Jump to content

Wikipedia:Reference desk/Computing

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Green Wave (talk | contribs) at 14:41, 13 November 2025 (โ†’Microsoft PowerShell: new section). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.


Welcome to the computing section
of the Wikipedia reference desk.
Select a section:
Want a faster answer?

Main page: Help searching Wikipedia

   

How can I get my question answered?

  • Select the section of the desk that best fits the general topic of your question (see the navigation column to the right).
  • Post your question to only one section, providing a short header that gives the topic of your question.
  • Type '~~~~' (that is, four tilde characters) at the end โ€“ this signs and dates your contribution so we know who wrote what and when.
  • Don't post personal contact information โ€“ it will be removed. Any answers will be provided here.
  • Please be as specific as possible, and include all relevant context โ€“ the usefulness of answers may depend on the context.
  • Note:
    • We don't answer (and may remove) questions that require medical diagnosis or legal advice.
    • We don't answer requests for opinions, predictions or debate.
    • We don't do your homework for you, though we'll help you past the stuck point.
    • We don't conduct original research or provide a free source of ideas, but we'll help you find information you need.



How do I answer a question?

Main page: Wikipedia:Reference desk/Guidelines

  • The best answers address the question directly, and back up facts with wikilinks and links to sources. Do not edit others' comments and do not give any medical or legal advice.
See also:


November 4

PDF copy paste is wrong

https://ceoodisha.nic.in/repo/View_Eroll_2002/02/AC014/P014092.pdf

This is written in Odiya.

Now those who can read Odiya they can read names correctly, but lets say I copy paste some names then the copy paste is wrong.

Like I read Ajay Das but after copy paste it is pasted as Ajytrd Dosdf and those who cant read Odiya they will translate it as totally different name .. This is happening with all the names mentioned in this pdf.

I think there is some problem how the PDF was created. If I want to tell them as email, what should I tell them? Plantleaves1234 (talk) 12:55, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't understand the language, but there is something weird going on with the document. If I copy-paste into Excel and then do a text to columns delimited by spaces, I get a seemingly decent copy of the original, but there's all kinds of extra characters showing up that are definitely not visible in the PDF. For example, the 178003 near the top right changes to 1780031 and an additional 1 gets added in the next column over. And the further you look, the more and weirder the errors become. Sorry, that's not helpful, but I can confirm there's something weird going on. Matt Deres (talk) 13:58, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
PDF is intended as a presentation format, embedding a page description language. As such, it's really only concerned with how to get documents to render reliably, on a wide variety of screens and printers. PDF doesn't really store data in a structure beyond what's necessary for rendering it, and how data is stored in PDFs varies greatly depending on what software was used to create it. It's really common to find invisible glyphs and stuff in weird orders, and sometimes to find that text has been duplicated, or glphs have been rendered into polylines (and thus aren't "text" at all). Sometimes glyphs are mapped to characters in a weird way, with custom CMAPs.
For this reason, trying to extract data from a PDF can be an unreliable, fragile process. Cut and paste is, as you've seen, only workable some of the time. People (who do this kind of thing for a living) will sometimes write script to parse the PDF and extract data, but doing so is brittle - if the creator changes their production system, it can change the order in which display elements are written into the PDF, invalidating the assumptions the parser script has had to make.
The proper solution isn't to fix the PDFs; PDFs are not a data interchange format. If this is data that the creator intends be read and processed by others (e.g. census data), it needs to be in a format intended for that. For example, the UK government seems to give their datasets either in OpenDocument or Excel XML; other organisations might use other XML formats, or maybe CSVs. So that's what you should ask them for. If they refuse, you're stuck with bodges. -- Finlay McWalterยทยทโ€“ยทTalk 16:29, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There are free tools that make a pdf "searchable", based on OCR. However, none that I saw had an option for the Odia script.  โ€‹โ€‘โ€‘Lambiam 11:12, 5 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

November 7

Which AMD GPU is most similar in performance to the NVidia Geforce RTX 5070?

I apologise if this isn't appropriate here.

I've been wondering about this for a while, I'm getting parts to build my own tower computer, and the 5070 perfectly suits my needs, however, I'm curious to see what's the equivalent of it in AMD's Radeon GPUs, not only because I'm interested in the price difference, but also because I want to know which brand I should look for. Can you guys tell me which AMD GPU has the most similar to the RTX 5070? I'd really appreciate it. Sha lalad 14:45, 7 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You are all good, this is exactly the kind of stuff I like to see in here @Sha lalad. I think that your best bet would be to go with the AMD Radeon RX 9070. It has very similar performance, has 16 GB of VRAM (16GB compared to the 5070's 12GB), and the 9070 tends to do slightly better than the 5070 in tests. This is probably the most comparable to what you are looking for. If you need anything else, please feel free to mention me here and I'd be happy to help! NuggFrog (talk) 18:52, 7 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I've compared their prices, they're both pretty similar in price, but I honestly can't decide which one to get @NuggFrog. In your opinion, which would be the better choice to go for? Sha lalad 10:05, 11 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This is all personal opinion @Sha lalad, but I'd personally go with the AMD. I have been a longtime Nvidia user, but as of right now, AMD has been making some really good cards. Also, from that slight performance boost, I'd go with the AMD. However, if you are looking to use features such as Nvidia DLSS, feel free to use the 5070. I don't think that either one is a bad choice, it's up to personal preference. For the performance, go with the AMD card. For the features, go with the 5070. NuggFrog (talk) 18:13, 11 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
You didn't mention the operating system you intend to install, but driver support is another factor to consider. In particular if you intend to install something that isn't Windows. PiusImpavidus (talk) 20:37, 11 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

November 12

Effect of Expanding C: Drive in Windows 11

This may not be so much a question as a possible observation about a solution to a problem. I have had a Dell Inspiron 3910 with 12 Gb of RAM since 2022, running Windows 11 since Windows 11 has been available. Until September 2025, it had 216 Gb of available solid-state storage for the C: drive. That would be 256 Gb of main storage, of which 216 Gb was available for the file system. That had initially given me satisfactory performance. I am not a gamer. My computer is a library and database box. In 2025, I noticed that I was occasionally getting alerts that I was running low on storage, and I would see that I had less than 10 Gb free on the C: drive. The free storage on the C: drive was being gradually eaten away from two directions. First, the amount of storage used by Windows 11 was gradually increasing. Second, the amount of data that I was keeping in my directories on the C: drive was gradually increasing. I also saw that the size of pagefile.sys would increase as the machine stayed up. It would initially be 12 Gb when I rebooted, and would gradually expand to 24 Gb or 28 Gb. Once I got a warning that the C: drive was full. I found some files that were duplicates of other files, and some files that could be offloaded to an external 4 Tb device. Then I restarted it, and it freed up more storage. The general pattern was that after a few days, it would either become storage-congested or become memory-congested, and I would restart it, and it would run well again for a while.

Then I asked Best Buy whether I could upgrade the solid-state C: drive, and the answer was that I could upgrade it from 256 Gb to 1024 Gb of storage. So it was upgraded to 929 Gb of storage for the file system. So far, so good. But what I have noticed is that I am no longer running into memory constraints. The memory is still 12 Gb. The pagefile.sys now is always 37 Gb, rather than between 12 Gb and 28 Gb. So my question is whether increasing the amount of storage has improved the ability of Windows 11 to manage the memory. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:29, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The short answer is yes.
Your system apparently wants to use about 37 GB of memory. Since it has only 12 GB of real memory, it swaps some of the memory between the real memory and pagefile.sys, as needed. Previously there wasn't enough disk space to support a 37 GB pagefile.sys, which is why it was constantly struggling. Now that you have plenty of disk space, it can create a pagefile.sys file large enough to handle the memory usage of your system.
BTW, it is not ideal to have any amount of paging occurring between memory and pagefile.sys. Running a 37 GB working set on 12 GB of physical memory is a very poor configuration. Your system would run faster if you upgraded the memory as well. Ideally you'd want your memory to be large enough that you never need to swap. Apparently that would require 64 GB for your usage. But even getting 32 GB would probably improve things quite a bit by reducing the amount of swapping, even if it didn't completely eliminate it.
ETA: I'm striking my second paragraph because I realized that I was assuming that the size of pagefile.sys represents the size of the system's working set. However I'm not sure if that's true or not, and don't have time right now to research it. CodeTalker (talk) 00:12, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, User:Code Talker - I think that another 4 Gb is the maximum RAM that I can add, because I think that I am architecturally limited to 16 Gb. Anyway, I have spent sixty years working with computers that did not have enough memory, and I think I will continue doing that as long as I am walking on the Earth. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:53, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
According to this Dell specification page, the Inspiron 3910 supports a maximum of 64 GB of memory (32 GB per slot). CodeTalker (talk) 01:57, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

November 13

Online copies of ABCs of IBM System Programming?

I've added all 13 volumes of ABCs of IBM z/OS System Programming to z/OS#References; I'd like to add the older versions of ABCs of IBM System Programming' to MVS and possibly OS/390, but I prefer using editions that are freely available online. Does anybody have relevant URLs? -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 14:05, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Microsoft PowerShell

Where are language files on PowerShell? Green Wave (talk) 14:41, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]