Tag: computer

Back in January I bought a new laptop when Windows 7 reached end-of-life and my old machine proved less-than-capable at running Windows 10. I got another Thinkpad, refurbished, and had it shipped right to my brother so he could replace the hard-drive with two new solid-state drives. And it’s been great ever since, except for the battery.
Right out of the box, with no programs running, a full charge on both batteries would only give me a bit over two hours battery life. I spent a little time trying to sort this out when I first got it, but at the top I was mostly occupied with transferring data and software from my old laptop and preparing for what turned out to be my final California trip for the school year.
Anyways, for over three months I’ve been living with a mediocre battery and a fan running far harder than it had any need to. Until tonight, when I finally stumbled on the right combination of words in Google that directed me to a YouTube video explaining that for some reason the Radeon software was looking for a folder that didn’t exist because that sub-component didn’t apply to my GPU. But it kept on looking. Constantly. And like a cell-phone draining its battery looking for a signal that wasn’t there, it kept looking so hard it affected the performance of the whole laptop.
All I had to do was create a dummy folder with the name Radeon was looking for and my CPU load dropped from 40% to 4%, by battery life tripled to over six and a half hours, and it’s so much quieter now too.
I texted my brother and he replied “Damn. That is simultaneously both stupid and awesome.”

For the last few weeks, since mid-December, I’ve been battling a gradual reduction in free hard drive space on my laptop.  I’d get the low free space warning, delete some stuff, hope that was the end of it.  Get the warning again, uninstall some programs, hope it was done.  I thought it was a virus, or maybe malware of some kind, but all scans came up clean.
Today I finally smartened up and searched for the symptom (losing free space on hard drive) and eventually one of the many pages and forum threads I find directed me to a program called Treesize which quickly and simply shows you how much space each folder and file on the hard drive is taking up.  So I downloaded and ran it and I discovered that Norton has stashed over 13 gigabytes of virus definitions on my hard-drive.  Looking into it it seems that since I’m running an older version of Norton it isn’t properly deleting the old virus definitions when it updates, and so I was gradually losing hard drive space.  All I had to do was to turn off automatic installation and it stopped eating my hard drive.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/18/1857204