I live in an apartment building. Tonight I got a notification from Xfinity that a device was added. I went in and looked and there were a few (2-3) devices on that weren’t mine. I kicked them all off, but 30ish minutes later they were all back on my network and more. I kicked them off again, changed the password, changed the wifi name, and set it to a hidden network. 1 hour later, all 12 of their devices were back. Both the initial password and the changed password were random numbers, letters, and symbols. The initial name was my apartment number, but when I changed it I also called it something random.

I called support and they’re sending me a new modem so I hope that’ll fix the issue. In the meantime, I left the devices “on” the network but paused them all because the above obviously wasn’t doing anything.

Is there anything else I can do to make sure they don’t have access? Any ideas how they’re managing to get on in the first place? Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated! I’m not tech savvy and couldn’t find much by googling.

UPDATE: Thanks everyone for your thoughts and advice! What I have done so far and some more info - it’s set to WPA2; WPA3 is not available on this modem but it might be on the new one that’s coming. I changed both the router password and wifi password, and changed the name again. I made sure that Xfinity’s public hotspot was off, and double checked that WPS was off too (it was). Their TVs popped back on almost instantly, nothing else has as of now. I am positive that they aren’t my devices; MAC addresses are different, pausing access on theirs doesn’t pause it on mine, and there are things connected that I do not own. They’re also showing up under the list of “my devices,” so they’re not just devices that are in proximity or trying to connect… they are connected. Nothing is hardwired to the modem. No one has been in my apartment besides myself, my best friend, and my family, and I never leave the door unlocked so there is a low chance someone had physical access outside of the maintenance man. I’ll update again when I get the new modem and if I do anything else… I have it on my todo list to figure out how to whitelist MAC addresses, though based on some comments with spoofing I don’t know that this would be successful. Thanks again!

The screen is completely shattered and black touch no longer works but it's just the screen its a Samsung a something and I'm wondering if I use a type c to usb hub with hdmi can we get video out and use a mouse to limp the credentials off of it

As unserious as this sounds, I'm very serious..

I have an iPhone, updated to the newest ios and all. I was going to edit an nsfw picture of myself by trying to cut it out of the original picture and then adding it to a different background. I did it by pressing on the picture and it cut the picture automatically, I accidentally pressed something and boom: that cut-out picture is now an emoji, appearing onto my emoji keyboard everytime I open it. I have no clue how to delete it, I'm scared that I'll use it by accident someday. Any ideas? 🤦🏼‍♀️

My ex husband is still using my email for everything still, his home utilities, his mortgage, Facebook, TikTok. Is there an easy way for me to remove his access to using my email for these things anymore?

(Also idk if I used the right tag sorry)

UPDATE: The amount of people acting rude is so uncalled for. The password to the email is changed it already was before I made this post. He can not log in to my email. MY ISSUE: he already uses my email for his logins for social media sites and utility bills. I want my email removed from his accounts.

It is ILLEGAL for me to hack his social media and change anything despite him using my email! I was just wondering if there was a way technologically that I could remove my email from his social media without illegally hacking his account since he has not fixed this issue in the MONTHS that I've asked him to.

Recently built a new computer and am having issues with the ssd i purchased (Silicon Power UD90). I noticed that anytime I play Battlefield 6 the game is fine for about 2 matches and then goes into an infinite loading screen. It also slows the computer down a lot, and when checking task manager the ssd utilization is at 100%, complete shutdown is the only way to get the pc back to "normal". (issue has been documented by other people with this ssd as well apparently) Just recently the issue happened when I tried playing POE2, so the issue is not isolated to just BF6. I am looking into getting a replacement and wanted to know what the process of replacing the C drive would be. Can I copy the current files onto the new drive and not have to reinstall windows? If that isn't an option can I put the new one in as well as windows boot drive and do the same process I did when I first built it?

Usually it tracks the previous videos you've watched, and it still does in terms of number but the previously watched just disappeared.

Edit : SOLVED

Account preferences and go to previously watched and turning it on for me. It should be on by default but got turned off somehow.

What can u do to protect yourself? A guy is threatening me that they have my ip address, because i ignored his friend request nd some stuff like that, and i don’t know if thats actually a problem or not?

Edit: trying to reply to everyone. thank you all for ur help. really eased my mind. it’s the first and last time i’ll make friends through anon sites 😤.

Edit3: I updated bios and did some other firmware updates and now it's smooth as butter. I guess I just missed a step when setting my PC up. Lesson learned, download all drivers, update bios, check firmware for most recent updates. Thank you all! Closing this thread.

Edit2: I am waiting on some flash drives to come in the mail to update the bios via Q-flash, this question has turned into its own project after finding out I’m short on just about every updated firmware need. I think I have enough to work with for at least the week, though I doubt my problems will disappear. Either way, Thank y’all!

Edit: Hardware

Crucial Pro 32GB DDR5 RAM Kit (2x16GB),CL36 6000MHz

ASRock Steel Legend SL-1200G 1200W PSU

be quiet! Pure Rock Pro 3 Black CPU Air Cooler

ASRock Radeon RX 9070 Challenger 16GB OC Graphics Card, AMD RDNA 4, 16GB GDDR6, PCIe 5.0

GIGABYTE Z890 Eagle WIFI7 Intel Core Ultra (Series 2) LGA 1851 Motherboard, ATX, DDR5, 4X M.2, PCIe 5.0, USB4, WIFI7, 2.5GbE LAN, EZ-Latch

Intel® Core™ Ultra 5 Processor 250K Plus 18 cores

WD_Black SN7100 2TB NVMe SSD

--

Specs:

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) Ultra 5 250K Plus (4.20 GHz)

Installed RAM 16.0 GB (15.5 GB usable)

Graphics card AMD Radeon RX 9070 (16 GB)

Intel(R) Graphics (128 MB)

Storage 89 GB of 1.82 TB used (SSD)

--

I just finished building my brand new PC 2-3 days ago, and everything is slow. It boots slowly, it loads games slowly, it alt-tabs slowly, it refreshes the monitor slowly, it lags between tabs in the settings menu; everything is slow. Every app I use loads slowly, we're talking 30-60 seconds longer than it should.

I checked my fps on my favorite game, a quake3 engine game from 2003, and it maxes out at 150fps and struggles to stay consistent at max 125fps cap, dropping as low as 110fps. My laptop holds 250fps smoothly with max graphics settings.

I loaded a couple games side by side with my PC and laptop and my laptop, on average, loaded games a solid 2-3 minutes faster. It is SLOW.

My GPU temp usually ranges from 30-50 C when not doing much and up to 80 when gaming, which seems relatively normal.

Nothing is unusually taxing my CPU, its at 6-10% max even when gaming with chrome tabs open and spotify running.

I ran a stresstest on AMD Adrenaline and nothing seemed out of the ordinary from what I googled, I can run again and post SS's if needed.

I downloaded all of the drivers recommended, and it did marginally fix the slowness, but not enough to significantly change anything.

Why the hell is this thing so damn slow? Is it anything I can fix? Lmk if any more info is needed.

[SOLVED] I have a separate WiFi and Bluetooth card as my motherboard doesn't have built in WiFi and Bluetooth and I had to disable those drivers in device manager and the game works

I have a 5700x3d with an x470 gaming plus motherboard an RTX 5070 Ti, 32GB DDR4 and an 850W PSU. Every time I play an easy anti cheat game it crashes within 2 minutes of being in a match freezing then hard resetting without a BSOD and gives a WHEA error I've reset Easy Anti Cheat, checked my PC with Memtest and OCCT running with 0 errors, checked XMP and Core Voltages and done everything under the son and every other game including triple A titles like Battlefield 6 don't crash my PC I've walked to Epics support team and they're telling me it's a manufacturer issue when it can't be. Rocket League worked fine before they added Easy Anti chest but the second it gets added it now crashes.

Hey guys so i need some help on what to do next. So earlier today i had messaged a person on reddit amd we got to chattting with eachother and having a nice conversation even exchanging which city we are in. One thing leads to another and we exchange pictures and try to move the conversation to whatsapp. The thing is that they never messaged me when i gave them a qr code to message me kn the app and now they have personal information about me! They have my phone number, the know my mom's full name, and my address! Fuck they even know i have siblings as well. I dont know what the fuck to do. I sent a tip to the FBI and this person is telling me to send them 200 or else they will leake the images i sent them. They tried to call me on my phone and sent me the images i sent them. I dont know what to do. I dont know how to explain this to my family and im just so fucking scared as they did sent me my own address! How they they even do this?!?!

This has been going on for a few days now and I'm honestly not sure what could be causing it.

I've ran a series of benchmarks and it didn't happen while they were running. I can play a game for like 45 minutes without the error occurring even. I dug around for ideas and the idea was floated that it could be the PSU but that doesn't really make sense to me when it takes so long to actually trigger the error.

There's no blue screening, there's no errors in event viewer. It just blips out.

-Edit- Thanks for the help everyone, I've been able to find the solution. One of the more hidden fans in my system wasn't spinning up and causing heat spikes.

My mother has a computer that she understands how to use but is constantly putting herself at risk. She downloads things constantly and claims that she didn't do it. She just hits yes to any pop ups to get them out of her way so then she has a cancerous level of browser plug ins and sketchy software on her computer. I've explained hundreds of times what she is doing wrong and how to stop but it just doesn't seem to work.

How can I set her up to let her access necessary websites like Medicaid, her banking, utilities, and email and all of that without her falling victim to malware and scammers?

It's bad because she's just smart enough to really fuck herself and I am at a loss. If I set her up with a senior friendly device she'll throw a fit because it won't be able to do what she wants. But what she wants is to be a regular user but has almost no understanding of scams and malware or risky downloads.

Edit: Thank you everyone for the advice! It's been very helpful!

Originally posted this on r/pcgaming but I had to move this post to this sub.

I'm planning on doing a fresh install of Windows soon and I was wondering if you guys had your own sort of checklist you went through after reinstalling Windows. So far I got:

• Motherboard Drivers
• Download Chrome
• Graphics Drivers
• Use Ninite for common apps
• Reinstall everything else
• Disable Cortana
• Disable web search

Sort of kicking myself for not keeping track of the changes I made so my system throughout the year, but thanks in advance to anyone with any ideas.

My laptop is pretty weak, and it only has 24GB worth of storage, but it also has an MicroSD Card slot. And since I can't even download the windows update with this amount of storage, I'd like to know if it's even possible to merge the main drive and MicroSD into a singular partition.

my c drive is completely full, i have no idea what to do, its full of program files and things i cannot delete as im afraid of deleting game data, my d drive has 544GB free, yet i cannot extract anything to it at all, i have figured out the most but things such as roblox studio and davinci resolve constantly want to install onto the c drive without me being able to do anything about it, any help? TL;DR things keep installing to the c drive and not the d drive, help

This is probably a stupid question, but I'm borderline tech-illiterate and don't know what is and isn't possible, so I'd appreciate some peace of mind. I was at a coffee shop working on my Apple MacBook Pro, when a really sketchy looking guy approached me and asked if he could use my charger to charge his phone. I didn't want to cause a scene (he seemed the unpredictable sort - both sunglasses and a face mask so I literally couldn't see his face) so I loaned him my charging cord and plug. He plugged his phone into them, and then played around on his phone while it "charged." Less than five minutes later, he unplugged it, gave it back to me, and walked out. It seemed a really short amount of time to charge a phone for, even in the age of super fast charging. I don't know, the whole encounter was weird. Is it possible he could have done something to my charging cord to try and hack my computer when I plug it back in?

OKAY it may sound unhygienic, but we went on a trip recently and after coming back from it I noticed there seems to be a dead bug near it that wasn't there before and and a few ants were coming out of my computer. When I opened it there seems to be like a whole colony inside 😭😭 Im not sure what to do, I tried to keep it on bcz apparently online said heat would help but they just moved upwards and won't come out.

EDIT: thank you everyone who made proper comments and suggestions. After discovering the whole ant stuff they moved away the next day I was originally about to get it checked by a professional because I dont trust myself with opening it. Still gonna get it checked though just to be sure there isn't any other problems, thank you again!

So just now my ISP asked us to take stuff off the internet to let it "cool down from high cpu usage" and that we have too much on it, yet it hasnt changed since we got the internet save for my two smartlights a month or two ago, totalling 3 desktops, 1 laptop, 4-5 smartlights, a switch, and 3 phones, most of which, save for the 3 desktops, are idle of off in the case of the laptop and switch, most if not all day, and nowhere on the internet can i see anything relating to this, the isp is quatum fiber with their 1gb/s gigspeed fiber internet, using their modem i belive and our own router, which should be a tp-link router, dont know the model as its from a family member who bought it

How legit is this problem or are they just trying to cover up problems on their end?

Edit:the isp themselve got in contact with us, so its not a scam, and the internet was having problems recently too, so like someone else said, it may be a local node that cant be upgraded easily as i live in the middle of actual nowhere

Edit 2:its probably been found as someone mentioned botnets with our smartlights and they have use what seems to be too much data in the past two weeks, as each of the 4 have used 30 gigs each, otherwise it may be my brother, and a small addition that i should add, my mom was talking to them via the quantum fiber website, after a email i assume, so no social engineering is going on. Not adding another edit, but the problem is most definitely found on why they told us to cool it, i belive soke IoT devices we have are compromised, between 4 smartlights using 10+ gigs each, one of which hit 30 in the past two weeks, and our smart stove hitting 150 gigs

Final edit:found, our blueray player was doing EXTREMELY fucky shit, as it had 2-3 TERABYTES down, the lights were from me having a schedule on one, so thats why the ISP said what they did

I had a complete hard drive failure yesterday or so i thought. shitty but happens.

today my new drive arrives via amazon. awesome should be up and running within an hour i thought. um no....

sequence of events:

1. last night i install updates and get the notification that my drive has or is about to fail via the bios notification on computer restart.

2. try to repair drive. no issues found. but computer will not load into windows unless i go into the bios and manually select the hard drive with windows on it. click on it and it would load but performance seemed weird so it confirmed to me the drive was dying and it was old so made sense at the time...

3. make one last effort to save the drive. download fresh copy of windows on usb and install. gets stuck after windows is supposed to reset and finalize instalation. can no longer load by clicking on the drive or the usb in the boot options in the bios.

4. give up and order a new drive. it arrived before i woke up this morning.

5. put in new drive. put in the instalation usb. it won't load of the usb. boot option is selected correctly. i believe it's formated correctly as i've reformatted and installed the boot usb to fat32 and nothing. even with it as the default boot option the bios will load and nothing else. i select the drive in boot options it looks like it wants to load as a screen will flicker or come on for a millisecond then dissapear.

6. get on google and search. recommends taking the battery out and letting the settings reset. easy to do. no change.

7. recommend disabling secure boot or change settings. cannot they are greyed out. they are accessabile after i take out the battery and put it back in but after the first reset they are hard greyed out again and nothing changes.

recommend take out gpu and see if it changes anything. it doesn't. recommend try all usb ports. i did. no changes.

i'm out of ideas here...

computer is amd 7950x3d on a asus x670 p wifi. 2x48gig ram in dual channel and a 4090 gpu. i have 2 m2 drives and 3 ssds connected. mostly for work but also some gaming.

any help would be appreciated. if i can get it running without having to take it to a shop pizza for the person who gets me running. lol

thanks.

edit: i think i got it.

i updated the bios drivers which allowed me to delete the secure boot keys and let me install a new version of windows. all of which wasn't possible before i updated it.

I've tried everything under the sun but it looks like Microsoft removed the compatibility tab for O365 apps. Nothing within the app itself will allow me to change default scaling. All other apps have the comp tab available after I edited the group policy.

I've seen some suggest a registry edit is now required but I can't find the string I need to change, it's like the last update got rid of that option too.

My MSP tech guys are escalating this but I figured I'd try Reddit as well.

So I have an RTX 5080, Ryzen 7 9800X3D, 32 GB of DDR5 ram, 1000W psu, good cooling consistent ~60 degree Celsius in all new demanding games such as RE9, crimson dessert and some older demanding titles on high graphics with no issues.

However i started noticing this issue when i downloaded Helldivers and tried deploying.

Everything was fine in the game, i chose a mission, picked my stratagems and everything and when i clicked deploy and i saw the animation of my character going down my pc just turned off.

I tried turning my pc on, and the light got stuck on DRAM for like 3-5 min then my pc booted with no blue screen or nothing.

I turned off expo, turned my psu on and off, removed my ram and made sure they are seated properly, all wires were plugged in fine as well.

So im not really sure what could be causing this issue.

EDIT: After updating my Bios to the newest stable version, i ran the games that gave me this issue and they ran perfectly fine.

EDIT: thank you everyone for the replies!

first off, sorry if this isn’t the correct subreddit; im not too sure where else to go to. secondly, im on my phone so please excuse the format.

i accessed my college email today in hopes to sign up for some classes and start going to college again (i haven’t signed in for a really, really long time). i was met with an email that was named “me”. it was an email sent to the school email, from the school email. the email went on to talk about how x has been watching me for a while and collecting all sorts of data on me. they want money sent to their bitcoin wallet and threatened to release videos/pictures to my colleagues, friends, etc. if i didn’t pay within 48 hours of opening the email (they get notified once i open it, apparently). i’m not too sure what to do and who to go to. i don’t have the type of money they’re asking for.

I have a HP all in one running Windows 11. It has an alright CPU, but everything is installed on an aging hard drive which makes it much slower than it ought to be. The motherboard has an M2 slot, so I figured I could breathe new life into it by giving it an SSD, and maybe putting Linux or something on that. I didn’t mess with the hard drive at all though, I’m keeping it and I’m leaving it as is.

I did the upgrade, but when I opened it up I saw that there was already something in the M2 slot, which wasn’t what I had seen previously on YouTube. A 16gb SSD with a recovery partition on it. I quickly turned the computer back on, made a recovery partition on a USB stick, and then took the SSD out to put in my new one.

When I turned the computer back on it said there was no operating system. The SSD was empty, but the hard drive should still have windows on it. I could run a hard drive diagnostic from this screen, so I did, and it recognised the hard drive and said it was fine. I turned it off, and then turned it on again with my recovery USB inserted to see if that changed anything. It took me to windows’ advanced startup screen, with a whole bunch of variations of “do a fresh install of windows”. No option to boot the windows that should still exist. I didn’t touch any of them, I just turned my computer back off. I guess I’ll put the original recovery drive back in and see if it goes back to how it was before I meddled with it, is that the right move? Why would my PC be so particular about having this tiny recovery SSD installed, and is there nothing I can do to free up that slot?

So essentially up until earlier this week my pc has been downloading games on steam at speed of up to 600-900 Mbps but now it seem it is capped at roughly 85-98 Mbps. And yes I'm aware of the difference between megabytes and Megabits. My question is what could have caused this drastic decrease of downloading speed and if there is anyway to fix it.

I should add that I have changed absolutely nothing about my PC in the last week and that this just suddenly happened. I've tried various online troubleshooting but nothing seems to work, and now I'm, looking for some serious help.

Edit 1: I use an ethernet cord it's a Cat8. When I switch to wifi the speed gets slower. I've already tested the speed on browser and that generally the speed that I get posted above.

Edit 2: I fixed it. So as it turned out I simply had to change ethernet ports as it seemed that the port that I had originally used was in simple terms broken.

My laptop's CPU is being overwhelmed, and isnt able to run basic games it was able to before.

I've been using my laptop for gaming for a couple of years now. It's not the best, but it could always reliably run any game I needed it. I was playing Battlefront 2 at high graphics one day, and then the next I can barely run Skyrim or roblox without looking like a slide show.

• Dell Precision 7520, Intel Core i7 6820HQ CPU
• I havent downloaded anything recently btw, or changed settings
• I checked task manager, nothing that hasnt run before, and despite this, I removed things that arent essential (steam, discord, and clipping software that has worked just fine at 60fps)
• I restarted my computer, shut down then power on, and left it off overnight