Wall of text incoming. PC problems, what else?

One thing in the PC world that I seem to have issues every now and then are the fecking USB ports! I don't know what it is. In theory they are great, a de-facto standardized way to connect about anything to a computer, from mice and gamepads to USB modems and hard disks. You can be always sure pretty much any PC has them, and even many tablets etc.

Earlier, I had serious issues with them both on my old laptop (now scrapped) and the old desktop. Specifically with USB hard disks, those systems might just suddenly decide that the hard disk was not connected anymore, even during a big file transfer. More than once, the whole fecking NTFS file system of the external hard disk became corrupted due to that, making the whole hard disk unreadable.

Back then I tried to google about the issue, and some others seemed to have the same problem (there was a certain error message which I forget now), but it was never fully clarified what was the root cause. Some analysis pointed to some Win2000/XP USB drivers, and others to certain commonly used USB hardware parts which were simply faulty by design.


Back to this day. For quite long, I haven't had that much issues with USB ports anymore, e.g. on my T400 laptop. But, due to a hardware design fault, the USB ports on this Lenovo T400 seem to be very fragile, hence one (out of three) USB ports got broken from normal use quite fast. The plastic part inside the USB port just cracked and fell out. Googling for it, this seems to be some quality issue on T400 laptops, many T400 users have had the same problem.

Ok, so two USB ports isn't quite enough for me (and I am not supposed to use the broken USB port anymore, as the pins might now get bent, and cause a short circuit, making the whole laptop fail to boot... or so says the google), so I bought an USB ExpressCard providing two additional USB 3.0 ports:

http://www.verkkokauppa.com/fi/product/4703/cnjcg/Buffalo-IFC-EC2U3UC-2-porttinen-USB3-0-ExpressCard-kortti

It seems to work quite ok... except when it doesn't. The old times are back. If I have a mouse connected to the ExpressCard USB ports, after a couple hours of use (or sooner) it just might become unresponsive, as if the mouse is not connected anymore. It doesn't seem to revive unless I restart the whole computer, and at least twice has happened that if I try to remove the ExpressCard with "Safely remove...", the whole machine hangs.

And once it indeed happened that while one of my USB hard disks was connected to those USB ports, it lost the connection suddenly. That caused a forced chkdsk by Windows on next reboot, but apparently the hard disk filesystem was still ok.

I don't know, but the whole USB thingie seems somewhat flaky and unreliable to me for any serious use. Maybe some asswad wrote the USB specs, and now I have to put up with it? Maybe I should use it only for connecting non-critical stuff like mice and gamepads, and more important stuff like external hard disks would connect only through eSATA or whatever. But there doesn't seem to be any universal option for USB.

Are your external drives powered by their own power supply? Usually during the summer months I have a similar problem with my external drives. They tend to get "lost" if someone power cycles one of these desktop fans. Somehow this seems to cause a spike in my local power grid. The problem got really annoying when I had my old fridge sitting on the same grid as my computer equipment. My permanent solution was to buy a new fridge.

At least on linux systems it is sufficient to unmount the affected partition and power cycle the external drive.

This is not a work place. This is just a mess. You can't work this way, it's driving me crazy. Too bad I have to stick with it.

You can downvote me , i don't care .

Finally . I was banned from the Steam forums for the third time .

I insullted a whole country with this post of mine :

USA

Home of the dumb people .

Sorry but i have to write this since your country's education ( especially geography and world history sucks ) .

I also wrote : Maybe they will realise that their dcountry isn't the center of the world .

I'd like to apologise from the US members of the GOG forum .

ffs my girlfriend just dumbed me...again
Not very lucky with the girls unfortunately

Why is there no easy way to find out if a cute girl has a bf (or for that matter these days possibly a gf..scary lol) or not? Grrrrrrrr

Dumb people are everywhere. Earth is home of the dumb people. Not the USA.
There is. You walk up to her and ask her if she has a boyfriend(or you can ask one of her friends).

Easy for some. Not so easy for a lot of us hahahaha.

You could try finding her profile on a social networking site. If she has one, I'm sure if she has a boyfriend or not will be revealed on her profile.

So i am pretty much screwed thanks to my landlord.

"Would your boyfriend be upset if I asked you out?" Maybe you'll get a laugh out of it, which is almost always a good start.

I'll be back in the next couple days with a pair of customer service gripes...

OR you could say(if you don't want her to know you think she is cute)something like "I'm doing a survey to see how many people are single and how many people have a boyfriend or girlfriend in this school" or wherever you noticed this cute girl. Then ask her "Are you single or do you have a boyfriend or girlfriend?", when she answers, write it down on a piece of paper, and walk away. Ask a few other people in front of her too so it doesn't look fake. It is not an honest thing to do, and if she finds out it was fake, you may look creepy and dishonest to her. You can also walk up to her and say "Hey, what are you doing this weekend, anything exciting?" Then she will respond with I'm doing this blah blah, then respond with "Oh, with your boyfriend, right?", then she will correct you or just say she has a boyfriend if she doesn't like you.

Yeah, most landlords do enjoy screwing. Sorry to hear that.

Well i am pretty sure my landlord enjoys it more than everyone else.

What exactly happened? Maybe you can fight what he is doing to you?

Just ask her to go out.