DrMacintosh

16 minutes ago, JimmyConrad said:

But don't feel like learning excel and productivity shortcuts again. 

Is there really anything to relearn though? Excel runs on the Mac. It should simply replace "alt" with "command" ? 

Thunderbolt is well, Thunderbolt. This baby can fit like, idk, 4 PCIe lanes in it. What can USB do? Some data and some power....maybe.

Not a fair comparison, but interesting none the less.

Yep, they are fine. We use 2 Seagate Ironwolf drives in our little 4 bay Synology backup NAS. All it really does is make daily backups of OneDrive/SharePoint and cold store data. 

3 minutes ago, Senzelian said:

Someone is illegally importing devices and manufacturers want to stop that. What's the problem now? I don't get it.

The problem is that people paid real money for these phones. Illegally imported or not, the consumer likely had no part in that and simply purchased a phone from a store/private seller. These people have no phone and are now being graciously given a 30% off coupon to buy a new one. 

The problem with building a backup to have in case your house burns down is where do you store it? It would have to be off site. If you have a business you can store it there, or maybe at a friends house. Synology NAS devices can backup other Synology NAS devices. So if you had two, there would be your backup strat. I would also consider pricing out Backblaze. They have a tier for NAS storage for just this purpose.

3 hours ago, s_k said:

That too is talking about macs that don't boot.

The articles do mention booting to a blank screen. You do get into the machine, but then your image goes away, so that technically applies. 
 

If you make a Time Machine backup, there’s no harm in doing a complete restore of the machine. This isn’t likely an issue that can be solved by typing a command in terminal or flipping the right setting. 
 

Look at it this way. If the firmware restore doesn’t help, then it’s a hardware issue. Time Machine makes losing user data and apps almost impossible, so it’s an easy diagnostic step to restore the firmware. 

So since this is an Apple Silicon Mac, the traditional "PRAM" does not exist, and so those key combos do nothing to an Apple Silicon Mac. 

Since you mentioned that without an external display, you just get an Apple logo followed by nothing, try following this guide for what to do when a Mac boots to a blank screen:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210905

Since you may not be able to get into recovery mode after following that guide, this guide on how to restore firmware on an Apple Silicon Mac may also be needed:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213662

Rather than doing all of this....quite frankly, user nightmare scenario. You could just get a cheap Android device, talking around $300, and simply put parental restrictions on it? 

What is the point in loading a custom rom these days? You can already disable the ability to install new apps as a core feature of Android. 

2 minutes ago, aisle9 said:

I'd connect the IdeaPad to an external display,

Typically yeah, that is the temporary solution. But we use these machines in the field. 
 

I’m leaning pretty hard towards just starting fresh. 

3 minutes ago, johnt said:

If Bitlocker is enabled and you guys don't have access to the code, forget it lol

IdeaPads don’t have BitLocker for starters. IdeaPads typically don’t ship with Pro editions of Windows. Even if it had BitLocker, losing the display doesn’t stop the HDMI port for working. 
 

I’m simply fighting a limitation of Windows that prevents you from doing data migration between computers while retaining apps and data. 

2 minutes ago, johnt said:

If the screen is an issue, why not connect it to a monitor (HDMI, DP, or usb c docking station)  if you need immediate access to it?

We don’t need immediate access. We can simply no longer use that computer for surveys. Outside of HCL Notes, everything else we do is via OneDrive/SharePoint and all our other programs are a simple download, register, and go. This specific program, is an in the field survey program which we can’t even download without sending an email. It takes hours to configure and setup and you have to coordinate with the tech to actually do that. 

5 minutes ago, aisle9 said:

Is this their work machine?

Yes

Hello all,

So one of my coworkers dropped their Lenovo IdeaPad and the hinge broke. The machine still works, just does not have a screen. It's an Intel IdeaPad 3 with the Core i3 processor. It has a 2.5" SSD in it right now loaded with a specific program called HCL Notes. Setting up her new computer from scratch would require installing this program again, which has to be done by a 3rd party tech. To avoid this downtime I was thinking about cloning the old machines drive to the new machine, but I foresee some issues with that plan.

The replacement computer is an AMD ThinkPad E16 Gen1. It has an M.2 SSD. I have not even booted this machine up yet. I've imaged the ThinkPads drive to have a fallback in case something goes wrong.

As far as potential problems go, I can think of a few:

• Versions/Editions of Windows (IdeaPad is on Windows 10 Home, ThinkPad is on Windows 11 Home)
• Devices (New machine is Ryzen based with an entirely different supporting architecture)
• Windows Activation issues?

So yeah, I'm just not very confident that cloning the old drive onto the new machine will result in something that works. What do you guys think? Should I just set the machine up from scratch and have the tech configure the program? Or should I try to see if cloning the drive works out?

The iPad really is the first and last choice in tablets. Alternatives from Samsung exist, but are not most consumers first choice. 

In the lineup of iPads, the 10th Gen iPad is a good device, however needing to use the 1st gen Apple Pencil is a huge drawback, but it's serviceable if you don't mind carrying around the pencil separately. The magic keyboard folio for the 10th gen iPad is rather nice to make up for that though. 

Anyway, I would look into an iPad Air if possible. Apple, in the US at least, is having its back to school sale right now:

https://www.apple.com/us-edu/shop/buy-ipad/ipad-air

Alternatively, a refurbished model would be an excellent option. Get one of those, the 2nd Gen Apple Pencil, and a case and you'll be all set. Logitech has a much cheaper keyboard case for iPads if you want one of those. 

For something that isn't from Apple, the Galaxy Tab S6 Lite gives you a lot of value: 

https://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/tablets/buy/?modelCode=SM-P613NZAEXAR

6 hours ago, Zando_ said:

You can even retrofit your Mac Pro if you have decent skills with a Dremel, IIRC @DrMacintosh has used a kit for one such conversion

I did, using a kit from The Laser Hive: https://thelaserhive.com/product/atx-low-120-kit/

It's a neat project, but honestly not worth it. A legit case is sooooo much more convenient to work with. I can only fit 2 3.5" drives in the case. Thankfully my board has NVMe slots so I used that plus a neat adapter that breaks a single 3.5" drive slot into 2 2.5" drive bays.

Also, unless I rip the top shelf out, I can only has blower style GPUs otherwise the card would overheat:

The last photo is the current config, the G5 shroud plate and front fans are still installed.

The best way to visualize macOS is by having a Mac. The latest versions of macOS have built in capabilities to visualize another instance of macOS. 

2 hours ago, TobiasDax said:

We will most likely generate 30-40TB of footage in the next year

Seriously, start looking into an LTO archive solution. Generating this much data, at this rate, is unsustainable. With this much data, you're going beyond what an off the shelf NAS can do for you and should start looking at something like a storinator from 45 drives. Even with 10 bays full of 12TB drives, not even factoring in RAID storage loss, that is only 120TB. That only gets you 3 years before you have to do this whole song and dance again. Not a wise use of money imo.

2 hours ago, TobiasDax said:

Synology is moving to forcing their own HDDs

They are absolutely not doing that. They are releasing new drives, and their more enterprise products are certified to work with them, but any WD or SGT NAS drive will work without issue. 

11 minutes ago, Stahlmann said:

the problem is not that the vehicle spec sheet is wrong, but that the estimated range in the tachometer is wrong and people get stranded.

If a Tesla never updates its remaining range, that's a problem. The car should realize that as it ages it will loose range (which I believe they already do) and the car should also realize that based on speed and the use of cabin features, it will loose range. Since I'm 90% sure a Tesla will do both of these things, I'm cautious to blame the car. Maybe their range calculations can be updated to check the voltages more often.

On the other hand, It is well known that people are stupid and will ignore their gas gauges in regular cars and get stranded on the highway. I don't see any reason why those same people would not also own Teslas and are simply ignoring what their vehicle is telling them. 

As I'm getting older, I'm realizing more and more that users are the vast majority of the problem. 

I have to wonder, is Tesla actually lying about the range of the EVs or are they doing what literally everyone else does when it comes to phone/laptop battery life? Sure it can last 18 hours watching videos. But once you fire up Final Cut Pro the battery is going to drain pretty quickly. Car range is determined by speed, temperature, and if cabin features like AC/Heat are on. Gas cars have this same problem, though on a less dramatic scale. 

Budget?

32 minutes ago, Spotty said:

Apple normally advertises privacy and security as a major feature so it's odd that they wouldn't sign up to the scheme.

That may be precisely why they aren't. HomeKit is already marketed as the secure smart home platform from a big tech company. HomeKit Routers can already be configured to block absolutely all outgoing or incoming traffic for HomeKit devices, so there really isn't anything to left to secure or protect users from at that point. 

A lot of smart home vendors aren't signing up with this. For one, I don't see Home Assistant anywhere. Lots of security oriented people actually use Home Assistant with a HomeKit backbone. 

Hello all, I'm setting up a DS923+ to store my jobs cold files. Mostly pictures, finished reports, excel docs, old invoices, etc. We can remotely access this data via Synology Drive/QuickConnect fairly well.

I also completely forgot that Active Backup for M365 exists which really takes this NAS to the next level for us. I'm waiting to start the first backup job until I've moved our cold storage files onto the NAS. We are trying to operate with less than 1TB in SharePoint to get our bill down since additional SharePoint Storage is like $0.20 per GB per month which is insane.

As a first time Synology and NAS user and the only extremely non-professional IT person at the company (we only have 8 people) I'm looking for any advice or common mistakes to avoid for this use case.

Also, I'm moving our data and configuring Active Backup for M365 at home since I have faster internet than our office and I currently don't have a car, so I'm wondering what kind of issues there may be from moving the NAS to a new network once I do get it in office, thanks!

Can I introduce you you to Apple Music? The Android app is great.

1 hour ago, NinJake said:

however they sent me a refurb drive in exchange.

Ok, but how many power on hours did the drive have?

What exactly would L1 and L2 techs be doing over the phone for Seagate? Is the drive plugged in? Is it making some clicking sound? Seems like a large expense for nothing beneficial for the user.