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June 21

Three-Part Stupid Question

Well, this was going to be a two-part stupid question. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:03, 21 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

So Robert, I have to ask regarding the XY problem again: why do you want to uninstall Outlook, Office, and Windows 10? Are you having major problems? First we need to determine that reinstalling will buy you something. It may not fix whatever problem you're thinking of. Elizium23 (talk) 20:14, 21 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Uninstalling and Re-installing Outlook

The way Outlook is set up currently makes it a little hard for me to see my mail cleanly, because of a tweak that was made when I changed my password. My question is whether I can uninstall Outlook and re-install it. Since Outlook isn't listed in the Control Panel as an app, maybe I have to uninstall and re-install Office. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:03, 21 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Try the steps at [ https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_outlook-mso_windows8/how-to-reinstall-outlook/82764efe-f6f2-4ad3-9dbc-ee83972c5219 ]. --Guy Macon (talk) 19:26, 21 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Uninstalling and Re-installing Office

Is it feasible to uninstall and reinstall Office, perhaps because all of the piecemeal updates get it messy inside? Is it possible to uninstall it and reinstall the whole Office suite without having to pay for it all over? Robert McClenon (talk) 18:03, 21 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't tried this personally (I use Libre Office) but I am told that if you log in to your Microsoft account it should be under services and subscriptions at [ https://account.microsoft.com/services/ ] --Guy Macon (talk) 19:24, 21 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Reinstalling Windows 10

Is there a way to uninstall and reinstall Windows 10? I don't think that I have the original CD, and don't want to buy a new one. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:03, 21 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

--Guy Macon (talk) 19:21, 21 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Alternative: [ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/how-to-use-reset-this-pc-to-easily-reinstall-windows-10/ ] --Guy Macon (talk) 19:50, 21 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Reinstalling Windows: a personal view

If you use Windows for any length of time, it can occur that your experience gets worse and worse over time. Update upon update, apps added and deleted (leaving bits behind), ill-considered configuration changes, programs you thought you would use but never did, possible malware infections, and user stupidity all combine to make Windows slowly rot away until one day it just stops working. I recommend a periodic (I do it once a year) clean install. That being said, how you do the clean install makes a big difference.

First, consider whether you want to upgrade your hardware.

Is your disk too small or too slow? Can you afford to replace the spinning platters with a solid state drive? This is one of the two things that help an older computer the most.
Is your RAM maxed out? It may be that bringing it up to the maximum is dirt cheap. This is one of the two things that help an older computer the most.
Do you have a good backup solution and do you use it regularly? You will thank me the first time you lose everything to malware, a hardware failure, or your own stupidity. Got an unused x4 or larger PCIe slot? Get one of these USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20 Gbps) 1-Port Type-C cards and get a USB 3.2 Type C backup device (thumb drive or external disk).

Next, prepare prepare, prepare.

On a thumb drive, save install programs for all of your apps, latest versions downloaded from the vendor websites. Run VirusTotal on all of the installers.
Also go to your motherboard or PC manufacturer's website and save all the drivers they have for your computer on your thumb drive. Important: make sure you have the latest BIOS.
Now save all of your data on two thumb drives. Make a list of all of the programs on your desktop, start menu, and taskbar, and save that list with your data.
Get a Windows 10 (if you are still on 7, 8 or 95, stop using them now) install DVD or thumb drive. The URLs are in the section above.

Time to pull the trigger

The safe way is to buy a new hard disk, remove the old, set it aside, and install to the new. Think this is too expensive? 500GB hard drive, $18.99 & free shipping, 120GB SSD, $25.99.
Format the drive, do a fresh install of Windows, install all Windows updates ("check for updates" in the search box), install your apps, bring back your data. Make whatever configuration changes you normally make to Windows. Write down notes as you do this to make it easier to do next year.

--Guy Macon (talk) 23:06, 21 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

June 22

Online Video Troubleshooting

I am trying to watch the video on this webpage but the video player does not seem to be working. I have tried to watch with both Google Chrome and Safari browsers. Could any one else watch the video in the link? If so, what setup did you use? If not, do you have any advice on how to fix it? StellarHalo (talk) 09:02, 22 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

StellarHalo, could you elaborate some on how it "doesn't seem to be working"? What does it do? Do you receive a message? Do you see graphics of some kind? Broken images? What happens when you click around? Is anything clickable? Have you tried clearing your cache? What version of Chrome and Safari? Are you using MacOS or iOS? Elizium23 (talk) 09:23, 22 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The player works fine for me except when I receive MEDIA_ERR_SRC_NOT_SUPPORTED and it fails to play... Elizium23 (talk) 09:23, 22 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Elizium23, I apologize for not providing more info in the original question. I am using MacOS. Chrome and Safari should be the latest version. My error code was the same as yours:

This video is either unavailable or not supported in this browser

Error Code: MEDIA_ERR_SRC_NOT_SUPPORTED

Technical details: The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported.

After I close the error message and click the play button, the video just does not play with no time marker. StellarHalo (talk) 09:33, 22 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

StellarHalo, does this link provide assistance toward a solution for you? Elizium23 (talk) 09:43, 22 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Elizium23 No, unfortunately. However, there is a place to submit a troubleshooting ticket which would require signing up for an account which I would rather do after exhausting other options first. StellarHalo (talk) 09:54, 22 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Doesn't work for me either. Inspecting the html source shows the resource at the other end might be [1] but trying to retrieve that gets a 404. 2602:24A:DE47:BB20:50DE:F402:42A6:A17D (talk) 11:57, 22 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

June 24

Audio issue on my laptop

Hi there. My Yoga 920 laptop (Windows 10) has an odd audio problem. Audio works fine for a few hours, but then any videos, etc. go totally silent. No error message or anything...just silence. There's no way to get the sound back other than a reboot. I've reinstalled the audio driver, updated Windows, (then un-updated it to see if that helped), but nothing doing. Any thoughts on what the problem might be and how to resolve it? Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 100.15.193.40 (talk) 23:12, 24 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Have you checked Event Viewer logs? Elizium23 (talk) 23:17, 24 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I looked at the Event Viewer. Nothing obvious there, but I'm not too familiar with what I should be looking for. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 100.15.193.40 (talk) 13:22, 25 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

After you've lost sound, what happens when you verify the device in Device Manager? Does it claim to be functioning correctly? Have you tried both earphones and speakers? Is there any evidence in the audio mixer subsystem that you've lost the sound device? Can you ensure that applications are indeed making sound without you being able to hear it? Have you tried something like USB headphones or a USB sound card that might offer another device for the sound? Elizium23 (talk) 13:36, 25 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

So for $6.00 you can add another audio device and thus see if you have broken audio hardware. --Guy Macon (talk) 14:36, 25 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

June 25

Contact Wikimedia Maps re typo

There's a typo on Wikimedia Maps. How do I contact them to correct it? (Specifically, it's here - zoom in on the Coventry Cross Estate, and you'll see it's shown as "Covenrry Cross Estate".) --A bit iffy (talk) 11:11, 25 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The mapping data comes from OpenStreetMap. I checked its live site, and the spelling is correct there. I assume that someone has fixed it there (I'm struggling to find a useful way to browse OSM change history). The m:Wikimedia Maps data you see on Wikipedia is generated from a local replica of OSM's database (because it wouldn't be fair for us to point our massive userload at their servers). If I'm reading the charts here correctly, the main maps server in Texas (Codfw cluster) is a few days behind OSM's live server (don't worry about the equiad one, I think it's not used, and it's doing negligible IO). So when it catches up with that fix, in a day or two maybe, the change should be manifest (at least in uncached maps) in Wikimedia Maps. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 12:35, 25 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. --A bit iffy (talk) 22:15, 25 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

If you find another such issue, and it isn't fixed on the live OSM site, you can sign up there and fix it - see their Beginners' guide. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 12:38, 25 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. --A bit iffy (talk) 22:15, 25 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

June 26

Pipe output to two commands

In Unix I'd like to cat a file and output both the the word count (wc -w) and contents... can it be done with one command? I thought tee would work but I don't actually want to write it to a file, just show the count and contents in standard output. Thx. 98.110.131.11 (talk) 13:34, 26 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I note the reference to UNIX, so you need to check this against your particular implementation of tee. The GNU utilities which are sometimes found on UNIX and always on Linux may differ slightly, so this may or may not answer your question. GNU coreutils v5.3.0 - c8.23 permitted a FILE parameter of "-" which directed the text to standard output. For these versions cat X | tee - | wc -w should work, but I've not tested it. More modern implementations of BASH (importantly, invoked as /bin/bash and not /bin/sh) allows redirection to a process using the >() syntax. For instance cat X | tee >(wc -w) which on my machine typed out the file X and then added "31" at the end. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 14:31, 26 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The second idea worked great in zsh which is what I was using (on Mac). In bash it worked but printed an extra line waiting for user input... pressing enter would allow it to terminate. Thank you for the help. 98.110.131.11 (talk) 15:39, 26 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

GNU (coreutils) tee doesn't support the - option (because it's already sending to stdout, and this would entail it having two different stdouts). A hack is to do tee /dev/tty | wc -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 15:57, 26 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Finlay McWalter: – Hi Finlay, the documentation says:

In previous versions of GNU coreutils (v5.3.0 - v8.23), a FILE of ‘-’ caused ‘tee’ to send another copy of input to standard output. However, as the interleaved output was not very useful, ‘tee’ now conforms to POSIX which explicitly mandates it to treat ‘-’ as a file with such name.
— info '(coreutils) tee invocation'

There's no inherent reason why two streams can't both write to stdout, consider constructs such as 2>&1 for example. The problem is that the streams mix unpredictably Chapter 3 of the Bash Reference Manual gives the detail. Regards, Martin of Sheffield (talk) 16:27, 26 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

What you can't do is have one program write to two different places and have both of them be stdout at the same time. The suggestion of teeing to /dev/tty works, though. By the way, you don't need to use cat in the example at all, if the input is a single file; just redirect tee's stdin. Thus: tee /dev/tty <X | wc -w

Clearly wc can't produce its output until tee finishes running, but that's not a guarantee that the output will reach your screen only after tee's output to /dev/tty finishes reaching your screen. --76.71.5.208 (talk) 22:26, 26 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Your second point is valid, that's why GNU coreutils was changed, see the quote above. Your first point though is inaccurate. Consider the following commands:

 $ grep SLAVE *
 grep: bin: Is a directory
 ifcfg.txt:    SLAVE=yes
 $ grep SLAVE * 2>/dev/null
 ifcfg.txt:    SLAVE=yes
 $ grep SLAVE * 1>/dev/null
 grep: bin: Is a directory
 $ grep SLAVE * 1>/dev/null 2>&1
 $ grep SLAVE * 2>&1
 grep: bin: Is a directory
 ifcfg.txt:    SLAVE=yes
 $

We start with grep producing two l ines, one to stdout and one to stderr. Next the stderr is send to the bitbucket. The third example show stdout going to the bit bucket and we see the stderr. The fourth example shows stdout being sent to /dev/null and stderr being sent to the same place. Note that as far as grep is concerned these are separate units, BASH is uniting them. The final example shows stderr being sent to the same unit as stdout, but in this case it is /dev/tty. Grep is indeed writing to two separate places, and yet the data streams can be sent to the same place (wherever stdout points). I might point out that the cited text is taken from the official documentation. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 22:44, 26 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

[root@tamar ~]#

Windows 10 PC runs slow. Could it be due to recent ver. 10.0.18362 Build 18362?

Normally I wouldn't be asking for help with a slow computer, but I'm wondering if the problem could be due to the most recent Win 10 update, which was installed on June 17 (version 10.0.18362 Build 18362). This is about how long I have been experiencing the problem. I called the cable provider and we ruled out the modem and router. Also another computer on the network works fine (167 mb/s download) as does my phone (about the same). On this computer I get from 6 to 26 mb/s. Can anybody help? --Halcatalyst (talk) 20:35, 26 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Halcatalyst, so the problem is not actually a slow computer, but slow network bandwidth? Could you clarify if you mean megabits per second or megabytes per second? What server are you downloading from and how far is it across the Internet? Have you done a traceroute? Pings? What other network diagnostics have you tried? Is it one large file or several smaller ones? Elizium23 (talk) 20:49, 26 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Megabits per second. I think it's the computer rather than the network speed, since both the phone and the other computer are in the expected speed range (nominally 200 megs and they get in the 160s). My Internet connection is Mediacom cable. Don't know what a traceroute is or how I would do network diagnostics. The problem seems to affect all my downloads, but especially image-heavy sites like my personal web page, which has a lot of pictures on it. --Halcatalyst (talk) 21:48, 26 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Halcatalyst, try visiting speedtest.net and see if it can determine a baseline speed; compare it to the other devices. Elizium23 (talk) 21:57, 26 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I went back and cleared my browsing history and a couple of other things, and now I'm getting different results with speedtest on my laptop, from about 100 to 150-160. Same on the phone and the other computer. I don't understand the variety, but at least they're in an acceptable range now. Thank you for our help! --Halcatalyst (talk) 01:47, 27 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

June 27