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1

General Discussion Area / Re: What's the general consensus on Acer laptops

« on: 19 February 2015, 17:11:41 »

I cannot argue with that!  Sony Vaio really are crocks of shite. All of them.

Amen to that

Iv had an ACER laptop for a few years now, never let me down...

Only thing that has failed is the battery, but thats quite common with most laptops...

I've managed to accidentally pop the odd key off the keyboards when catching them with shirt buttons of all things, and they are a bitch to reseat. I personally find the build quality somewhat cheap and weak even in in the general feel of them, let alone using them

Battery wise a bit of careful management will keep it going for as long as you could reasonably expect unless it's a cheap Chinese POS to start with. (My Tosh R630-155 Satellite still gives me roughly 2 to 2½ hours from an original 8+hours and was bought in April 2011).

2

General Discussion Area / Re: Android Backup / Restore process

« on: 17 February 2015, 02:27:16 »

Same process for all devices whatever they are? Apple, Android, Windows devices etc..

Don't know if it's the same for all devices bud, but what I described above is the process I'd personally adopt first for devices with rechargeable batteries if I was having issues. Recalibration can take longer than you possibly first expected, but you do end up knowing whether it's time for either a new battery or a simple rebuild of the batterystats.xml file.

PS
If you choose to use a 3rd party widget/app to measure your battery voltage, you are looking at 4,100mV for a full charge.

3

General Discussion Area / Re: Android Backup / Restore process

« on: 16 February 2015, 20:54:45 »

If I'm correct...

To calibrate the battery you must use the phone till it shuts down (0%) then recharge to 100%.

Repeat the above process a few times, Something like that...?

Pretty much, the procedure for handsets that are standard is as follows:

1. Wait for phone to discharge
2. Connect charger (with power off) and allow to charge to 100%
3. Disconnect charger and power phone on
4. Allow phone to run until it self discharges again.
5. Connect charger (with power off) and charge to 100%
6. Reapply charger at around the 10% to 15% indication and charge fully.

That's it.

Do NOT at any time attempt to connect to any form of outside power source during the above process.

If you want to speed things up slightly during the process, leave things like GPS, Location, etc all switched on and you can play with them after the process.
Discharge times will depend on your actual battery capacity, you have an extra 200mAh more than me so you can expect around 3 to 4 days (depending on how much you use it during the draining process).

4

General Discussion Area / Re: Android Backup / Restore process

« on: 16 February 2015, 17:14:07 »

So far it's running like it was on KitKat, Even the battery life has improved 

I'd still be tempted to do a recalibration for peace of mind if nothing else.
The battery life on my S4 became somewhat erratic after changing to another ROM (KitKat based) to the point where a 30 minute stint using GPS had the battery life reported at 72% from full.
Switching the GPS off and leaving it saw the battery back to 88% by the time mid afternoon came around.

Battery calibration did end up taking 4 days to complete because of the 2600mAh battery, but it's bang on now.

5

General Discussion Area / Re: Android Backup / Restore process

« on: 14 February 2015, 13:41:12 »

So like crApple, on your Android device, if its running sluggishly, run a full factory reset, and do NOT restore. See how it runs for a week or so, and manually rebuild any historic data if needed.

The above is the proper way to do it for sure as all partitions are rewritten with fresh data and leave no option for any crap to inadvertently get left behind in the Data or Cache partitions.

It's also worth noting that you can run the phone in "safe mode" if you don't want to make any guesswork changes, and if that fixes it then it's going to be down to software (Don't forget that apps are still being updated for Lollipop users because of issues like you describe, so it's quite possible to install a "broken" app without realising).

If you want a copy of the proper ROM that either Sammy or your service provider use (along with the software to flash it), I need to know whether your phone is provider branded/supplied, along with the model number (probably G-900), the OS build number, and your baseband version.

All the above are located at Settings > General > About device

6

General Discussion Area / Re: Broadband speed.

« on: 13 February 2015, 12:19:50 »

So is an upload of 0.35 reasonable?

Depends on what you want to do with it really.

If I want to access my brothers ROKU box on my TV here, it would be a complete waste of time as it would be unwatchable.
If I wanted to send an e-mail or two though, no problem.

7

General Discussion Area / Re: Android Backup / Restore process

« on: 13 February 2015, 12:17:03 »

Doing an update on my old s3 killed it. Battery went naff and as you say, made it dead slow.

Did you recalibrate the battery after you installed the update?

8

General Discussion Area / Re: Android Backup / Restore process

« on: 13 February 2015, 12:16:19 »

So these are my 3 primary questions.

#1: Will doing what Samsung suggested actually make any difference what so ever?

It will completely reset the phone back to the day you took it out of the box, so it will be as quick as it can be at that point as nothing (other than the handset features) will be installed.

#2: If i backup via Kies 3 does this backup everything like iTunes does on iPhones i.e Does it basically clones the phone exactly the same way iTunes does, settings, history, app placement etc..?

Not quite.
It will put your SMS messages back where they should be and the apps back in the launcher, but for actual app placement (eg, app shortcut on Home screen 1), you'll have to put that back yourself.

#3: Does Kies 3 backup data from the SD card or do you just remove the SD card before doing the restore?

Thanks in advance. 

You can't remove the actual SD Card it has onboard, but if you have an external SD Card installed this can be left where it is as the restore process won't touch external partitions.


FWIW,

KIES is the spawn of the devil and responsible for all sorts of grief, I would personally download the stock ROM and use ODIN to flash it back to the handset.
The issues you describe sound quite common for a stock Lollipop ROM, if you want one that does work as you were probably hoping then flash a known good custom ROM to it instead.


You don't need KIES to do the actual reset on the phone, this can be done in Settings > Backup and reset > Factory Data Reset.

9

General Discussion Area / Re: Broadband speed.

« on: 12 February 2015, 17:56:43 »

162 Mbps downstream

12 Mbps upstream

10

General Discussion Area / Re: recommendations for free AVI video file editing prog?

« on: 10 February 2015, 08:25:30 »

I was surprised to find that WMM can handle MPEG-4 movie files.

MPEG-4 is just a container and has been quite common for ages, if it were wrapped in (say) a .MOV container then I doubt it would be recognised by default.

11

General Discussion Area / Re: Laptop for £500

« on: 09 February 2015, 06:55:05 »

but I'm an AMD man hate Intel so a multi core AMD chip with on chip graphics would be my choice

I'd stick to Intel for real world performance and reliability. I could never recommend an AMD CPU equipped desktop, laptop or server  .  Not until they catch up...

+1 for that.

AMD did have a moderately good shout when they introduced the K7 processor for speed/performance against the P4 of the time, but Intel started pulling that back when they introduced the Northwood IMO. As for the heat generated by the K7, I lost my skin more than once to a heatsink that had made it to triple figures when I accidentally touched it.

Rhonda's old Satellite was an AMD/ATI combo (x2 @ 1.8GHz) and the official display driver would crash at the merest sign of having to do any work, so much so I ended up on the Microsoft WDDM driver instead (which was surprisingly rock solid).

If you want it to work as expected, It's Intel IMHO.

12

General Discussion Area / Re: recommendations for free AVI video file editing prog?

« on: 08 February 2015, 16:13:55 »

Dunno what version of windows you got but Windows movie maker can cut AVI files

I doubt for one minute that WMM will recognise the container that has been used to create the original file, especially a cheap chinky camera.
Wouldn't surprise me if Varche has to transcode the video file back to a format that Virtualdub can work with to be honest.

13

General Discussion Area / Re: Nokia Lumia does not like toilet water

« on: 08 February 2015, 16:09:36 »

My old Nokia 6310i (I think it were) was a damn sight tougher than this Lumia...

Probably because it didn't have to do anywhere near what a modern day smartphone (essentially a PC) has to do.
Couple it with hardware that is naturally tough by default instead of being wafer thin and demanding reams of power, and they were a bloody good phone.

14

General Discussion Area / Re: recommendations for free AVI video file editing prog?

« on: 08 February 2015, 15:41:24 »

Virtualdub

15

General Discussion Area / Re: Any Plex (Roku Box) Users here - Home Server Stream question.

« on: 07 February 2015, 18:40:08 »

Only just got in to Plex myself, but that's only because I access it from my brother's NAS box over a VM Big Kahuna conection using a Chromecast.

What I can tell you is that my brother has no problems streaming internally, and we are sweet as a nut after the first 30 seconds or so getting it in 720p at our end.
I know it streams internally without any issues but then again my brother may have found something that you have missed if there are different settings for the two.

I should be seeing him over this weekend, so I'll show him this post if you haven't had a resolution by then.