Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2012 June 21

Welcome to the Wikipedia Computing Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

June 21

Computer drivers

Have Windows 7 and receiving balloons about updating my drivers. Did limited search and believe that with Norton appearing I am being directed to sign up for new costs to have them updated.Is this the case? Do drivers need updating, if so can I access any other way to do it? Beginning to learn that it is best to ask before signing up for anything! Hamish 84Hamish84 (talk) 03:56, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

PS. My thanks to those who provided previous help. Have not as yet worked out how to thank them direct!!

Drivers do indeed sometimes require updates, it's not absolutely necessary to get them, your computer will work just fine with the same drivers it has always worked with. Updates can have bug fixes, resolve specific problems, optimizations that make them run better, etc that are generally better to have then not to have. Having said that, I have never seen driver updates that require any "signing up" or payment. What you have sounds more like either a software update or a malware program that is trying to convince you that you need its services. This has become VERY popular recently, programs pop up telling you that you have viruses (which you either don't at all or the program it self has placed them there) then it tells you that you need their software to resolve the "issue". the best thing to do in that case is google the exact name of the program or "window" that you see and you should be able to find how to remove it, sometimes unfortunately it isn't trivial. If it is norton asking you to update it (frequently after a free trial period) just uninstall it and get a free antivirus program, or just use Microsoft Security Essentials which is free if you have windows 7. Vespine (talk) 05:21, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

You don't need to subscribe to anything, especially anything that requires you to pay, for driver updates. Sometimes registration with the manufacturer of the computer and/or the item will let them update you, or you can often just wait until you see some problems. I discovered that updating a working driver is not always wise, when it cost me a new video board. (I won't name the manufacturer for purposes of liability reduction for Wikipedia). To make a long long story short, a couple of hours after the automatic updating of my video driver, the board died; an exact replacement was no longer made but the currently available bottom of the line board from the same video folks was something of an upgrade for my aging machine (which couldn't handle anything better than bottom of the line because of power supply limitations) but that had problems, until somebody on some online forum suggested I roll it back to the last working driver (which did work) and explained that.... since each driver handles a lot of different boards, the updates often involve making the newer boards work, and the older boards tend to get left behind for obvious reasons, so it might not be good policy to auto-update drivers always, and certainly in a case such as that I describe, rolling back to an older driver and turning off auto-update is a good thing to try. I do keep auto-update on for my other drivers, but I don't think they update as often as video drivers see to do. Gzuckier (talk) 03:44, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

List of female 3d figures?

Where is a list of female 3d figures for software like Daz? I was able to find a list of 3d software (Thank you Wikipedia) but I can't find a list of base female models I can buy besides the ones made by Daz. Edit: I just need a list of base females made by a company, not models I can buy from indie vendors at various indie vendor websites. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.176.250.165 (talk) 08:01, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

You might try Poser World, a forum that has a section devoted to Daz and Poser resources. Looie496 (talk) 18:23, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Erasing old hard drives before disposal...

How many times does the data realistically need to be overwritten to render anything on the drive unrecoverable? I hear/read that the Gutmann method, with 35 passes is considered complete overkill... Note: I very much doubt that any agency with unlimited resources and unlimited time in which to spend on forensic examination will have an interest in my drives. I'm just talking about sensible precautions here... Thanks. --Kurt Shaped Box (talk) 20:34, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Data remanence cites very reliable sources that say "once". There's no evidence of anyone ever recovering data that was simply zeroed once. Truly national security users are sufficiently paranoid that they have cause to worry about unknown attacks (by their counterparts), and so might require degaussing and/or mechanical shredding. But you, who surely do not have the plans for hydrogen bombs on your disks, don't. None of this holds for solid state (flash) drives, which require different methods, as that article notes. 87.115.114.119 (talk) 20:45, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. As a matter of interest, what is the correct/best method for permanently overwriting the data on USB flash drives? I suppose that you could just smash the thing or throw it in fire, but in terms of being able to use the thing again afterwards... --Kurt Shaped Box (talk) 22:06, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

The paper by Wei et al, cited in the data remanence article, talks about various methods. Ideally they'd all implement the ATA ERASE-UNIT commands, but that paper says many don't. Without that it doesn't seem that there's a sufficiently reliable software-only way. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 22:28, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Sweet. That pretty much covers it, I think... :) --Kurt Shaped Box (talk) 23:15, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Very old hard drives, removable disc-packs and "floppy discs" (if anyone remembers them) had much larger gaps between tracks, and it was possible to write date between tracks (in some cases and with some drives), with this data being difficult to erase on some other drives. The paranoia about data remanence is probably from those days. Nevertheless, I've used a sledge-hammer on more than one occasion! Dbfirs 08:57, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Are those 3.5" floppies you're talking about, btw? I found a box of them the other day that have been in one of my drawers for night on ten years. No idea what's on most of them, but interestingly a document shredder capable of taking 5 sheets of A4 at once will just about manage to consume one with a little back and forth... --Kurt Shaped Box (talk) 22:05, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

I was thinking of the older 8-inch and 5.25-inch floppies where there was lots of "wasted" recording space. The 3.5-inch design had a much more compressed track format, but there might still be a slight risk of data between tracks, so shredding (after removing the plastic case) or burning would be an option. Dbfirs 09:46, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

Why would any normal person need to do this? Clearly you have something naughty on your hard drives. Don't worry, I won't tell ;) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.144.149.58 (talk) 22:22, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Risk of identity theft because of any stray personal/financial details left on the HD, basically. Criminals do root through bins looking for things that they can use to get an 'in', believe it or not. It's not particularly common, but I'm pretty sure that this is how someone got ahold of enough details (likely from a paper statement that I'd carelessly discarded) to make online purchases using my credit card (which had never left my person and hadn't been used for a very long time and never online) several years ago. --Kurt Shaped Box (talk) 22:46, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

In addition to the point about identity theft, it's a very dangerous argument to say "if you haven't done anything wrong you have nothing to worry about". That's the path to losing entirely our protections against government snooping. I see you geolocate to Russia, so I'm not sure you've ever had such protections in the first place, but believe me, if you did, you'd want to keep them. --Trovatore (talk) 22:51, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

What about doing some preventive work to avoid identity theft? Like encrypting all sensitive data. OsmanRF34 (talk) 23:13, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Well, it's better than nothing. But if you don't encrypt the entire disk, you never know whether something leaked (and it's really hard to find out). If you do encrypt the entire disk, then it's probably just with your regular login password, which you may have accidentally typed somewhere else. Used storage media aren't worth much; the safe move is to pull them out and physically destroy them (not that that's necessarily easy either...)

But even if you're planning to do that, you should still encrypt anything sensitive, and possibly your entire disk. You never know when the machine might be stolen, going through an airport or something. --Trovatore (talk) 00:28, 23 June 2012 (UTC)