MORE ON AI – Its EVERYWHERE now!
I’m now seeing ChatGPT/equiv all over the place! When I put an item on eBay – it now offers to write the description for me! An example:
” Add some elegance to your outfit with these stunning Chico’s clip-on earrings. Featuring three beautiful stones in amber and white, the earrings will complement any outfit, whether casual or formal. The gold tone adds a touch of sophistication to the piece. The earrings are 2 1/4″ in length and have a clip-on closure for comfortable wear. These earrings are perfect for anyone looking to add a touch of glamour to their wardrobe. “
All I did was have it write the description with AI and out this came! Not bad!
When I use Elementor (a great web design tool) it now offers AI to fill in articles for me – on any subject I wish!
Maybe some suggestions on writing a good newsletter??
I use Github CoPilot – which takes the place of a Junior programmer. I tell it ‘write me a function to do this….’ and it comes back with it! Usually does a pretty dam good job!
Per an interesting article I just read – its writing Hollywood scripts now. and AI is being use to ‘evaluate’ a script see how good a movie it would make!
A noted author selling on Amazon was just made aware that there are a dozen books up there now, selling under HER name — all written by AI!
Its EVERYWHERE folks. And its only going to get worse!
AMAZING RECOVERY OF THE YEAR! A huge save of an older server – in critical state!
A customer brought me an older Dell server that was in horrible shape – it had 2 failed raid arrays, and could not boot windows server any longer – and it was the system that did billing for the customer! It took a loooong time (about 4 months!!) but I refused to give up. Initially, 2 of the drives had failed outright in the raid, and since there were 2 raid5 arrays, any more drive failures and the raid would be toast. One raid was the boot volume, the other was their data volume.
There were also various server error messages! Some were important, others were not. But just untangling everything to get to where we could see what was needed took a major effort. And, there was NO and I mean ZERO room for error. The failed drive was not marked by something like a blinking red light. I had to deduce WHICH drive the failure was referring to. Much perusing of manuals, and some real puckering up of lips and I decided which drives had to be replaced instantly. The raids supposedly rebuilt properly. But it was still not bootable. And I was get CRC read errors (bad sectors) as I copied the data off the drives – in case the raid DID fail at least I should have some of their information! One more drive was faulty – but it did not show up as bad. I ran various self tests on the drives and after days (and days and days) of tests, ONE of the drives reported an error. So a third drive got replaced (out of the 8 drives originally!). Wound up spending the $$bigbucks with Microsoft for a Support Incident where they were supposed to help me fix the booting issue in WinServer2012. Now, its not like Win10, where you can roll back the registry to a restore point if your registry gets messed up – WinServer has NO restore points! After more than a month and many sessions with MS engineers they gave up. And refunded me the money. But I felt we had a working drive C – and after analyzing the boot drive – I realized that it did NOT have the customers programs installed on it – they were installed in a hyper drive (a MS bogus virtual drive format). So with heart in throat I went ahead and did a clean install on the boot drive – drive C. Now we could boot! The billing software was a seriously involved package, and we had to get their software folks to remote into the server and reinstall the software packages on drive C – but at long last we could point the software at the data (which I had copied from the HyperDrive to drive C) — and voila they were able to do billing!
What an effort. I almost gave up at least a dozen times during this ordeal. But I kept thinking there was still SOME hope – and in the end – we succeeded! I can state with pretty much absolute certainly – no one else could have recovered this system!
BLAST FROM THE PAST! FUN installing Windows10 on a 2011 Mac Mini! Many frustrating hours spent!
I had a simple request – install Win10 on a 2011 Mac Mini. ‘No problem’ says I. After booting off my trusty Win10 install USB – some of the devices had drivers that were not loaded right. The unit has an intel HD video (in the CPU) as well as a Radeon ATI graphics card. But the intel stubbornly refused to load! And boot camp drivers did not work. I finally ‘forced’ the driver to be installed, and then system Blue screened when it booted! Restore point, reinstall driver and again a blue screen! FRUSTRATION!!!!! After much experimentation, I hit on the problem – which is oddly similar to what happens when you disable the ATI video chip on a 2011 Macbook pro – you lose the ability to bootcamp (run Windows along with MacOS) – because the bios – when you boot to windows – ‘hides’ the Intel graphics, and you wind up with no video card! Here, the problem was that I was booting my USB stick that I can created in GPT format (not the legacy MBR format). ‘Let me try’ I thought and I formatted the stick as MBR (which is what bootcamp does creating the windows partition) – when I booted off my Win10 MBR USB stick (booting off a CDRom would have achieved the same result as CDs by definition are MBR) – my windows install went smoothly and NO intel video appeared to gum up the works! There were still 2 drivers I needed (and bootcamp provided one, a useful internet post provided the other) and I had a FULLY working Windows 10 install on the 2011 Mac Mini! VICTORY WAS MINE!
WINDOWS 11 FUN & GAMES:
2 entries from the ‘Wow Win11 is fun!’ pile. Many of you have loaded a 3rd party utility to make Win11 menus look more like the ones we love in Win10. Most recent Win11 update KILLS those utilities. BAD USER – wanting to change what the Microsoft Gods have determined your menus to be!
Also – a customer called with something I had never seen – the microsoft standard ‘print to pdf’ printer was suddenly gone! Win11 said it was there (it is under ‘Windows Features’) – but it clearly was NOT. well I thought lets see. I ‘removed’ it by unchecking that box. Then saved. rebooted. Then checked the box to reinstall it. saved. rebooted. And then the pdf printer was back! Never had to do that in Win10, I thought….
ANOTHER REMINDER – TURN OFF BITLOCKER. IT WILL BIT YOU!
TOPTECH REMOTE SUPPORT PLANS! AVAILABLE NOW! (sign up at www.theeldestgeek.com and give us your feedback!!)
You can register at www.theeldestgeek.com and the support plans are available for you to sign up for! 19.95 a month or $199.50 for a year.
Sign up and let me know everything works! Any problems? Call me at 7034013806 🙂
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If you want a gift card of our services for a friend just ask! Happy to make up one!) YOUR SUPPORT IS MOST APPRECIATED!
LIQUID SPILL REPAIRS? We can help! NEED HELP WITH GOLD/SILVER? Or Antiques? We have a LOT of expertise 🙂
I’ve been a precious metals dealer for years – started in the Antique Center. And we buy gold/silver – we pay more than pawn shops or jewelers!
And if you have something you THINK is valuable I can find out what pretty much anything is worth!
ADOPTION CORNER:
SYSTEM OF THE MONTH:
*** SOLD *** A super nice Razer Blade 15 i9 laptop! 32gb, RGX3080, 2TB SSD! Come see it!
Click here for the current adoption list – all are basically ebay prices but come with 6 month warranty and we do trade-ins and move-data as well 🙂
And we are open to haggling!
Or ask if you would like a good system and I’ll paw through the inventory1
VERY nice 11th generation Surface Laptop 4! And a surface laptop 2.
Surface STUDIO 3 –
and a 2017 i7 15.4 with 500gb SSD!
Nice recent HPs and Dells.
Many others too numerous to mention. Looking for anything? I may be able to rustle it up!