O.T. Macrium

Mark Twain wrote:
I was just on Yahoo (which I usually avoid)
and was reading a story when the screen went
white and I had a message that the computer was
infected.

I closed it and ran malwarebytes full scan with
no errors, then ran SuperAntiSpware full scan
with 654 and deleted 654 then ran Avast full scan
with no errors.

I should of taken a screenshot but didn't think
,,... but I have never had this happen before.

Thoughts?
Robert


We're going to have to get you a miniature
computer tank to ride around in :-) With
armor plating and a big gun on the front.

What you probably received was scareware. Written
in Javascript.

Keep your eyes peeled, read more news articles and
see if your event is reported in the news.

If you have the

*exact*

error message text, please post it.

A screen turning white is not unusual.
If the scareware message has spelling mistakes,
this greatly enhances the ability to "Google it".
Most of the time, these people cannot spell, which
helps a lot.

Paul

Mark Twain wrote:
You think it might be a good idea to
bring a DVD with me to Fry's ?

Robert


DVD playback is stateless. You can bring your own titles,
without the insertion of the DVD causing any change to
what is stored inside the machine.

BluRay (BD) is different. In some cases, if you insert
a brand new fresh title, it has a key revocation for an older
movie. And after your disc is removed, suddenly the player
will no longer play Casablanca. That means that BD players
are "stateful" and each disc when played, can do something
to the machine.

Bringing a DVD disc is OK. If bringing a BD with you for
the purchase of a BD player, you'd ask the salesman if
he minds or not. I don't know if standalone BD players
can be rolled back to factory settings or not.

I only learn enough about BD, to know I won't be buying one :-)
That's good enough for me. I don't plan on doing an
deep research on all the "bad table manners" a BD player has.

DVD is not flawless. My knowledge base, such as it is, is
based on keywords. When I want to remember "DVD bad", I
remember "Casino Royale".

http://www.zdnet.com/article/sony-really-sucks-at-drm/

While great care goes into designing commercial DVDs
so they always work in standalone players, sometimes they
slip up. A person who is an expert at DVD collecting, would
likely bring a copy of the affected Casino Royale title
and insert that in the player :-) It won't hurt the player,
but the customer can just turn around and then walk out
of the store, if the title will not play.

That means there are two reasons to bring a DVD.

1) Check quality of playback on known source material.

2) Check compatibility on one of the bad flavors of DRM
(Digital Rights Management).

Paul

I had no idea this was so involved,.. Jeez
all I want to do is buy a DVD player and TV
but there's so much more to it!

I only asked about bringing the DVD because
I might see a LG TV I like and I might play
great at the store but when I get it home it
might be crappy with my DVD's.

That was my only concern.


Thanks,
Robert

Mark Twain wrote:
I had no idea this was so involved,.. Jeez
all I want to do is buy a DVD player and TV
but there's so much more to it!

I only asked about bringing the DVD because
I might see a LG TV I like and I might play
great at the store but when I get it home it
might be crappy with my DVD's.

That was my only concern.


Thanks,
Robert

That shouldn't be a problem.

Paul

Mark Twain wrote:
I had no idea this was so involved,.. Jeez
all I want to do is buy a DVD player and TV
but there's so much more to it!

I only asked about bringing the DVD because
I might see a LG TV I like and I might play
great at the store but when I get it home it
might be crappy with my DVD's.

That was my only concern.

Thanks,
Robert

They won't have a dvd player hooked up to the TV.

Paul in Houston TX wrote:
Mark Twain wrote:
I had no idea this was so involved,.. Jeez
all I want to do is buy a DVD player and TV
but there's so much more to it!

I only asked about bringing the DVD because
I might see a LG TV I like and I might play
great at the store but when I get it home it
might be crappy with my DVD's.

That was my only concern.

Thanks,
Robert

They won't have a dvd player hooked up to the TV.


For demonstrators, don't they have them hooked to
a common feed ? Some stores here would just have
cable playing on the TV sets.

I think the computer monitors in the store I bought
my first LCD monitor from, they were all fed from a fanout
box. And I would annoy them by finding the source machine
and flipping it to showing text so I could check
for parallax :-)

Paul

Paul wrote:
Paul in Houston TX wrote:
Mark Twain wrote:
I had no idea this was so involved,.. Jeez
all I want to do is buy a DVD player and TV
but there's so much more to it!

I only asked about bringing the DVD because
I might see a LG TV I like and I might play
great at the store but when I get it home it
might be crappy with my DVD's.

That was my only concern.

Thanks,
Robert

They won't have a dvd player hooked up to the TV.


For demonstrators, don't they have them hooked to
a common feed ? Some stores here would just have
cable playing on the TV sets.

I think the computer monitors in the store I bought
my first LCD monitor from, they were all fed from a fanout
box. And I would annoy them by finding the source machine
and flipping it to showing text so I could check
for parallax :-)

Paul

I agree about common cable feed. It comes down to the willingness
and level of authority of the sales people to change it.
Week days may be better since there is a manager on duty.

Once again I want to thank you and
Paul in TX for all your good help and
taking the time to explain things.

Robert

I thought you might be interested,...

I went to Best Buys and bought a 28
inch LG but only 720p vs 1080

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lg-28-c...?skuId=5895500

It's exactly 25 inches and fits the
entertainment center like a glove.

Also bought the HDMI cable

They didn't have the DVD player

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchp...60& keys=keys

so will have to order it.

What do you think?

Robert

Mark Twain wrote:
I thought you might be interested,...

I went to Best Buys and bought a 28
inch LG but only 720p vs 1080

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lg-28-c...?skuId=5895500

It's exactly 25 inches and fits the
entertainment center like a glove.

Also bought the HDMI cable

They didn't have the DVD player

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchp...60& keys=keys

so will have to order it.

What do you think?

Robert

I'd say you were half way there :-)

For fun, you can connect the computer
to the TV set, via the HDMI.

Or use the TV tuner in the TV set, to see what
the screen looks like. Connect a balun and rabbit
ears to the 75 ohm input, and get the TV to
scan for OTA stations. I can get a few digital
TV stations here, using just rabbit ears.

Read the manual to see how to select each input source.
The thing will probably come up in TV mode, and
you'll need to use the remote to select the HDMI
input. See if the remote has some sort of buttons
for selection.

You can still have fun, even if the DVD player isn't
here yet.

Paul

Mark Twain wrote:
I thought you might be interested,...

I went to Best Buys and bought a 28
inch LG but only 720p vs 1080

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lg-28-c...?skuId=5895500

It's exactly 25 inches and fits the
entertainment center like a glove.

Also bought the HDMI cable

They didn't have the DVD player

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchp...60& keys=keys

so will have to order it.

What do you think?

Robert

Nice!
The TV manual says 45 watts and only 7 lbs!

I thought I had a balun and rabbit ears
In fact, I know I do, but damned if I can
find it.

In any case, I decided to buy this:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/TERK-TVOMA1...id=p5731.m3795

what do you think?

I found the HDMI input under Video

http://www.lg.com/us/tvs/lg-28LN4500-led-tv

Also, good news, my replacement Harman Kardon
speakers came and I have sound again! I'm glad
I had the 780 although it was a factory mounted
/mono whatever but it got me by.

Thanks,
Robert

Mark Twain wrote:
I thought I had a balun and rabbit ears
In fact, I know I do, but damned if I can
find it.

In any case, I decided to buy this:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/TERK-TVOMA1...id=p5731.m3795

what do you think?

I found the HDMI input under Video

http://www.lg.com/us/tvs/lg-28LN4500-led-tv

Also, good news, my replacement Harman Kardon
speakers came and I have sound again! I'm glad
I had the 780 although it was a factory mounted
/mono whatever but it got me by.

Thanks,
Robert


I couldn't find a good reference on the square antenna.
It could be hiding this sort of thing inside. A fractal
antenna. They don't have to use wire for those, and the
antenna could be made from FR4 with copper tracks on it
in the desired pattern. The phasing on some of these,
is intended to combine the signals and drop the characteristic
impedance. Which is how the antennas in the examples here,
manage to get a bit closer to 75 ohms. That's what the
two "rails" in the center are for. Impedance conversion.

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-...DTV-DTV-plus-/

When I needed an antenna, I build a Gray-Hoverman. One with
extra elements for VHF. And that's because the bureaucrats
here thought it would be cool to give the TV industry zero
dollars to subsidize new transmission equipment. And a side
effect, is a couple transmitters just used the old analog
setup, on something like channel 6. They changed the
modulation of the transmitter, for the digital signal,
but the "power" part is just the old equipment.

It means our channels here, they could have all been placed
on UHF (simplifying things and making the square antenna
more practical), but instead the band remains split between
some stations being on VHF and the rest being on UHF. Then
it means a physically larger antenna to get VHF. UHF works
with smaller dimensions. If I only needed a UHF
antenna, I could have continued using my old one.

My Gray Hoverman was designed "for the cottage" rather than
an urban setting. To use it in the city, I'd need a rotator
because it only has a 15 degree beamwidth. Since I have
TV transmitters on two major different vectors, it requires
rotating the antenna to either vector to get a signal.

It the antenna is isotropic, and has a wide beam width,
then you hardly ever need to fiddle with it.

In one of the TV forums, the "experts" there never buy
an antenna, without seeing the beam pattern versus
frequency. And I was hoping to find a little backgrounder
on the square antenna, with some good pictures of results.
As that helps predict whether it'll be a practical
purchase or not.

Amplifiers are a good choice for distribution - if you're
driving 100 feet of cheap down-lead, then sticking an amp
on the head end, might help reduce the loss. Amplifiers
always have a "noise figure", and indiscriminate use of
amps leads to a degradation in the noise part of "S/N".
So a 60dB amp isn't "twice as good" as a 30dB amp,
or a loaf of bread baked for twice as long is burned,
rather than being "twice as good". So if you see
exaggerated claims for the amp, keep that in mind :-)

The TV has AGC (automatic gain control on RF) and
probably works from 10uV to 1V or so in amplitude.
The TV will turn up its own gain on a weak signal.

One difference with DTV, is the response to the signal.
You can go from a crystal clear picture, to a black screen
(LOS) with only a 2dB drop in level. There isn't
nearly the graceful degradation as there was with
analog NTSC. A missing channel could be close to the
right level, or way way down and totally out of reach,
and you can't really tell.

One amazing thing that happened here, was getting a
TV tuner card for the PC and comparing it to my
settop box. A world of difference. The STB could
only get three channels regularly. The TV tuner
card (using the same signal) gets everything known
to exist in the city. While propagation characteristics
change from month to month, the difference I'm seeing
really looks like the TV tuner does something different
from a DSP perspective. As I don't think this is
just "moar amp". It's not an amplifier effect.

It's fun to play with. Too bad I'm not all that interested
in TV :-)

Paul

Would these be better?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Terk-HDTVAZ...item4b2a42c3ff


https://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Terk-Lo...AMXQO21Rnou Q

I agree, I'm not really all that interested in
TV either, maybe news, documentaries etc. I
haven't had cable in 20 years but thought if I
could pick up 1 or 2 channels, why not?

I usually prefer to watch my DVD's or YouTube

Thanks,
Robert

Mark Twain wrote:
Would these be better?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Terk-HDTVAZ...item4b2a42c3ff


https://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Terk-Lo...AMXQO21Rnou Q

I agree, I'm not really all that interested in
TV either, maybe news, documentaries etc. I
haven't had cable in 20 years but thought if I
could pick up 1 or 2 channels, why not?

I usually prefer to watch my DVD's or YouTube

Thanks,
Robert



Everything in life has "boring old planning" to do.

You need to run your location and elevation, through
the DTV map.

https://www.tvfool.com/index.php?opt...pper&Itemid=29

Here's a sample report.

http://www.tvfool.com/?option=com_wr...ed86708bf4a 3

In that example, a high gain antenna (with small beamwidth)
would need to be rotated to sample all the stations. Even a
wide-beam antenna would have a problem. Only an omnidirectional
wouldn't be annoying there.

The colors in the table, indicate how "easy" the signal
is to get.

Green An indoor "set-top" antenna is probably sufficient to
pick up these channels

Yellow An attic-mounted antenna is probably needed to pick up
channels at this level and above

Red A roof-mounted antenna is probably needed to pick up
channels at this level and above

Grey These channels are very weak and will most likely require
extreme measures to try and pick them up

So that one must be an urban map.

The top item in the chart, you can probably receive that
with a "twig".

The bottom entry requires maybe a long yagi on the roof.

*******

When the antenna has a performance graph, you can tell how it will do
with the TVFool map.

This one for example, is low gain, but it's an omnidirectional
one, with no backside reflector. Signals come in the front or
the back.

https://i.stack.imgur.com/cMtQf.png

Here, a four element yagi is more directional. It has a gain lobe
out the front, less of one on the back side. You would need
to rotate this on a complex map. Your Terk with the four element
pairs could be similar to this. Your flat antenna might be
similar to the last one.

http://www.yagicad.com/Projects/6mOWA.htm

But when graphs aren't available, it's pretty hard to tell
what you're buying. On the one hand, you can have a "range"
specification, like 35 miles. But how directional is it ?

https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/be...-hdtv-antenna/

*******

In any case, run your map, and see what you've got.
If all your stations are in green circles and they're
all over the place, maybe your first antenna pick is
enough. The multi-element Terk could be more directional,
and that's good if all the TV antennas are on the
same hill. Two cities I've lived in have been like that,
a hill with a lot of TV stations sharing towers on the hill.
If there aren't a lot of vectors to cover, it makes picking
an antenna easy (no constraints). Look at your map and
see what you've got.

If you lived in the woods, and all the stations were on
the outer circles and they had the "bad" color, then you
would need a long yagi on a high elevation. Or an antenna
with similar fancy performance.

Didn't the WEGA have a rabbit ears in the box ?

I wouldn't buy a rabbit ears, as for the same money
you can get something a bit more modern. One of the
flat ones for example. But don't buy an antenna until
you see the map.

I prefer my antennas to have graphs, because then it's
like a "weather forecast". I have some idea what to
expect, but real reception conditions vary. And all
this "science" is just to avoid situations where you're
fooling yourself. If you live in the woods, no, you're
not getting DTV. In Canada, there's one province where
more than half the people lost broadcast TV, when DTV came
in. The coverage map is a "desert" there, because the main
transmitter is no longer 350,000 watts. One of the stations
in my city now, uses a 3KW transmitter, little better than
a "few toasters strapped together". Cheap to run. $0.75 an
hour for transmitter electricity. The TV tuner card in my
PC, actually picks that one up. I wasn't even aware
I was "in range" until I got the TV tuner card.

Paul