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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

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ProfessorTomoe

Computer General Discussion and Tech Help

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Tell me if this has happened to you. You're watching a YouTube video on your Android phone. It pauses to buffer, yeah, okay, fine. The screen went black while it buffered, but no big deal, right? Then, a little while later, bam! No video. Can't see a thing. Audio's still going. You can get picture again by closing and opening the video/app/phone and resuming the video, but that's a temporary thing and it'll probably happen again before the end of the video.

Any ideas? I Googled it and tried uninstalling the app's updates and emptying data. Problem eventually started happening again. I just did that a second time just now, so we'll see how long before this happens again. Still, any ideas? I'm using a Samsung phone, if that helps.

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I've had similar happen on Windows 10, turned out it had to do with the fact that I was using Adblock Plus cus the blackscreen buffering would happen at roughly the time that an ad would have played. Switch to uBlock Origin and haven't had that problem since.

Dunno if that'd be the same for an Android device though.

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Got a new FitBit Ionic for Christmas.  It is proving to be extremely difficult to get set up properly.  It wouldn't talk to my iPad after numerous tries, and my not-very-smartphone connected once after numerous tries long enough for it to read 98% updated, then lost the connection.  Bluetooth works just fine to get a code number and pair to the thing, but then it won't synch with it, and it never even gets through the first initial step to connecting to WiFi.  Tech support phone call escalated to next level, which was an email within 24 to 48 hours, which was not very helpful and has been replied to with the latest results.  It does seem to be able to count steps and track sleep, but not sure about whether I'll ever be able to download the info at this rate....I am, as they say, less than gruntled.

</FirstWorldProblems>

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My internet problems continue, and have grown to affect my phone landline. The first guy who came out, who was supposed to escalate my problem, instead CLOSED MY TICKET! I got another person out here who found the problem—it was the same problem that the first guy said he'd "fixed," but hadn't. He gave me his phone number, told me that the people at Advanced Technical Support would be working on it, and promised not to close the ticket.

Unfortunately, he had to do something to our POTS landline. It's still down. I don't give out my cell number, so if anyone needs to contact me (other than spammers), I'm screwed Tuesday. I've called the second guy about it, but all I've got is his personal Frontier answering service recording. I'm going to fill up his inbox until he responds.

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So it happened again. I just cleared data and uninstalled updates, and it does it again!

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I feel your pain, @Zorua! Frontier is out here again. Initially, they were here to fix the phone. Then I asked the guy (different from the last one) if they'd made any progress rebuilding my profile. He responded with a blank stare.

Oh lord, not that again.

Anyway, once he sort of understood the situation, he drove off to mess with our main service box. We lost internet service and TV service for a while (again). And, of course, any fix to our Internet service naturally requires that our POTS landline be taken down, so that's offline, too. However, I use the word "fix" too loosely. Our download rate problem still exists.

At some point, a ball peen hammer is going to be required—probably on someone's head.

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I came ***very*** close to pulling out the ball peen hammer yesterday. The Frontier rep came out and at least fixed the phone (I still had to call tech support for help in setting up a PIN number for my voice mail). However, after doing "everything he knew how to do," he and his manager were about to dismiss the problem as an issue on my end, even with proof in the form of a slow download on my screen. I told him that he was very close to losing a customer. He apologized and tried six ways to Sunday to explain how it wasn't Frontier's problem.

Then he said the magic word: traceroute.

He started doing a few hops on my system. He even got his manager on the phone for me. Then I pulled out a diagnostic tool called PingPlotter. It's a graphical interface to traceroute. It showed exactly where the problems were occurring. There were some problems within Frontier's system, but the biggest problem was a huge delay between Frontier and someone else's NOC (Network Operations Center) with whom Frontier had a contract.

Bingo. To paraphrase the tech, I convinced his manager that there was indeed a problem.

I now have the manager's phone number and an appointment for another tech to come out and gather data via a hardwired connection today. I may see a very faint light at the end of this incredibly long tunnel that I've been stuck in for the past few weeks.

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2 hours ago, mlooney said:

Personal id number number?  Can you use it at the Automatic ATM Machines?

:-)

No, it's actually a PIN number. I had to sort through this big box of PINs, you see. Terribly painful if you're not careful. Hard to read the number printed on the PINhead, too, what with all the angels dancing on top of it.

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22 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

Terribly painful if you're not careful. Hard to read the number printed on the PINhead, too, what with all the angels dancing on top of it.

Had this problem a long time ago.  Just bend the PINs into hooks and the Angels will stay away.
You may begin attracting stray Anglers.

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1 hour ago, The Old Hack said:

That can be a problem. A wild hypotenuse is nothing to laugh at.

Oh, you said anglers, not angles. Never mind then, carry on.

Gotta watch out for those Rouge Angles of Satin!  (TV Tropes link omitted, look it up at your own risk ;-)

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20 minutes ago, CritterKeeper said:

Gotta watch out for those Rouge Angles of Satin!  (TV Tropes link omitted, look it up at your own risk ;-)

Or that classic line from the World of Warcraft forums, 'Rouges are overpowdered.'

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Ball peen hammer time again. Augh.

The tech who came out to collect data was apparently sent to convince me that my problem was not bad enough to fix. He kept doing tracert commands to what he claimed I'd called "problem sites" (more later) and said that the speed between hops was sufficient for their standards. In other words, if I didn't get a hop of 100 ms or more, sorry bub, you're SOL.

Time to consider (urp) Spectrum, I said. Again. To him and his manager. He went back to doing tracert commands. Finally, he found one that was bad enough to report. His manager told him to tell me he was elevating my problem to "level 3."

I don't even know if level 3 exists, or if it's just a level used to get problem customers to STFU. In any case, immediately after tech puppet left, I got a hop of 400 ms. I called the manager and told him to include that in his "level 3 referral e-mail."

God, I hate Frontier. It was halfway decent when it was Verizon. Not anymore.

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It never ends.

This time, Adobe is the culprit. I was working with it just fine over the weekend with Adobe Audition CC. I hop on today, and none of my Waves plugins are working. I check to see if they're working in Cakewalk SONAR, and yep - they're working. Waves isn't the culprit. Audition is.

I fire up Audition again and check for updates. It tries, but tells me I need some file and offers to get it for me. I accept. The process fails, almost exactly the same way. It does this about five times. I finally get this vicious cycle to end and write down the URL it's trying to go to. I get there, retrieve the file, and run it as the process was trying to do.

Anyone who has run a Linux distribution that does not have rolling updates will understand what happened next. I was upgraded from Adobe Audition CC.2017 to Adobe Audition CC.2018, and all of my VST plugins were GONE.

I've just spent the past 15 minutes trying to find the one piece of paper where I've got the paths to all of my VST files written down.

Dried mud indeed. I am not gruntled at all at this moment.

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How has dried mud managed to hold on to their share of computer real estate?

Every other system that is successful develops competitors that push innovation and improvement.

But when Dried Mud takes a piece of the computing landscape, no alternative is allowed to grow.

 

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Good. Freaking. Jeebuz.

I'd just finished a bit of composition and decided to run an update for Nero 2018 which had been bugging me the past couple of weeks. Everything ran normally, including the "reboot to complete" prompt. I rebooted and got the Windows 10 logo. I also got a prompt giving me 10 seconds to cancel disk checking on my G: drive (I have lots of data as a composer). No big deal, let's let it run.

So it ran until it got to 9%. Then it hung. Then it moved again, extreeeeemely slowly, until it got hung at 74% again. Then it went backwards to 73% and hung.

After a total of several hours, I finally got my login screen. Nero Update popped up and said I had updates, but nothing was checked. I then got a warning box from Windows telling me to reboot to fix disk errors. I rebooted, got the logo again, this time with just the spinning dots. At this point I went to sleep.

When I woke up, the system was checking drive G: again. As I write this, it's at 6%.

I'm glad I did Clonezilla backups of all of my drives earlier in the day. I may need them.

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Gave up on the chkdsk. Turns out Windows isn't even recognizing my drive anymore. I bought a replacement cheap 2TB storage-only drive (WD Blue 5400 SATA 6GB - $71 including tax) and plan to transfer the Clonezilla partition to it as soon as my son can make it over here.

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