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I have a Epson WF-3640 printer at a remote location for printing documents for a vision impaired user. It's getting difficult for the user to turn-on the printer and communicate any errors on the touch screen. Do anyone have an idea about remotely controlling the printer and seeing what's on the touch screen? Frank

I need to replace a NUC with a tiny box that has ATX connections for power, reset, etc on the motherboard for PiKVM control. Can anyone recommend a tiny system that would work. Intel or AMD is fine. I don't need any optical drives and putting the system together is fine too. Thunderbolt/USB4 is preferred and HDMI is a must. Frank

Please forgive me if this is not the right place for this. My parents live 500 miles away and I want to configure a way to capture and mirror the video stream from their cable box to the TV so I can help them watch baseball games. I already have them setup with a NUC for non-broadcast watching but I really me to be able to see what is on the TV screen when trying to talk them through cable box menus. It would be great to have one HDMI cable from a device with an input from the cable box and an embedded PC for YouTube, Netflix etc that I can remote (VNC, etc) in to. Does such a device exist off the shelf? Ideas on the parts needed to build such a box? Frank

I have a remote NUC running Win10 Pro with a single user account. I created a PIN when the OS was installed. Now I want to do RDP over a VPN but I appear to need a password to connect remotely. How do I do that? Can I create a password for the local account? Or does it have to be my Microsoft account password? The documentation is somewhat unclear and the default user that comes-up in the password dialog seems to be a Microsoft account. Frank

I'm having trouble with a Win10 box that does 400Mb/sec after rebooting but drops to 10Mb/sec after a few minutes. The box is current on updates and uses wired Ethernet. At the same time that the download speed is dropping, it remains full speed on my Linux box on the same network segment. A reboot returns the download speed to normal, but after letting the box sit for 30 minutes with no activity the download speed drops again. I've debloated the Win10 box but no change. Does anyone know where to start looking? Frank

I need to add some USB3+ ports to a Fedora server. Can anyone recommend a PCI-E board with 2-4 external ports, a 19 pin internal connection and the NEC chipset? Thanks. Frank

I've just built a new box to replace my aging pfsense firewall and would like to test it be putting it in service. What are people using for testing firewalls from the outside? Google turns-up some links but most are broken or just test a few common ports. I don't mind having to pay a bit to subscribe if there's a good scanning/penetration test site. Frank

I've got a Linux server based on a Supermicro X9DBL-3F motherboard. This board has only USB2 ports, no USB3. My KVM switch uses a USB3 connection for keyboard, mouse and USB storage. If I plug a USB3 card into the motherboard and connect the KVM switch to it, everything works fine once the system boots and the OS provides support. But since the motherboard doesn't natively support USB3 I can't enter the BIOS or select a kernel when booting. I have to move the KVM connection back to a motherboard USB2 port. Of course, Supermicro isn't going to add USB3 support to an old board's BIOS just for me. But has anyone ever looked into what's involved in hacking the BIOS? Frank

My Win 10 pro box has an Asus P7P55D-E Pro motherboard, an Intel Core i7-870, 16 GB of RAM and an EVGA GTX1060. It's running Win10 Ver 1803 (OS Build 17134.228). My monitor is an Apple 23-inch Cinema Display. Since it's an Apple display, it expects only 1920x1200 at 60Hz. At any other resolution, the screen is blank and the LED on the bezel just flashes 3 times to tell you it's an unsupported resolution. Yesterday while adjusting BIOS settings, the GTX1060 video resolution setting got scrambled. The box would POST and boot but I kept getting a black screen after the system showed the blue Windows icon on a black background just before the log-in screen. The monitor screen was black and the LED was flashing 3 times to indicate that the video card was not at the supported resolution. No problem, I thought. I'll just hold the power button the shutdown the box and boot it up again. But the screen was still black. I did this several times; shutting-down the box and powering it back up and each time the screen was black. Finally, I decided to press the reset button. The box rebooted, without powering-off, and the video came back just fine. So I want to ask, what does a Reset button press do that powering the box off doesn't? Frank

I'm looking for recommendations for a rugged printer for my parents who live 500 miles away from me. The printer needs to be an all-in-one with printing, copying and scanning. It needs to be a color inkjet. It also needs to be able to print photos. As I can't easily go there to fix things, it needs to as rugged as possible. They have an Epson WF3640 now but it's got issues with not recognizing ink cartridges once in a while. I have a Brother MFC-4710DW which is a really nice printer, but can be hell when the tiniest bit of paper causes paper path issues. Can anyone recommend a printer that they would buy for their own parents? Frank

Sorry if this isn't the right area to ask this. I've got 4 systems that share a keyboard, mouse and DVI monitor with a KVM switch. I'd like to add a monitor that supports resolutions higher than 1920x1080 but the KVM switch seems to be the limiting factor. Has anyone had success at higher resolutions without forking-out lots of cash for a new KVM? UXGA or QXGA? Frank

I have a Clevo P150HM laptop with a Nvidia GTX-485M video card running Windows 10. I've got a HP LP2475w monitor attached to the laptop. A few months the video card started spiking in temperature, up to 75C, and displaying random patterns on the screens when both the laptop screen and external monitor are used at the same time. This occurs with both the DVI-I and HDMI outputs. The temperature spikes stop as soon as the external monitor is disabled or the laptop lid is closed even if the DVI-I or HDMI cable is still attached. With just the laptop screen or external monitor running, the video card idles at 38C and rises to a few degrees during Excel or Word use. With both the laptop screen and external monitor being used (either both displaying the same desktop or as an extended desktop) the temperature starts climbing right away and the screen image beings to break-up. The laptop does not crash but quickly the screen becomes too garbled to see what's happening. I've tried several versions of the Nvidia GeForce driver but the problem remains. It doesn't appear to be a temperature issue as I can stress the video card up to 90C for over an hour with just one monitor working with no problem. The video card heat sink seems to be working as the temperature rapidly drops back to 38C when I stop the video benchmark programs. Anybody got an answer to this? Frank

This isn't a driver problem. The motherboard won't even POST with the Vantec USB card installed. Unless the POST finishes the OS can't boot. I'm not sure how to diagnose this problem without diving through the Bios settings one-by-one. Frank

I have a Supermicro X9DBL-3F motherboard for a home server running Centos 6. The motherboard, which has no USB3.0 ports, is installed in a Supermicro CSE-732D case which has a pair of USB 3.0 ports and the blue connector for the 20 pin header. I put an Orico PVU3-502I USB 3.0 card in the system. It boots fine, but Centos 6 doesn't have driver support for the card. I tried putting a Vantec UGT-PC345, which is on the Centos supported chipset list, in the system, but the motherboard refuses to boot. It just freezes during the POST ad nothing more. I tried pulling all the other cards short of the video and moving the USB card to other slots, but the system just keeps freezing during POST. I've disabled UEFI in the BIOS for the Centos install. Does anyone have any ideas? Any experience with Supermicro server boards and USB 3.0 cards? I'm willing to change the OS to Centos 7 or Fedora 24/25 if either of the USB 3.0 cards wouldl be supported. Thanks. Frank