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Glut of tomatoes?

Homemade V8! Makes a kickass bloody mary.

Preboil celery and carrots in a little water until soft. Add the tomatoes and cook another 20 minutes with the lid off. Put in a blender or zizz with a mixer. You’re supposed to strain it through muslin then, but that makes it too thin for my taste. I just trawl trough it for chunks (celery is the usual culprit).

According to campbells.com, the proper article is tomato puree plus carrots, celery, beets, parsley, lettuce, watercress and spinach. But the as long as you have tomatoes and Tabasco, you’re good.

Sorry about yesterday. It was the database on my server. I didn’t even bother to file a ticket. I knew they were working on it and I wasn’t too fussed. I had bloody marys!

Any hardline computer geeks online?

I’m having a mystery problem with my fancy computer. It’s three years old and it’s the absolute highest spec I could afford.

While it was still fairly new, I noticed the USB ports in the front were a little flaky – sometimes cutting out briefly. I assumed that bank of ports wasn’t fully plugged into the motherboard.

Then the ones in the back got a little flaky. Then all of them got pretty flaky. Then all of them got intolerably flaky, stuttering in and out constantly.

So I broke down and bought a PCI card with four USB ports. Which worked a treat. For about a week.

What could make all my USB ports unreliable, even freshly added ones. Would that be (please no) a motherboard issue? Could it be the power supply?

Comments


Comment from ExpressoBold
Time: September 22, 2022, 6:51 pm

See if you have the latest drivers installed… I’m guessing this is WinDoze gear you have.

~

Thanks for the V8 recipe !!!!


Comment from Anonymous
Time: September 22, 2022, 7:29 pm

Yes, Windows 10. Is there a USB driver specifically?


Comment from ExpressoBold
Time: September 22, 2022, 7:50 pm

Device Manager says there are USB drivers. Whether they are the same driver as an interface for all the USB devices on your system, I do not know.

Luckily, with Device Manager, it allows you to download a new driver, if available, and then roll it back if your system becomes FUBAR because of it. I had a heck of time syncing my Acer monitor with the Nvidia card because the driver was absolute generic crap and Nvidia didn’t provide a driver to MS until long after I bought the monitor.

If you can’t find the device manager, just open an all settings window and type “device manager” into the search box.

I also did a search using the term “windows usb drivers” and all kinds of info + services popped up.


Comment from Allen
Time: September 22, 2022, 8:18 pm

I’d check the power supply connections, and the supply itself. USB’s can source a fair amount of current and if your supply, or connections, are wonky you can get the behavior you describe.


Comment from Durnedyankee
Time: September 22, 2022, 8:31 pm

Everybody is so helpful…no one took the opportunity to ask if the cereal you’re getting off the universal cereal bus was approved by the EU.

Oh, look! The door! I’ll just see my way out shall I?
No, no, don’t get up, thanks😸


Comment from Uncle Al
Time: September 23, 2022, 12:31 am

It seems to me that this is not likely to be a driver problem because of the gradual deterioration in performance of the original ports, and that your new PCI port card worked OK for a week before going flaky (and when geeks talk about serial I/O problems, “flaky” is the preferred term of art for obvious reasons).

I’ll go with power supply problems, and since both the original and new ports are flaky, I don’t think it’s a connector issue (but you never know; reseating everything is a good idea). You may need to replace the power supply, but please don’t choose one by price alone. Check the specs and then the reviews.


Comment from QuasiModo
Time: September 23, 2022, 1:36 am

+1 for power supply, I’ve had quite a few of them get flakey over the years. It seems like a scary task to change it with all those wires but it’s pretty idiot proof. Take some before pictures so you have a reference.

650w-750w for a computer bug like SWeasel, none of those wimpy 500W.

Writing this is giving me a deja view, weird 🙂


Comment from Timothy J. McCorkle
Time: September 23, 2022, 2:00 am

Um… look into the Opposite end of the connection are Your USB Cables full of fluff and debris? that would cause the slow deterioration, and the eventual flaky to the new Ports


Comment from BJM
Time: September 23, 2022, 3:56 am

I have to go with power supply too…but as Timothy J says it’s a good idea to look at both ends of the connections. I spent some time today testing for a “flaky” port and then it struck me to slither up a ladder and check the camera’s POE connection. Bazinga!


Comment from Tim Carlson
Time: September 23, 2022, 4:23 am

Things I hate – computer edition:
1) printers/debugging printer issues (I DESPISE printers)
2) networks/debugging network issues
3) USB interfaces

Here in the Philippines, a majority of my issues with USB are related to the humid environment and the local fauna. Either the pins in the connector have corroded or some critter has crawled into the works.

I would vote for power supply issues. Are most of your USB devices powered by the USB port, or do they have an external power supply? (usually a wall wart for USB hard drives, printers have their own built-in power supply or wall wart).

Buuuuuut . . . you could have a poorly behaving USB device that is gumming up the works for everything else, either by drawing too much power, or injecting noise into the power supply, or not following protocol. Do USB devices and their drivers still have to go through WHQL testing? The chinese are notorious for not giving a shite about what Microsoft requires and releasing junk into the environment.

Oh – add WHQL testing to the things I hate.

Good luck. I don’t envy you at all.


Comment from Bruce T Garrick
Time: September 23, 2022, 6:46 am

Could be a flaky USB device. Try running with one unplugged at a time and see if unplugging any of them gives relief.


Comment from Durnedyankee
Time: September 23, 2022, 8:32 am

Okay, seriously, how many gizmos do you have plugged in?

Are they ALL flaky, only some? Any seem not flaky?

It’s hard to trouble shoot multiple things simultaneously (by hard, I mean damn near impossible), if you get my drift.

I realize I may be the intellibrick with the flipbook on the other end of the phone asking (in accented English) if your computer is turned on, but have you done a, one thing, say, a port, tested against one other thing, a gizmo, with no other peripherals plugged in?

Then scale up. Maybe your drivers aren’t handling signal collisions properly because of volume, or maybe one of the devices is ruining the neighborhood for the more well behaved ones.

It seems weird that your hub “got corrupted” after a week, I would think an electrical issue would surface shortly after you plugged the hub in, ditto for a driver problem unless there’s some kind of cached memory leak that took time to “fill up” after the hub was connected.

And yeah, check the connectors, I’ve had them break, or had the wires stress at the base because they got torqued at bad angles and lost connectivity until jiggled back into connection, which certainly is described by the term flaky.

Heh, in one line Bruce had me covered…sigh 🙄


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: September 23, 2022, 1:01 pm

I only have a 500w power supply, so that’s probably a good place to start. It was an expensive one (I sourced all my components to be specially quiet this time), but sounds like it’s not powerful enough.

At the moment, just the mouse and keyboard plugged in…and the Oculus. My problems started long before I bought the headset – but my USB ports really, really hate the headset. When it’s plugged in, I’m more likely to have issues with all the ports.

Meta recommends a special, super expensive USB 3.0 cable for the headset and actually has a diagnostic to see if your cable is good enough. So I guess it’s drawing a lot and stressing the power supply…?

Thanks for your help, everyone!


Comment from durnedyankee
Time: September 23, 2022, 3:56 pm

Now, just imagine how much fun it will be like when your Electric Futility vehicle has USB ports for charging things

🙂


Comment from Drew458
Time: September 26, 2022, 2:15 pm

Tabasco? Be careful of their extra hot version. As a spicy food lover, the regular Tabasco was getting kind of lame, so I thought I’d try one of the hotter flavors. The Extra Hot is made with scorpion peppers. I had no idea what those were. I do now. This stuff is nearly lethal. Far hotter than chewing on habeneros. Scorpions are hotter than ghost peppers, somewhere around 1.2M Scoville units. Holy. Cow.

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