A tale of two drives

So just happened to spot, when running HWiNFO64 to check motherboard version, that my 250GB Crucial MX500 is down to 8% life remaining! What? Couple of months of go when I was checking that value it had 28% life remaining, so all good and plenty of time to plan my next upgrade. Now I’m in panic mode and ordering a new 500GB Crucial MX500 for £43, which is a good price as the 250GB cost me £63 just over four years ago.

SMART Status from HWiNFO64 v7.26

So what happened? Seems that the Crucial drives have a potential with many small packet writes, this may just be on the model made all those years ago and not on the current models, Crucial have always had a good reputation from reviews. So in the SMART details we can see it has written a lot of data, compared to the other MX500. The failing drive is my boot disk so has the pagefile, core programs (Anit-virus, VirtualBox, Browsers) and applications (Office, VLC, Notepad++) on it.while the other SSD, only a couple of months newer and running the same firmware version, has all the games, documents, photographs and BOINC application.

So the failure drive presumably has all the small packet writes (temporary files, browser cache & cookies, pagefile) while the still okay SSD has the larger writes (photographs, documents).

So just about to install the new 500GB Crucial MX500 replacement drive, and we’ll see how that goes over the coming month. After that the PC will probably be passed on as I should have my new one built and moved into the world of NVMe drives.

10-Sep-22:
Quick update to this. The machine, Treacle, has now been retired and relegated to a hardware test role, admittedly old hardware. The new Crucial MX500 drive is at 100% life remaining while the old 1TB MX500 has only 64% life remaining, so still pretty good.

So is it aceptable to sell an SSD that has only 8% life remaining? It will need a secure erase, which presumably will reduce that further, cue another addition to this post.

18-Nov-22:
The secure erase, three passes using “British HMG IS5” via Eraser an overnight job, didn’t reduce the disk life any. So I put the drive on eBay with full disclosure of the remaining drive life, including screen grabs from HWInfo SMART data, and a starting price of £3 + £3 p&p. One week later it sold for £26 inc p&p, when you can buy a brand new one for £38.08 inc p&p! The buyer, one of two bidding, was happy with the drive and condition. So why pay, what I consider, over the odds? Did they expect to be able to retrieve data from the drive? I have had a close friend, computer illiterate it now seems, sell a computer after physically destroying the drive only to be contacted by the buyer to say they have his personal data now (The buyer did send the drive back).

So is there a market in second hand drives purely for what data you can retrieve from them? I know it’s possible to get data from incorrectly erased drives, I’ve had to recover said data for friends in the past, so is that data of use to someone? You’d need some serious time and software to be able to make use of any account/password data on the drive.

Running a command as Admin

Or how to run a command with elevated privileges on Windows.

Tried to run a chkdsk this morning via a Windows account that wasn’t in the Administrators group and found out that I couldn’t do so. This was when I chanced, by searching t’internet, upon the Control (Ctrl), Shift and Enter magic key combination, never heard of this! Using these keys, instead of just Enter, runs the selected command with Admin privileges, fab!

Exact filename searching on Windows 10

Trying to find a file by filename and file type and getting matches that include the filename and type as well? Windows 10 search seems to have taken a step backwards by being “helpful” in searching file contents and filenames, or types, when you use the search box.

Then you need to use the “name” keyword in the quick search box. The name option has two ways of being used:

“name: web.config” This does what you don’t want! i.e. it returns files that contain the words “web” and “config”, but it doesn’t return files that have file contents including those words.

“name:= web.config” This command will return only matches for “web.config” nothing else.

Colourful emoticons on Windows 10

Using Office 365 on Windows 10 you can bring up the emoticons window by pressing the Windows key + “.” or Windows + “;”.

Actually in typing the above I’ve just found out the same thing works in Firefox on Windows 10, so there’s a good chance it will work for any app on Windows 10. ☺

Windows 10 restarts after shutdown

Currently have an issue where most of the time shutting down the PC just performs a restart, annoying to say the least, been going on since late 2018.
I’m currently trying out this solution to see if it can be resolved.

6-Dec-19: A couple of test shutdowns later and it seems to be working, one to monitor.

Jump lists in Windows 10 not working?

Try this solution, posted as a fix for Windows 7 but worked for me under Windows 10.

 

Windows PC not auto-booting?

Since I installed the “Windows 10 Fall Creators Update”, build 16299, the desktop has stopped auto-starting, to it’s BIOS configured schedule. It’s scheduled for a 5:01am start, but every morning I’ve come into the room, since the update, it’s sitting there switched off.

A couple of Google’s later and here’s the answer, well I hope it is as I haven’t verified it yet, something for tomorrow morning. So the suggestion is to disable Windows “fast startup” mode, details on doing that can be found over at TechAdvisor.co.uk, and a more detailed explaination of why is at HowToGeek.com.

29th October 2017: Seems to have resolved the issue.

Automatic Logon Into Windows 7/10/11

Press Windows key and R, a command box should appear.
Into this box, the “Open:” field, type control userpasswords2 and hit the enter key.
This should display the “User Accounts” screen, in Windows 7. From here select the user name, in the main table, and uncheck the “Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer.”
A click on the Apply button will open the “Automatically Log On” window. Enter the password, and confirm it, to add the password to the system so that it does not need to be entered during startup.

17-Aug-22: A Windows 10 update has removed this functionality, so on new installs you will not see the checkbox anymore. To re-enable it you need to fire up regedit and then navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\PasswordLess\Device

Then change the value of DevicePasswordLessBuildVersion to 0.

Restarting the command will now show the missing checkbox.