Firedrops

I am back. It's been a few more days and it is not good. It happened again. This time, Malwarebytes scan did not turn up anything. ADWCleaner turned up a sogou chrome extension. I can't find anything in my extensions related to sogou, so I just relied on ADWCleaner to quarantine it. So far, it has not come back yet. I'm waiting a few more days for it to pop up again, and if sogou's back, that's definitely it. Again, it's bizarre that neither my OS nor my browsers (including chrome/opera) are installed on this SSD that it's targeting. The malware is just like "F*** this drive in particular".

Thanks, I went to have a look, HWInfo reports all my drives (including my main OS NVME drive that's (probably) not the one being problematic) are between 35-45 C, which seem fine. My NVME is tucked on the mobo with some integrated heatsink, and is getting very little airflow since both GPU and CPU are WC-ed. The problematic SSD in OP is bolted onto the back of the mobo tray, also presumably getting no airflow. But with those temps they're probably both fine. However, the problem seems to have gone away (for now). Things I've done: A MalwareBytes then ADWCleaner scans, turned out some sussy stuff including a "Trojan.BitcoinStealer" and some weird registry stuff, just clicked Quarantine on those. Maybe the bitcoinstealer has been endlessly scanning this one particular drive?? A new Windows update has finished downloading and is prompting me to install at next restart. No idea if this has been background downloading and somehow saturating this random drive it's not supposed to be in, but Windows does the weirdest things so I won't rule it out completely. Past few hours drive activity has been back down to ~1-5%, with task manager reporting read/write speeds of ~500 KB/s, which seem much more in line with expectations. Will continue monitoring. Update: It's been a few days and it's all good. I'm 99% sure it was the malware. Surprising, given how much praise Windows Defender gets nowadays.

I have a local sata SSD hosting my OneDrive (with stuff like Documents, Desktop... etc also synced here) and as storage for downloads, including torrents through qBittorrent. It is a Fanxiang S101 2TB. Not a T1 manufacturer by any means, but by most reports they are reliable enough. I've had it for a year so far without other issues, and have done full block scanning to verify true capacity and read/write speeds are as advertised. Since 2 weeks ago it has started acting up. My system started stuttering frequently, including in games where I'm otherwise maintaining smooth 200 FPS before. I think I've tracked it down to this SSD. This SSD is not storing my games, nor any other software/apps, but it might be interfering with Windows itself since Desktop etc are on it. It frequently jumps to 100% disk usage, every few milliseconds. Sometimes it ramps back down straight away, other times it stays up for minutes. Even at 100% usage, the read/write speed in task manager are in the 2-digit KB/s range. It also seems to be throttling my qBittorrent downloads - popular linux ISOs with hundreds of seeders are now stuck in 5-50 KiB/s, where I used to easily do 50 MiB/s. I've done a full chkdsk f x r, took 4 hours, absolutely no bad sectors were discovered. It is at about 1 TB usage (out of 2 TB capacity). Would anyone have any ideas on how to further troubleshoot? Could the problem be originating elsewhere that's cascading into this SSD activity? Does this behaviour seem like malware?

Not much help unfortunately, but me too. Game also likes to freeze for seconds when zooming into scopes. I suspect it's a CPU bottleneck + some insane spaghetti code.

Got it figured out, with help from this page. The RAM_ID are just locations for 10k 0201 5% resistors. No additional resistors need to be purchased because they're all there, just need to switch positions to toggle the high/low states.

That's not the point. I have sufficient tools and experience replacing SMD/BGA components on PCBs. Plenty of people have done this with Apple PCBs with good success, but unfortunately that doesn't help with mainboard-specific questions that I have.

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I want to attempt upgrading the soldered RAM on my HP 13-ay0095AU from 8GB to 16GB. While I have a lot of experience soldering, this is my first time attempting something like this. I found the schematics and .cad file (attached). However, I haven't got a clue on how to properly read them. As far as I can tell, they should be the correct and the same board. RAM-related info seems to be mainly on page 12 of the PDF. I've also attached a photo of the physical board, found online. I have a few questions: 1. The board seems to physically have 8 spots for RAM chips. However, Googling the part numbers for the 8 GB setups (e.g. H5AN8G6NCJR-XNC) suggests that those are 16x 512 MB chips? Am I reading this wrongly? 2. If I find an online vendor with the part "K4AAG165WA-BCWE", do I just order 1 unit? Or 8 units, 1 for each spot? 3. How do the "RAM_ID1...4" work? Are they just bridged pads or resistors or something else? Any help/tips/advice would be greatly appreciated! HP ENVY x360 13-ay00xx series Compal GPR31 LA-J481P Rev 1.0 BoardView.cad Compal GPR31 LA-J481P Rev 1.0 Схема.pdf

The spec for IO Shield is 44.7mm, including a 2.3mm standoff on the mainboard, but the 'few mm' to allow for decorative shrouds is what I'm worried about

I'm trying to design a table with an integrated 'case', but can't find this info. For ATX boards including protruding components, such as IO shield, VRM heatsink, and decorative shrouds thereof, is there generally a specification/limit to how "tall" they can get?

I see, thanks. In that case I will just stick to the stock 256GB SSD and just allocate more to virtual memory. I don't need it to be fast, I just need it to not crash whenever I open any 2 programs (including the browser) at once. Unfortunately this laptop is barely even a year old, and it seems all 13-14" thin-n-lights no longer have swappable ram.

I have a laptop with a tiny 8GB soldered ram with no upgrade slots... looking for the next best thing. Looking for a 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD in Australia (limited selection), the CPU (AMD 4500u) only supports up to PCIE Gen 3. But I'm not sure what specific benchmark/metric to look out for. Instinctively I would say random read/write, but Tom's Hardware benches with a lot of other suites as well. Would anyone like to chime in?

Apologies for the delay. I have tried the boot-repair on a live USB. First I tried the "normal" option (not the "failsafe"), which leads to this: And zoomed in for better text clarity: And it was stuck like that, seemingly unresponsive to any input. So I shut down the system by long-holding the power button, then tried the "failsafe" option. It seems to have been populating various devices for a while, and finally settled on this screen: and it appears to be stuck re-trying this? So at this point I gave up and powered the system down again, and back into Windows to post this. Was anything in these photos able to help with troubleshooting?

Done Do you mean this?

As title says, after updating from 20.10 > 21.04, something happened to my GRUB and windows was complaining about mis-configured boot environment or something like that, I can't remember clearly anymore. But GRUB menu still appeared, and I could still boot into my Ubuntu OS (although it's duplicated for some reason). So the first thing that came to mind was to boot back into Ubuntu 21.04, and google for how to repair GRUB. Every single solution pointed towards this rather old looking program "boot-repair", typical instructions goes sudo apt-add-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair boot-repair So I got it and went through with the instructions, got some "success" outcome, but this turned out to kill GRUB completely. It now goes into a full black screen about something like "Minimal bash-like editing..." with a terminal interface. So I've got a live boot disk (21.10), and online guides suggest 2 things: 1. Re-attempt "boot-repair" through the Live USB. A bit skeptical of this, but I cannot do it anyway. The first line outputs this: E: The repository 'http://ppa.launchpad.net/yannubuntu/boot-repair/ubuntu impish Release' does not have a Release file. N: Updating from such a repository can't be done securely, and is therefore disabled by default. N: See apt-secure(8) manpage for repository creation and user configuration details. I googled around but couldn't find any up-to-date and relevant solutions. 2. Something about mounting various partitions and re-installing Grub (possible source from StackOverflow). I saw a few variants of this, but most were lost since re-starting the Live USB also wipes internet history. I made sure that the disks and partitions were correct, and eventually this is the output root@ubuntu:/# grub-install /dev/nvme0n1 Installing for x86_64-efi platform. Installation finished. No error reported. root@ubuntu:/# update-grub Sourcing file `/etc/default/grub' Sourcing file `/etc/default/grub.d/init-select.cfg' Generating grub configuration file ... Script `/boot/grub/grub.cfg.new' contains no commands and will do nothing Syntax errors are detected in generated GRUB config file. Ensure that there are no errors in /etc/default/grub and /etc/grub.d/* files or please file a bug report with /boot/grub/grub.cfg.new file attached. So it says there are no issues, I also checked for this `/boot/grub/grub.cfg`, but it does not exist. There is only `gfxblacklis.txt` and `unicode.pf2`. This does NOT fix GRUB either, it is still shows the minimal bash-like interface. Anyone have any idea how to help? Are there any more modern attempts at a `boot-repair` program? Is my Ubuntu+GRUB borked entirely and need a full re-format?