Tech Corner

[jaylach]

Do you have an experience with Apple Pages?

LOL! Never even heard of it. While I DO have a Mac Book Air (2017) I don't do much on it.

On Windows, when I had my business, I was a super user at least. Now I'd lower myself to power user. When it comes to a Mac I'm just that novice that can get around without killing the thing.

 

[raylove]

Personally I don't like the cloud as to storage. I see security as my responsibility and am not about to toss it to an outfit that I don't even know if I can trust. I even disable One Drive when I install Office.

I have no problem with Eset as it has always been good but I haven't used since 2008. Is it still called NOD32? Just looked and it seems so. When I was getting my MS MVP awards up until 2010 I DID use Esset at times. When I closed my business and stopped getting NOD32 for free I quit using. Personally I always thought NOD 32 was good but I'll stick with Defender and Malware Bytes as, I think, the combo is a better choice.

I also dislike cloud storage as it's out of my control.
A few years ago the SD card in my wife's phone got corrupted and neither the phone nor anything else could read it. Not to worry, all the photos on it were backed up to her Google account, except when we looked there they had disappeared. After some weeks of too-ing and fro-ing with Google they ceased all communication. Their last theory was that once the phone stopped reading the data on the card, Google interpreted it as the data being deleted, so the backup got deleted too.
I'm not sure if this could happen these days but it was madness and a lesson to never entrust a third party with your data.

 

[jaylach]

Unexpected results...

Got an email saying that my Internet speed had gone from 400 Mb/sec to 500 Mb/sec so went to speedtest.net to check and, sure enough, it reported a download speed of 506 Mb/sec. I was a bit surprised to see that my upload speed had gone from 5 Mb/sec to 25 Mb/sec. Sure wish that had happened when I still had my web sites.

Now the odd part. Not always, but at times, I use a VPN, often Calgary, Canada. When I turned on the VPN I expected a speed drop but nothing major. My download speed dropped to 200 MB/sec and my upload speed dropped back to 5 Mb/sec. I imagine this is actually due to the server the VPN is using but will have to check other locations to test for variance.

 

[anewbie]

Unexpected results...

Got an email saying that my Internet speed had gone from 400 Mb/sec to 500 Mb/sec so went to speedtest.net to check and, sure enough, it reported a download speed of 506 Mb/sec. I was a bit surprised to see that my upload speed had gone from 5 Mb/sec to 25 Mb/sec. Sure wish that had happened when I still had my web sites.

Now the odd part. Not always, but at times, I use a VPN, often Calgary, Canada. When I turned on the VPN I expected a speed drop but nothing major. My download speed dropped to 200 MB/sec and my upload speed dropped back to 5 Mb/sec. I imagine this is actually due to the server the VPN is using but will have to check other locations to test for variance.

In truth i would have expected a more significant drop so you should consider yourself lucky. In the old days when MS tcp buffer default was 4K you would be down to a few killo-bits. And yes i spent years tweaking tcp behavior for better performance. It took MS over 10 years to tweak the default size of the tcp buffer as streaming became more popular.

While the servers might impact your performance tcp latency is also a huge issue.

 

[jaylach]

In truth i would have expected a more significant drop so you should consider yourself lucky. In the old days when MS tcp buffer default was 4K you would be down to a few killo-bits. And yes i spent years tweaking tcp behavior for better performance. It took MS over 10 years to tweak the default size of the tcp buffer as streaming became more popular.

While the servers might impact your performance tcp latency is also a huge issue.

I don't consider it any sort of problem, I was just surprised. Let's face it, 200 Mb/sec is more than enough to stream any video. On the other hand your TCP aspect makes sense as I have seen buffer stops if I forget to turn off the VPN when watching a baseball game through mlb/tv.

 

[anewbie]

Well you would think it was a problem if you only got a few kb/s

You could check your tcp buffer size and try tweaking based on latency to the vpn. You can run pings or mtr to find the distance.

 

[jaylach]

Well you would think it was a problem if you only got a few kb/s

You could check your tcp buffer size and try tweaking based on latency to the vpn. You can run pings or mtr to find the distance.

I'll look at that as long as I can find the setting. TCP just something I've ever paid attention. I'd be tempted to ask guidance but that is the lazy way out for something I can search. Even if I don't understand the search results a friend of mine has something like 14 MS MVP awards involving security and networking. I'm sure he could point me in the right direction.

 

[jaylach]

Below is the response from my friend, the networking MVP.

-----------------------------------------------------------
The aquarium forum guy might be correct, but that’s not likely to be the case with Windows 10 or 11 (and even older versions) as Windows uses dynamic scaling to manage the transmit and receive buffers for TCP/IP and it isn’t something we can configure directly. You could, theoretically, turn off the scaling (I believe that there’s a command line thing to do that and probably a registry setting), but that creates whole new headaches.

The fact of the matter is that a VPN adds significant overhead to your connection in a few ways. First, all traffic is routed from your PC to the VPN Host’s server somewhere in the world (which may be configurable by you where you can select which server location you want to connect through) before heading to the destination URL and the response travels back to you through that VPN server. Second, the amount of data being sent and received is increased. The first reason is why a VPN connection is always slower than no VPN. If the host’s VPN server is busy/overworked, your response time and therefore throughput will be impacted.

 

[seangee]

To some extent that is mitigated by aggresive caching on the VPN servers. Personally I have stopped using VPNs but do enforce DNS over HTTPS and am moderately aggressive on tracker cookies and advertising content. I suspect when you click on a link in a google search that takes you via doubleclick.net (or wherever) it as big an overhead as using a VPN, For the average home user bandwidth and throughput nowadays is not an issue

 

[anewbie]

To some extent that is mitigated by aggresive caching on the VPN servers. Personally I have stopped using VPNs but do enforce DNS over HTTPS and am moderately aggressive on tracker cookies and advertising content. I suspect when you click on a link in a google search that takes you via doubleclick.net (or wherever) it as big an overhead as using a VPN, For the average home user bandwidth and throughput nowadays is not an issue

You are not wrong about doubleclick (which is owned by google) but web pages are relatively minor amount of data and depending on browsers most elements are downloaded in parallel so doubleclick actually in most cases offer very little delay.

file download (esp large files) is where you care about bandwidth as well as secondary 4k streaming.
--
A web page even one loaded with gifs is hardly noticeable with regards to bits downloaded.

 

[MattW]

I've rarely tapped into Linux-based OS before, but after watching people test the Steam Machine in desktop mode, Steam OS has grown on me. Yes, it has its bugs and wrinkles, and missing things that only Windows has currently, but that can be ironed out and added over time. I may switch to Steam OS on my main system when the important things are added or fixed. Linus made some good points comparing Win to Steam OS, especially its ease of use. That Canadian may have won me over.

 

[jaylach]

I've rarely tapped into Linux-based OS before, but after watching people test the Steam Machine in desktop mode, Steam OS has grown on me. Yes, it has its bugs and wrinkles, and missing things that only Windows has currently, but that can be ironed out and added over time. I may switch to Steam OS on my main system when the important things are added or fixed. Linus made some good points comparing Win to Steam OS, especially its ease of use. That Canadian may have won me over.

I didn't even know there was a Steam OS.

 

[jaylach]

Was just scanning through some threads and this came back to mind. I assume that Steam OS is what is on the steam decks.

Here is another obscure OS called SilveOS. It is written in Microsoft's Silver Light Haven't much followed recently but it is a bit interesting. Except for just loading to make sure it was still around I haven't looked at this in quite a while, definitely before it used AI. It is a browser based OS.

SilveOS – Free AI-Powered Web Desktop

Free AI-powered online operating system and web desktop.

www.silveos.com

 

[MattW]

Not sure if I mentioned this previously, but I've been pondering downsizing my PC case from an ATX midtower to a mini ITX tower. The issue I'm having is whether or not an mITX tower is best for my chonky GPU . It's 344 mm in length and takes up 3 slots with a support brace. The other issue is that I would definitely need a new mobo and probably a CPU cooler + a small form-factor PSU. All together, it's a decent chunk of change, but it would give me so much more room on my desk.

This is the case I'm looking at the moment - https://www.corsair.com/us/en/p/pc-...-airflow-mini-itx-pc-case-black-cc-9011244-ww

 

[jaylach]

Not sure if I mentioned this previously, but I've been pondering downsizing my PC case from an ATX midtower to a mini ITX tower. The issue I'm having is whether or not an mITX tower is best for my chonky GPU . It's 344 mm in length and takes up 3 slots with a support brace. The other issue is that I would definitely need a new mobo and probably a CPU cooler + a small form-factor PSU. All together, it's a decent chunk of change, but it would give me so much more room on my desk.

This is the case I'm looking at the moment - https://www.corsair.com/us/en/p/pc-...-airflow-mini-itx-pc-case-black-cc-9011244-ww

Before even looking the first question is if you actually need a new build...