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Post by Mr Trev on Jan 4, 2017 17:30:40 GMT
Ian, the first thing I'd check is to make sure the touchpad is enabled. I have an Acer and the keycombo is FN + F7. Does the trackpad work if your mouse is unplugged? There's a setting in Windows mouse preferences that can disable the trackpad if a mouse is plugged in. I used a standard re-install myself - eg. not Acer - and the trackpad should always show up. My problem was trying to get Windows to let the custom drivers take control. Unfortunately I think this is going to become a bigger issue when MS dumps its own USB2 audio drivers on us in the near future
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jan 4, 2017 17:46:12 GMT
That's a fair comment Javier. Truth be told my Mac doesn't boot particularly fast these days either but I never turn it off I've been looking at an SSD drive for my OS partition but was unsure which one to go for. Would you recommend the Samsung?
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Javier
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Post by Javier on Jan 4, 2017 18:24:22 GMT
IMO is probably the best considering performance, reliability, endurance and price. I'd recommend the EVO 850 series, the 750 is slightly cheaper but endurance is much lower and the 950 Pro are not really worth the big jump in price for standard use.
Is yours a laptop or a desktop? the iMac is a PITA to disassemble but the Macbook is a piece of cake.
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Rabbit
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Post by Rabbit on Jan 4, 2017 18:36:06 GMT
When I was working, Macs were used a lot for music applications and every year, the techs reinstalled because of slowing down. They all store junk which eventually gets to them.
TBH, it's no biggie reinstalling the pc but the issue I'm having with the touchpad looks like a common occurrence on machines that have been updated from W7 to 10. Something to do with the Bios needing some kind of patch, which is fine if you install the original package and bloaty stuff, but if you want a clean install, bits might be missing which is what I think I have.
I use it for film editing so speed is important, even though it's a cheap old machine. It can take as long as it likes then since I use something else while the film is cooking on it. It had got to a ridiculously slow speed though so I had to do something about it.
Now it boots up in about 30 seconds and my film editor no longer crashes or locks up with HD material.
It's worth doing regularly if you can face it.
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Post by Mr Trev on Jan 4, 2017 18:54:10 GMT
The one nice thing about Win 10, they really make it easy to do a clean install. Microsoft even has a tool to let you download the OS if you don't want all the manf. pre-installed junk. I should do a reinstall myself since mine's getting slow too, and I keep getting an annoying click in my audio
The possible bios issue you mention could just be a setting that puts the trackpad into either standard or advanced mode. Standard is basically a old style PS2 device, advanced needs I2C drivers. If it is a driver problem, then the OS should download and install it eventually
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Rabbit
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Post by Rabbit on Jan 4, 2017 19:16:07 GMT
Yes, I downloaded W10 as a clean install via the menu system. It is very easy and is fully automatic.
The USB mouse was seen straight away and the trackpad driver is actually listed in the registry bu has no value set. It's set in the registry as 0. I did wonder whether changing that to 1 might switch it on since it doesn't appear in my device manager.
It might be that the Acer needs Acer's version of W10 and a straight install doesn't work quite right. I'm pleased with its massive increase in speed though. Almost as fast as a tablet.
Definitely worth doing.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 4, 2017 20:51:12 GMT
IMO is probably the best considering performance, reliability, endurance and price. I'd recommend the EVO 850 series, the 750 is slightly cheaper but endurance is much lower and the 950 Pro are not really worth the big jump in price for standard use. Is yours a laptop or a desktop? the iMac is a PITA to disassemble but the Macbook is a piece of cake. I've got an i5 Mac mini from 2012. I saw a video once about how to switch the drive but SSD's were much more expensive back then.
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Javier
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Post by Javier on Jan 4, 2017 21:37:27 GMT
I've got an i5 Mac mini from 2012. I saw a video once about how to switch the drive but SSD's were much more expensive back then. Indeed! They've become almost reasonable in terms of $/GB. If one can live with 250GB and store all big files in a USB HDD they are a real improvment and can do wonders to extend the life of 5-7 year old computers. Sent from my GT-I9505 using proboards
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Post by Deleted on Jan 4, 2017 21:59:41 GMT
That's all I do. there's nothing important on my Mac HD.
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Post by Mr Trev on Jan 4, 2017 22:47:54 GMT
When I got my new laptop, I found a dirt cheap M2 drive on Amazon. It is only 128gb, but it also only cost $30CAD. Installed my OS on that, and I don't know how I could stand using a mechanical drive. I do still have a 1TB HDD for bulk storage, so I should be good for a while (and I'm always keeping my eyes open for deals on SSD in case I decide to go full out)
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jello
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Post by jello on Jan 5, 2017 22:20:06 GMT
Thread title makes sense now. At first I thought your chauffeur had gone awol Ian Although a p.i.t.a. if it happens when you most need a PC to do something when there's no time pressure I quite enjoy troubleshooting these kind of things. You learn a lot that way. Of all the upgrades I've done over the years I think swapping my boot drive over to an SSD might be up there with the best of them. Couldn't go back to life in the slow lane now.
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Rabbit
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Post by Rabbit on Jan 5, 2017 23:00:28 GMT
I'm presuming that Windows is installed on a separate drive, Mark and just data stays on the computer? Sounds safe to me.
I guess that way, you just back up your data and wipe the computer, keeping Windows intact on a separate drive?
I am really surprised at how fast my crappy laptop is now!!!
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jello
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Post by jello on Jan 5, 2017 23:35:24 GMT
Pretty much Ian. All that's on the SSD is Windows and the various programs I use.
For everything else (games, music, personal files etc.) I have a couple of large capacity 7200rpm HDD. And another small SSD my son uses to record game videos to.
Having it that way means I can periodically reinstall Windows very quickly to keep things ticking over and not having to worry about losing anything important in the process. Once the price of 1TB or 2TB SSDs come down to something more sensible I'll likely stick in a couple of them to replace the HDDs. Right now though with the size of game becoming increasingly large (installed one recently that was 89GB!!) space runs out far to rapidly on a small SSD.
My Asus Transformer (laptop / tablet hybrid) on the other hand has a non-upgradeable SSD so with that everything just needs to get lumped together on the one drive. But don't tend to use that for much other than web browsing and video streaming so not a big problem.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 6, 2017 2:14:09 GMT
I've got an i5 Mac mini from 2012. I saw a video once about how to switch the drive but SSD's were much more expensive back then. Indeed! They've become almost reasonable in terms of $/GB. If one can live with 250GB and store all big files in a USB HDD they are a real improvment and can do wonders to extend the life of 5-7 year old computers. Sent from my GT-I9505 using proboards Can you suggest a good place to buy the Samsung SSD in Europe? I'll need to go for a 500GB drive as my current 500GB HDD is just over half-full. Right now my biggest problem is finding a reliable USB 3.0 hub. I have 4 2TB external HDD's to deal with and at the moment I'm switching them out as needed (which isn't very often really - only to back up my music collection from time to time). That's the one real downside to the Mac mini; the small form-factor means ports are kinda limited, although it does have 4 x USB 3.0 ports already. I'd ideally like to have just the ODAC connected straight into the Mac with all external drives on the hub. I think the hub will have to be powered for that to work. 1st World Problems.
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Javier
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Post by Javier on Jan 6, 2017 9:54:47 GMT
I could recommend one in Spain but have no idea about good French shops.
Amazon .es usually has very good prices but I just checked and its .fr franchise its more expensive. The 500GB EVO 850 costs 149€ and it is sold and shipped by Amazon itself on the .es site but on the .fr one cheapest option costs 158€ (6% more) and is not sold by Amazon itslef.
Anyway, 160€ is a reasonable price for that drive and probably the best price you could find would be 10% lower at best so not sure if 15€ are really worth the risk of buying from an unproven source, with Amazon you can always return no questions asked.
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