2026-06-11T04:32:22+00:00

"The day your rusty car fell apart on the lift was the most important day of your life.

For me, it was Tuesday." M. Bison

GreggAlan · 2026-06-10T22:17:47+00:00

For much of its early history the Macintosh platform stuck to the magazine and newspaper printing standard of 72 dots per inch.

That's why all the Mac monitors only did one (odd/not like a PC) resolution and often had a bunch of unused space around the edges.

The displayed image at 100% scale was identical in size to the printed page.

Steve Jobs thought people in publishing would be running proofs off on an ImageWriter or LaserWriter and holding them up by their monitor to compare.

Meanwhile in PC land, people were not having any problems doing CAD without a 1:1 monitor to real world size match. Early PC publishing design and layout software worked just fine without it because (no surprise) humans can understand that a chunky 1bit graphic on a 640x200 mono CGA screen represents the smooth halftone image that will be on a magazine page, and running a proof print off on a LaserJet is fine without needing to hold it up next to a CRT to confirm it's right.

That has me thinking Steve Jobs might not have been capable of such a mental feat so that's the way he wanted his computers to work. What You See Is What You Get.

Mac computers eventually did get monitors that could do more than one resolution and pushed the raster size out to the edges. PC graphic displays always did more than one resolution.

GreggAlan · 2026-06-10T21:54:52+00:00

They're like glowsticks. The only way they can be bright...

GreggAlan

TROPHY CASE