Thinking of getting a larger hard drive for my desktop

1) Use Chrome or Firefox with an ad-blocker
2) Use Chrome or Firefox in Incognito Mode (FF calls it something else but has the same function)
3) Sorry, that is clutzy....
Why deal with a sketchy ad-blocker or the hassle of going into incognito mode when you can watch the video directly on Brave?
Have I ever done that ? I'll answer for you.... "No".
That was in general, not specifically you.
 
a sketchy ad-blocker
Nothing sketchy. There are reputable and secure ones out there. Try uBlock Origin.

or the hassle of going into incognito mode when you can watch the video directly on Brave?
You already have Chrome (or Firefox) open. Right-click, select "Open in Incognito Mode". You clearly have no actual experience with this yet you try and knock it down as a "hassle". You won't run into memory glitches from running multiple, redundant programs.
 
You already have Chrome (or Firefox) open. Right-click, select "Open in Incognito Mode". You clearly have no actual experience with this yet you try and knock it down as a "hassle". You won't run into memory glitches from running multiple, redundant programs.
Useless. Just tried it and still get ads,

ingog.jpg
 
Read my posts again, # 120 and # 122.
OK
You already have Chrome (or Firefox) open. Right-click, select "Open in Incognito Mode". You clearly have no actual experience with this yet you try and knock it down as a "hassle". You won't run into memory glitches from running multiple, redundant programs.

2) Use Chrome or Firefox in Incognito Mode (FF calls it something else but has the same function)

I went incognito like you said, got on Youtube, selected a video, and still got that advertising for some stupid dungeon video game thing as posted in #123.
 
Legendary thread.

Makes me miss my dad. He was impossible.

I'm just curious, but if you want to run CCleaner, I'd love to see how many temporary internet files you have saved.

Incognito mode is not an adblocker. All it does is hide your browser history from friends and family. It doesn't block any tracking or web information from your ISP or Google, Microsoft, Mozilla. An adblocker is an actual browser extension like ublock, which needs to be installed. Ublock is embedded into the brave browser by default, which is why it blocks ads without doing anything.

Windows 7 is end of life. You will get no more security updates, and browsers are ending support. IIRC windows defender will no longer get security patches. You can still use it to do banking for a while, but you will eventually not be able to because an out of date, unsupported browser won't be usable for SSL or HTTPS connections with the site.

There are no tiles on Windows 10 or 11. I think you may be confusing it with Windows 8 and 8.1.

Windows 10 and 11 can run Windows 7 software. It's all NT and there's a built-in compatibility layer.

This is all such a funny thread. Just buy a 1TB SSD. A 1TB SATA SSD is like $50. LOL!
 
The last thing I posted about here had nothing to do with my computer running W7 and other here have experienced it as well. https://bobistheoilguy.com/forums/threads/whats-this-error-message-mean.364655/

Are you suggesting that people using W10 never get hacked? What do the companies that are subject to all the ransomware hacks use if not W10?

That's quite a leap(and an error in logic) to think I'm suggesting anything of the sort. Of course Windows 10 users get hacked. Users of any OS get hacked. I'll go so far as to say that most "big" targets that would get hit by ransomware are very likely not running Windows in any form.

Any security is only as strong as its weakest link, and a lot of big system hacks happen from user error.

With that said, older OSs have known, and often very well documented, security flaws that can be exploited. These are there in every operating system ever made, but the key difference between something like Windows 10 and Windows 7, or MacOS 13 and OS X 10.6.8, is that on current(supported) OSs the security vulnerabilities are patched promptly after discovery. Old OSs don't get this.


I can appreciate people trying to help but maybe I'm just not as concerned with security or support as others may be, especially when I'm satisfied with the performance of the computer overall. I mean, if someone came on here asking for advice on replacing the water pump on their 1988 Buick, would you instead of giving that advice, tell them their car is a POS death trap and they should instead spend their money on a 2020 model with airbags, abs and all the driver assist nannys to keep them secure?
This is not a valid analogy for several reasons.

One of the big reasons is that, provided that a car is structurally sound, there's basically no reason why it can't continue functioning just as it did when new. Parts are normally available long after the manufacturer stops supporting it, and for cars with an enthusiast following often better parts than new are available.

Computers will continue to function indefinitely offline just as they always have. Trying to use Windows 98, for example, on the internet is like trying to drive a Model T on the interstate.

Aside from that, often cars can be reverse engineered. Source code for many OSs is kept under lock and key. Even macOS, which is heavily built on open-source underpinnings, has a lot of proprietary closed-source stuff on top of it. Linux is truly open source, and someone savvy could basically keep any version of Linux secure as long as they wanted to. Likely no one but the manufacturer can keep Windows perfectly safe, though.
If Windows 7 is such a risk, why do all the online banking sites still let you use it? They won't let you log on with Explorer anymore so why don't they make it so you can't get to your bank account if you are using W7?

IE has been left behind so far that it no longer supports many current internet protocols.

Windows 7 with more recent browsers is still current enough that it can "talk" to their systems, and from their end there's not a security risk to them for you to connect to it. The day is likely coming, and likely sooner than you expect, that you will no longer be able to use any available browser for Windows 7 on it.
 
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On an old PC I would spend $50 - $75 on 2nd drive maybe spin HDD and move your hoarded files over. Guessing a ton of pictures fill that 1000 GB drive you rarely access.
 
All the pictures and documents I'd hate to lose take up 80 GB. And I don't expect that to increase much more than 10 GB a year.
For critical data like this, I would urge you to consider keeping at least (3) copies of it:
- a copy on your daily driver computer
- a copy on an external drive that is almost always left disconnected from the computer and AC (excepting when you plug it in to use it to back up your critical data; this mitigates the possibility of an electrical event or hacking by a malicious party)
- a copy stored in the cloud via a photo storage or online backup service; or, at the very least, on another external drive off-site at someone else's residence (this mitigates against theft, flood, fire, etc.)
 
I went incognito like you said, got on Youtube, selected a video, and still got that advertising for some stupid dungeon video game thing as posted in #123.
Try UBlock Origin to bl.ock ads on Youtube. This extension does not seem to cause potential problems with functionality unlike Ghostery and Youtube Auto Ad Block & Auto Ad Skip.
 
All the pictures and documents I'd hate to lose take up 80 GB. And I don't expect that to increase much more than 10 GB a year.
An M-Disc can hold up to 100GB. Great for secondary backup when the Big One hits. Of course, most consumers don't (want to) use discs any longer. You may have trouble finding M-Discs now. Verbatim BD-R discs with MABL would be the next best choice and much cheaper at ca $1 per disc.
 
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I wouldn't trust Samsung after this

SSDs are always best backed up by HDDs IMHO, you can at least recover an HDD by a recovery company whereas an SSD is impossible for the layperson.

I think it's far more sensible to just have a backup no matter what the media is. My work computer (a Mac) is backed up with a home-brewed SanDisk SSD Plus SATA (their bargain one) and a generic USB enclosure. I spruced it up with a micro-B drive connector (the really wide kind) to USB-C cable. My primary rationale for this was the speed (although the SSD Plus isn't the fastest for writes) and the lack of noise. The sound of a hard drive just annoys me when I'm working. But with a Mac I just use Time Machine for this application, which does automatic incremental backups as long as it's connected, and it's usually connected.

I don't worry so much that my main drive and my backup will fail simultaneously. Going to a recovery specialist to recover a bad hard drive is just so expensive and likely futile. I just keep multiple backups. My personal Mac is backed up using bus-powered hard drives, but I generally only plug them in when I'm ready to back up or if I need to offload data. One I use a program to manually select when I want to back up to a bootable clone and I'll plug the other one in if I want Time Machine to do its thing.

Incremental backups are kind of odd though. I hadn't made a bootable clone in a while and when I plugged in the drive it said it had less than 50 GB left on the backup. The program supposedly keeps older files in backup folders even if those files have been removed from the backed up volume. But I did it for the first time in months just yesterday, and now it's purged some of the non-current backup folders and it's got about 240 GB available. I only have about 650 GB used on a 1 GB boot volume, so the clone's backup folders were obviously trimmed.

As for the original topic, I've done various things over the years. I've had drive crashes before. I thought that I had a corrupted with my personal Mac's OEM hard drive, so I kept it around just in case I might be able to recover it again. Then I went to a bigger 7200 RPM 2.5" hard drive, and then a smaller SSD. The SSD just made it so much faster that I wondered why I didn't do it before. But when I started running out of space I got a 1 TB SSD when the price dropped. I was getting closer to filling it up when I just offloaded stuff to a hard drive. I don't worry that much about losing that data, so there's no backup of the random data that I have stored.
 
All the pictures and documents I'd hate to lose take up 80 GB. And I don't expect that to increase much more than 10 GB a year.
Remind us again, in all of this mess, why a second internal drive for seldom used files isn't a consideration?

If it MUST be an SSD and you're confident that you only need a little bit more space, a 256gb SSD is cheap these days and would allow you to supplement your existing drive while not having to replace a perfectly good one or deal with copying/cloning the old one.
 
Remind us again, in all of this mess, why a second internal drive for seldom used files isn't a consideration?

If it MUST be an SSD and you're confident that you only need a little bit more space, a 256gb SSD is cheap these days and would allow you to supplement your existing drive while not having to replace a perfectly good one or deal with copying/cloning the old one.

A 1 TB SSD is cheap these days. I've seen them as cheap as $60 from reputable manufacturers like WD. But they're almost all 2.5" and would require a caddy for a 3.5" drive bay.
 
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