The Official Computer Tech Support Thread

[adidasss]

Never buy a Dell computer. I bought an xps 13 laptop less than two years about because according to the reviews, it was supposed to be one of the best. And indeed, it is beautiful and performed very well. For about a year and a half. Now, less than two years after buying it, the battery is croaking and deforming the keyboard. Possibly related (or maybe another hardware failure), it's starting to freeze every now and then so I have to manually turn it off.

And of course, the warranty is one year.

Lesson learned, stick with the Asians.

[The Batlord]

The battery on my Chromebook is clearly busted. I can't use it without the power chord plugged in or it immediately shuts down, and my keyboard is warped and sometimes a key sticks for like ten seconds and I just have to wait for it to stop. Really annoying when it's the ****ing backspace key.

[adidasss]

Have you considered repairing it?

[The Batlord]

To me? There's a bubble in my keyboard that means I have to prop it up to keep it from rattling around while I type. I don't know about fixing it when it might very well be cheaper to buy a new one. And how do you fix a bubble of warped plastic?

[MicShazam]

Originally Posted by 66Sexy

To me? There's a bubble in my keyboard that means I have to prop it up to keep it from rattling around while I type. I don't know about fixing it when it might very well be cheaper to buy a new one. And how do you fix a bubble of warped plastic?

What's you chromebook model? Some models are really, really easy to change keyboards on and a replacement keyboard can be quite cheap.

[Freebase Dali]

Originally Posted by Stephen

Under my DNS Servers in OSX I Have one listed that looks like hexadecimal separated by colons with the first set separated by two colons. Is this a valid format for a DNS server?

ie.

nnnn::nnnn:nnnn:nnnn:nnnn

That seems like an IPV6 address. Basically it's the successor to IPV4. Version 6 gives you a lot more addressing possibilities because it's 128 bits rather than 32.
The two colons just means that zeros were omitted. It's called Zero Compression (can only occur once in an address) and it's used to simplify the address while still meaning the same thing in binary. In your example, I can see that 3 successive sets of hex were all zeros, so your example could have looked like this in reality:

nnnn:0000:0000:0000:nnnn:nnnn:nnnn:nnnn

The compression of zeros makes the address less verbose, as the Zero Compression can imply what's in those three groups by looking at the remaining number of groups and knowing only one Zero Compression can occur in the address, given that there will always be 8 groups of hex.

As to whether the particular IPV6 address is valid for a DNS server, that depends on two things:

1. Is the DNS server it's referencing assigned the IPV6 address and listening to requests on it?
2. Can your computer communicate via IPV6 to receive a response from the DNS server with an IPV6 address?

You can find that out by performing a ping from the client, using the IPV6 address. If it responds, then it's just as valid as an IPV4 address. The DNS protocol itself is irrelevant of that.

IPV6 still isn't ubiquitous as we have a lot of IPV4 addresses out there, but I've noticed over the past few years that some ISPs are beginning to assign IPV6 addresses to routers, and depending on your router and its configuration, it may be doing the same for the auto configuration of devices within the network, which would be relevant if you're not statically setting your own DNS servers on your network card with something like Google's 8.8.8.8, etc.

[Stephen]

Thanks Freebase, very comprehensive

[[MERIT]]

So, my computer f*cked up out of nowhere. I'm running Windows 10. Walked into the room to find a blue screen had popped up, saying that it was collecting data to restart because the OS crashed or quit working. When it re-booted, the HDD wouldn't boot at all. Ran all of the diagnostics that I could and it sounds like the OS was trying to update itself and errored out somehow, then committed suicide. Luckily, I have some live Linux distros so that I can at least get online. Here is what was diagnosed:

SMART Check: Passed

Short DST: Passed

Long DST: Failed

Failure ID: U0C05T-00098V-WPQF0K-61BG03 [Note: Zeros may be O's?]

Product ID: D2S42US#ABA

Error Code: 0x000000f

ErrorCode: 0xc00000e9

A required device isn't connected or can't be accessed.

The operating system couldn't be loaded because the system registry file is missing or contains errors.

File:\Windows\system32\config\system

I am dreading having to wipe and re-install. But that may be a best case scenario. May need a new HDD. Any ideas?

[Pookbasx]

Originally Posted by elphenor

yes I'd like to never use a computer again but I have to for school what do

What can you do without computer.

[Key]

Originally Posted by Pookbasx

What can you do without computer.

He just wants to be diffeeent.