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(Redacted with apologies to Steve. The more I watch, the more I like his channel.)

That guy’s not someone who’s in it for the fame and exposure, he’s in it to show stuff. Personally, I’ll happily suffer through a crappy video that teaches me a lot rather than some Retro Encabulator BS that looks/sounds great but has no real substance.

—Patrick

PatrThom said:

Retro Encabulator

—Patrick

Click to expand...

That was brilliant

Ravenpoe said:

That was brilliant

Click to expand...

Back when I was still pursuing a career in voicework, it was given as a prime example of how to properly deliver copy even when you don’t necessarily understand the material.

There are several other “encabulator” vids out there. It was a running gag for a while amongst companies like that.

—Patrick

Hey @DarkAudit I hear you ordered your RX580 card finally.
Sure hope you didn't get it from these guys.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

Hey @DarkAudit I hear you ordered your RX580 card finally.
Sure hope you didn't get it from these guys.

Spoiler: Explanation

Starting with macOS 10.13 "High Sierra," support for GPUs based on Polaris (RX4xx/RX5xx) has been included with the OS. No weird aftermarket drivers needed or anything like that, you grab one and plug it in and it just works(tm) (except for the pre-boot environment but that's not a deal-breaker).
This means you can grab ANY off-the-shelf RX580, plug it into a Mac Pro and you're off to the 10.13 and up races (assuming you don't exceed the computer's power budget, of course)
Now this company is usually reasonable about their accessories, but FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS? Come on! It's just a stock Gigabyte Card (which btw is on sale right now at Newegg for $220 after rebate), the only thing they've added is a second PCIe power cable. I mean, I'm sure these guys bought a bunch of 'em back when prices were high due to mining, but if they wanna sell 'em they're just gonna have to suck up the loss. Sheesh.

--Patrick

Click to expand...

Got the $189 XFX card from Amazon. Plus a PCI wifi card to replace the dongle-on-a-string I'd been using.

Oh, look at that. Server outage. Right when I'm trying to turn the day over. Yay. Problem with a web-based solution is when things go bad on their end, they take me and a few thousand other properties down with them.

My Windows computer won’t go beyond the load up screen for Windows. When I would usually hit return for my username and password to come up, nothing happens.

I’ve tried restoring Windows to four days ago and reinstalling it with my personal files intact.

I still can’t hit return to see my user name so I can enter my password. Brutal.

This may sound dumb, but do your use a wireless kbd? Did the battery die?
If you have a USB kbd, I'd try that, if only so you can log in and find out if this is just the kbd dying on you.

--Patrick

Squidleybits said:

My Windows computer won’t go beyond the load up screen for Windows. When I would usually hit return for my username and password to come up, nothing happens.

I’ve tried restoring Windows to four days ago and reinstalling it with my personal files intact.

I still can’t hit return to see my user name so I can enter my password. Brutal.

Post automatically merged: Jan 20, 2019

View attachment 28450

Click to expand...

Sometimes the lock screen won't respond to the keyboard to bring up the password box, but will to a mouse click.

DarkAudit said:

Sometimes the lock screen won't respond to the keyboard to bring up the password box, but will to a mouse click.

Click to expand...

There are times with some Macs where I've had the opposite as well. Can't click but can use arrow/TAB keys to select account, then cursor is back the instant you log in.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

This may sound dumb, but do your use a wireless kbd? Did the battery die?
If you have a USB kbd, I'd try that, if only so you can log in and find out if this is just the kbd dying on you.

--Patrick

Click to expand...

This is a laptop, I use the keyboard built in (at work we get fancy with extras).

I do have a usb keyboard that I can try. Do laptop keyboards die?

Thank you

DarkAudit said:

Sometimes the lock screen won't respond to the keyboard to bring up the password box, but will to a mouse click.

Click to expand...

I’ll give that a try too

Thank you!

PatrThom said:

There are times with some Macs where I've had the opposite as well. Can't click but can use arrow/TAB keys to select account, then cursor is back the instant you log in.

--Patrick

Click to expand...

I’ve mashed every button it feels like, but I’ll try what you’ve suggested.

Squidleybits said:

This is a laptop, I use the keyboard built in (at work we get fancy with extras).

I do have a usb keyboard that I can try. Do laptop keyboards die?

Thank you

Post automatically merged: Jan 21, 2019

I’ll give that a try too

Thank you!

Click to expand...

It happens more often on my laptop. Clicking my trackpad or the mouse tends to wake up the lock screen better than the keyboard.

DarkAudit said:

It happens more often on my laptop. Clicking my trackpad or the mouse tends to wake up the lock screen better than the keyboard.

Click to expand...

I’ll be sad if I reinstalled Windows and it was this all along lol.

Squidleybits said:

I’ll be sad if I reinstalled Windows and it was this all along lol.

Click to expand...

But you'll be in good company, I'm sure.

--Patrick

I just recently had the keyboard in my laptop literally stop working. Had to send it in for service (under warranty, thankfully). Does the light on the keyboard turn off/on if you toggle caps lock/num lock? Does hitting CTRL-ALT-DEL do anything?

I’ll have a look tonight when I get home. I have work and then class all night.

Thanks so much!

DarkAudit said:

Sometimes the lock screen won't respond to the keyboard to bring up the password box, but will to a mouse click.

Click to expand...

A mouse click isn’t working

I have a USB mouse/keyboard combo plugged in at the moment. I do have one USB port that’s never worked. That’s probably not a great sign.

GasBandit said:

I just recently had the keyboard in my laptop literally stop working. Had to send it in for service (under warranty, thankfully). Does the light on the keyboard turn off/on if you toggle caps lock/num lock? Does hitting CTRL-ALT-DEL do anything?

Click to expand...

I get a light for caps lock, but not num lock. Nothing happens for CTRL-ATL-DEL on either keyboard.

The porn bots are still following me. Fuck you, Verizon. Fuck you, Oath. Fuck you, Yahoo. And FUCK YOU, Tumblr. Nose? You've cut off your whole head to spite your face.

I haven't deleted my main account... yet, but I haven't been back since the ban started.

DarkAudit said:

The porn bots are still following me. Fuck you, Verizon. Fuck you, Oath. Fuck you, Yahoo. And FUCK YOU, Tumblr. Nose? You've cut off your whole head to spite your face.

I haven't deleted my main account... yet, but I haven't been back since the ban started.

Click to expand...

I have no idea what you're talking about, but tell me more about these porn bots.

Ravenpoe said:

I have no idea what you're talking about, but tell me more about these porn bots.

Click to expand...

Tumblr banned what they deem “adult content” as of last month. It didn’t go over well, and of course it did absolutely nothing to rein in the porn spam accounts.

That 2009 Mini I've been using as a server for almost 5yrs straight now? Well, last night noticed the fan is starting to noisily complain.
Not unexpected, what with it being almost 10yrs old and running 24/7 for probably most of that (5yrs under me, and its condition when I got it looked like the previous owner had been using it as a server, too).
Replacement fans are no longer carried by Apple (because Obsolete since 2016) but can still be had elsewhere for $10-50, and I AM a computer technician (so I won't have to pay hourly labor), and there's no real rush since the basement is currently at a constant 50F/10C, but ehhhhh...now there's one more thing I gotta get to.

--Patrick

DarkAudit said:

Got the $189 XFX card from Amazon. Plus a PCI wifi card to replace the dongle-on-a-string I'd been using.

Click to expand...

I'm looking at a similarly-priced compact RX580 to serve as an interim replacement for my 7970 until I can start putting a new system together for myself (now that everyone else at home but me has computers 3yrs old or less), and that I can repurpose to modernize my Mac Pro once I move on, and came across this review:

Look elsewhere for a 7970 upgrade
Pros: As good as the excellent Radeon HD7970, nice compact form factor.
Cons: No better than the six year old Radeon HD 7970 Ghz Ed I finally replaced with this. Virtually no improvement in framerates or graphical fidelity over the 7970 in any of the games I play, including WoW, Diablo 3, or Destiny 2.

By far the biggest disappointment for me is that it is unable to play WoW on ultra settings at 1080p at 60fps. Multiple settings must be turned down to maintain 60fps in deserted outdoor zones. This includes liquid detail to good, ground clutter to 5, shadows to good or lower, and environmental detail to 5. Raiding requires further reduction in settings. Overall recommended graphics preset by the WoW client based on the graphics hardware is 7 out of 10, which coincidentally is the exact same recommended setting as the nearly seven year old 7970.

Moving on to Diablo 3, with ultra settings the card will maintain 60fps in the camps. This changes quickly when you are in a rift with three other people. When the screen gets busy, the card chokes hard. Sub 40fps is common when multiple elite packs are engaged.

Click to expand...

Sooo...dude upgrades to a better graphics card, but is upset that he isn't getting more FPS in games that are CPU-bound? And then leaves a bad review because he doesn't understand how computers work? RrrrrRRRRrrrgh...

--Patrick

Dangit. I've already taped out my next system, a bit of a "sleeper" with parts people might not normally think of using in a gaming PC. I know I already ranted about a major tech site promoting my choice of CPU because sure enough the price on 'em went up (when you can even find them now). Now another big tech site has reviewed the motherboard and given it a glowing review, and at this rate demand is going to spike the prices of parts I already couldn't afford to levels that'll add several extra months of saving onto my schedule and that'll ruin the whole "sleeper at a decent price because people didn't know about these parts" angle. Grrr.

--Patrick

Stop encouraging people to film things vertically. And while you're at it fuck off with the "everything needs to be more like a phone" mentality.

mikerc said:

Stop encouraging people to film things vertically. And while you're at it fuck off with the "everything needs to be more like a phone" mentality.

Click to expand...

Hee-hee I saw that and that was the first thing I thought of.
How many people are going to watch a movie on it while the TV is vertical and think, "Damn, why is this so small?"
But if it doubles in the setup as a computer monitor, well, then it might have some usefulness for things like being able to see an entire page of this forum, for instance.

--Patrick

Yay in the victory thread for getting my old computer working.
Boo because I had to run one of them from floppy.
Oh, setting up the floppy wasn't the problem. But a box of ten 3.5in HD floppies today, when you can find them? Almost $20.
Ow.

--Patrick

Gone are the days of buying them for 50 cents at the high school store when you desperately needed to save your english paper to a disk so you could print it at school.

Has anyone else been having trouble with SSL over the weekend? I keep running into random FORBIDDEN and "certificate invalid" errors, with no obvious pattern.

--Patrick

Not random, but I haven't been able to access Home Depot's website for the last two months or so.

The uselessness of android's battery useage tracking drives me up the wall. I noticed abnormally high battery useage today (33% over 5 hours), and the graph shows a major dip at a specific point. Of course, I remembered, at that time I ran a speedtest on wifi and then did a little web browsing, which chewed up 10% in 10 minutes.

But the breakdown of useage below that said:
Wi Fi: 1%
Chrome 1%
Phone Idle: 1%
Android System: 1%
Screen: 1%

... so, despite being at 66% battery power, you're telling me I should be at 95%.

I know it's nitpicky but broke-ass shit like this drives me up the wall, because so often I've had a rogue app chewing up battery and had this screen be exactly no help at all in tracking down which one it was.

GasBandit said:

broke-ass shit like this drives me up the wall, because so often I've had a rogue app chewing up battery and had this screen be exactly no help at all in tracking down which one it was.

Click to expand...

Can't you get a Task Manager-type app for Android to track that stuff down?

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

Can't you get a Task Manager-type app for Android to track that stuff down?

--Patrick

Click to expand...

Most of the battery app are black box fire-and-forget "battery saver" apps that automatically reduce various apps functionality to get them to use less juice. But I guess I could try one or two like AccuBattery, despite some reviews saying the new version of android broke it.

Thing is, and my gripe is... the core android functionality of this feature should not be lying to me.

GasBandit said:

the core android functionality of this feature should not be lying to me.

Click to expand...

Well, you're not wrong.
I still have no Android devices in the home, so I got nothing, but one of the other techs is an almost-everything-Android guy, I'll ask if he knows of anything.

--Patrick

Only thing he says he's tried is "Power Battery," but he's heard there are others that are better.
He did not name any of these "others."
Maybe see if you can track it down another way? Find which apps use the most cell data or wifi, or which ones keep the screen/audio on the longest, if that's possible?

--Patrick

I'm gonna try AccuBattery for a couple days and see how that goes. It seems to be a very aggressive monitoring system, and I worry that it in and of itself will cause higher battery drain.

The AMD driver update really fucked me over.
Got no more HDMI Audio. Wont show up in Device Manager nor in Audio Settings. Downloaded Realtek Audio Drivers, but that is for the onboard audio not audio via GPU. Guess I need to dig out my old PC speakers with the 3.5 jack.

LordRendar said:

The AMD driver update really fucked me over.
Got no more HDMI Audio. Wont show up in Device Manager nor in Audio Settings. Downloaded Realtek Audio Drivers, but that is for the onboard audio not audio via GPU. Guess I need to dig out my old PC speakers with the 3.5 jack.

Click to expand...

Uninstall the current drivers and re-install an older version?

Also, was this you updating your AMD drivers, or was this a Windows Update thing? Because Windows has a bad habit of installing really old AMD drivers when it does a major system update.

I updated my AMD drivers. Tried reinstalling the drivers.
Tommorow I am going to use the AMD cleaner to remove every trace of AMD on my PC and then try it again.

For tonight I am using my bluetooth usb speaker. It is good enough to play Hobo Tough Life on silent and have a podcast in the background.

LordRendar said:

The AMD driver update really fucked me over.
Got no more HDMI Audio. Wont show up in Device Manager nor in Audio Settings. Downloaded Realtek Audio Drivers, but that is for the onboard audio not audio via GPU. Guess I need to dig out my old PC speakers with the 3.5 jack.

Click to expand...

Did you install the "optional" drivers? Go back to the "recommended" 20.4.2 drivers. This caught me out a few weeks back, too.

I try to stick to the WHQL ones when possible.
Heck, I'm still only running the 17.7.1 version.
Of course, that's because I'm using a GCN v1.0 card on Windows 7, but still.
Yes, I could upgrade all the way to 20.4.2 (the most recent WHQL'd version), but I don't know as I need all that Adrenalin stuff added in, since a lot of it requires a newer OS than Win7 to work anyway.

--Patrick

AMD Cleanup did the trick. It removed every file,driver,profile, anything AMD and I reinstalled the newest drivers and new everything works fine again.

I am going to pull what little hair I have left out of my head, I swear, if I have to deal with any more of this complete and utter batshit insane, utterly incomprehensible compatibility failures! Bought a new hosting package. Integrated email into it. Have my own private email server now, well, for the business. Set up Thunderbird on my computer flawlessly. Set up Thunderbird on Aislynn's last computer flawlessly. Set up Thunderbird on Aislynn's new Omen Desktop? Are you insane? You can't set up POP3 and SMTP over SSL on this computer, that's just lunacy.

What. The. Absolute. Fuck.

Gared said:

I am going to pull what little hair I have left out of my head, I swear, if I have to deal with any more of this complete and utter batshit insane, utterly incomprehensible compatibility failures! Bought a new hosting package. Integrated email into it. Have my own private email server now, well, for the business. Set up Thunderbird on my computer flawlessly. Set up Thunderbird on Aislynn's last computer flawlessly. Set up Thunderbird on Aislynn's new Omen Desktop? Are you insane? You can't set up POP3 and SMTP over SSL on this computer, that's just lunacy.

What. The. Absolute. Fuck.

Click to expand...

I should say that it's this sort of asshattery that has me looking so seriously at Linux instead of Windows. Three windows computers. Three of the exact same version of Thunderbird. Do the setup exactly the same way three times. It fails 33% of the time. That's just un-fucking-acceptable.

If I so much as gently caress the USB-C connector of my thunderbolt dock at work, it locks my laptop hard. What a piece of shit. What an EXPENSIVE piece of shit.

Well, accubattery has revealed one unpleasant fact for sure... my battery charging neurosis has definitely hurt my battery. Of an original 2770mAH capacity, my obsession with keeping it above 80% means its capacity is now closer to 900mAH. Apparently there are studies out there showing that you should only charge your battery to 80% and charge it again when it gets down to 20%.

So, I guess I need a new battery. This was also driven home today when my phone shut itself down at 49%.

Yup, i usually try to stick to the 20%, but 80% is harder... Why would I not just let it charge further, you know.

This accubattery app has a helpful alarm that goes off when charging reaches 80% to let me know to take it off the charger.

But yeah, it's a hard habit to break.

My Logitech Mx510 mouse finally gave up the ghost after only 15 years of use. I ended up replacing it with a Microsoft Intellimouse. I could have waited a few more weeks and gotten a Mx518, but I was in a rush since my games were unplayable.

GasBandit said:

Apparently there are studies out there showing that you should only charge your battery to 80% and charge it again when it gets down to 20%.

Click to expand...

Sorry, I thought you already knew.

Li-ion/LiPo battery tech is the current king of capacity-by-weight. BUT that capacity degrades over time, and it degrades faster when used heavily, subjected to thermal stress, etc. And as you discovered, charging it that last 10-20% causes more wear than charging it the first 80%. It is not by coincidence that satellites are usually hard-limited to never charge their onboard battery above 80% nor let it get below 20%, because in a satellite longevity trumps runtime.

So a haphazard charging schedule usually works out better in the long run because it means your battery spends most of its time between 20-80 and doesn’t spend long stretches of time >80 or <20.

—Patrick

4K UHD anime has finally hit the US with the release of Ghost in The Shell 25th anniversary edition. I will be purchasing it, but as of yet am unaware of any set-up that will allow me to either rip it or watch it outside of a set-top box, which btw fewer and fewer companies are supporting.

Bones said:

watch it outside of a set-top box

Click to expand...

What, you mean like via a service + a Roku? Or an appliance like a DVD player?

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

What, you mean like via a service + a Roku? Or an appliance like a DVD player?

--Patrick

Click to expand...

EDIT2: UHD refers to UHD 4K Blu-ray discs to be clear.
EDIT:misread pats reponse lol
the UHD drives for computers exist but require a load of DRM black magic to work, and you cant use any GPU that is not onboard. the set-top players are easier but most companies are abandoning support and it seems from the complaints effectively bricking them as they exit.

Bones said:

most companies are abandoning support and it seems from the complaints effectively bricking them as they exit.

Click to expand...

In other words, once people figure out how to use them to break the DRM, they are forced out of the market.

--Patrick

hey @PatrThom I am trying to understand your response. are you saying they look at it as "fucking pirates ruining it for all of us"? or "well the DRM is compromised, burn the bridges and fields on our way out!"?

Bones said:

hey @PatrThom I am trying to understand your response. are you saying they look at it as "fucking pirates ruining it for all of us"? or "well the DRM is compromised, burn the bridges and fields on our way out!"?

Click to expand...

...neither-ish? But both?
My assumption* is that each manufacturer gets issued its own set of keys, and once enough of a particular line of players have enough of their keys compromised, Blu-ray HQ considers them "traitors" for not somehow preventing this (in spite of the fact that this is inevitable) and so somehow makes it difficult for them to continue--prohibitively increases their licensing fees, sues them for aiding piracy, whatever.

--Patrick
*This is completely a guess on my part, but I feel like it makes sense.

PatrThom said:

...neither-ish? But both?
My assumption* is that each manufacturer gets issued its own set of keys, and once enough of a particular line of players have enough of their keys compromised, Blu-ray HQ considers them "traitors" for not somehow preventing this (in spite of the fact that this is inevitable) and so somehow makes it difficult for them to continue--prohibitively increases their licensing fees, sues them for aiding piracy, whatever.

--Patrick
*This is completely a guess on my part, but I feel like it makes sense.

Click to expand...

no i meant literally there are like 3 manufacturers left making UHD players as far as I am aware. as each company exits they cancel their keys effectively bricking the player when it goes to renew its passkeys every 30-90 days. (you have to have a connection or it will just autobrick anyways >_>)

Bones said:

no i meant literally there are like 3 manufacturers left making UHD players as far as I am aware. as each company exits they cancel their keys effectively bricking the player when it goes to renew its passkeys every 30-90 days. (you have to have a connection or it will just autobrick anyways >_>)

Click to expand...

This sounds like a singularly unsuccessful business model. The player mfrs become literal slaves to Sony and if they don't pay what Sony demands, their products go dead, so at some point they get fed up with being beholden to Sony and commit seppuku. I seriously don't understand why anyone would tool up to manufacture any sort of widget that can be remotely destroyed at the whim of another.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

This sounds like a singularly unsuccessful business model. The player mfrs become literal slaves to Sony and if they don't pay what Sony demands, their products go dead, so at some point they get fed up with being beholden to Sony and commit seppuku. I seriously don't understand why anyone would tool up to manufacture any sort of widget that can be remotely destroyed at the whim of another.

--Patrick

Click to expand...

im just guessing to be fair, but yeah on the same page as you. normal blu-ray works pretty good in my experience other than needing to update keys every so often when they revise something. the 4K ones seems pretty user unfriendly, so for the most part I was planning on just ripping the discs and watching the resulting files on my local network.

Buddy of mine: "My Internet is kinda spotty when I'm on my deck."
Me: "Well the WiFi probably just has trouble with that location."
B: "Oh but it's not WiFi. I thought WiFi would have trouble so I hardwired it."
M: "Hmm, I don't know then."
[time passes]
B: "Hey I think I found the cause."



Me: "Yeah, that's probably it, all right."

--Patrick

I totally forgot how Windows always seems to need to update. Grrr.

Squidleybits said:

I totally forgot how Windows always seems to need to update. Grrr.

Click to expand...

Yep. Many mornings I've gotten up to log in to my computer only to find my login screen greeting me.

Went to do my dailies last night after work, discovered my gaming PC wouldn’t boot. ”Hmm,“ I thought. “It was working just fine last night.”
Hook up a ps/2 keyboard, and a handful of restarts later, I can get into the BIOS. Temps are ok, power is ok, RPMs are ok, everything is recog...oh, there it is. Looks like one of my new hard drives has failed, or at least the RAID1 isn’t happy. Well, that’s why I have a RAID1 array in the first place. I’ll look into more detail after I do my dailies.
<Two hours pass...>
Ok. RAID controller says disk just dropped, not an I/O error. Might just be a cabling issue. Start disk health check to rule out bad sectors, but that says it’s gonna take 3+ hrs to complete. Fine. Set an alarm for 2:30a to check on it.
<Four-ish hours pass...>
Hmm disk comes up clean. Guess it musta been the cable. But now I need to rebuild the array. How long will that take? Ugh. I’m going back to bed. It should be done by morning.
<Four-ish more hours pass...>
Ok let’s see what...why is the computer off? Oh, it’s just asleep. Must’ve shut down when idle. I’ll just check the [57% COMPLETE] oh for f...it went to sleep during the rebuild? AARGH.
Fine. Abort the rebuild since I can’t trust it now and make it start over. Change sleep settings to “Aw Hell Naw!” and I’ll just have to check it when I get home from work in another TEN HOURS uuuuughhhh.

—Patrick

PatrThom said:

Went to do my dailies last night after work, discovered my gaming PC wouldn’t boot. ”Hmm,“ I thought. “It was working just fine last night.”
Hook up a ps/2 keyboard, and a handful of restarts later, I can get into the BIOS. Temps are ok, power is ok, RPMs are ok, everything is recog...oh, there it is. Looks like one of my new hard drives has failed, or at least the RAID1 isn’t happy. Well, that’s why I have a RAID1 array in the first place. I’ll look into more detail after I do my dailies.
<Two hours pass...>
Ok. RAID controller says disk just dropped, not an I/O error. Might just be a cabling issue. Start disk health check to rule out bad sectors, but that says it’s gonna take 3+ hrs to complete. Fine. Set an alarm for 2:30a to check on it.
<Four-ish hours pass...>
Hmm disk comes up clean. Guess it musta been the cable. But now I need to rebuild the array. How long will that take? Ugh. I’m going back to bed. It should be done by morning.
<Four-ish more hours pass...>
Ok let’s see what...why is the computer off? Oh, it’s just asleep. Must’ve shut down when idle. I’ll just check the [57% COMPLETE] oh for f...it went to sleep during the rebuild? AARGH.
Fine. Abort the rebuild since I can’t trust it now and make it start over. Change sleep settings to “Aw Hell Naw!” and I’ll just have to check it when I get home from work in another TEN HOURS uuuuughhhh.

—Patrick

Click to expand...

You and your raid. Live free like me. My Outlook on data:

Ravenpoe said:

You and your raid. Live free like me.

Click to expand...

My next system will likely only have a single drive, but that’s because all the irreplaceable stuff will get shipped off to a NAS.

—Patrick

So my computer started acting up. The screen would randomly turn off, and when I tried to force it to restart, it'd give off 5 beeps and then sometimes grudgingly restart.

I looked up what 5 beeps would mean for my Gigabyte motherboard. Holy crap, it could mean a whole bunch of hardware failures, such as CPU failure, motherboard failure, CMOS battery dying, etc. Cue panic.

Then I looked around some more, and it turns out 5 beeps can also mean a faulty display cable or display.

Right now I'm not sure what the problem is. I fiddled with the CMOS battery, and reseated the display cable, and so far things are going okay. But just in case, I'm gonna back up all my pr0n important files and maybe look into what a new computer build would look like these days.

bhamv3 said:

So my computer started acting up. The screen would randomly turn off, and when I tried to force it to restart, it'd give off 5 beeps and then sometimes grudgingly restart.

I looked up what 5 beeps would mean for my Gigabyte motherboard. Holy crap, it could mean a whole bunch of hardware failures, such as CPU failure, motherboard failure, CMOS battery dying, etc. Cue panic.

Click to expand...

This is something which is easily checked and fixed, btw. Assuming you have some way to test the voltage, that is. Any reading below 2.7VDC means it needs to be replaced.

bhamv3 said:

just in case, I'm gonna back up all my pr0n important files

Click to expand...

DO THAT ANYWAY, ALL THE TIME

--Patrick

I don't have a multimeter or anything like that, so I might just get a new battery and stick it in there, for peace of mind.

bhamv3 said:

I don't have a multimeter or anything like that, so I might just get a new battery and stick it in there, for peace of mind.

Click to expand...

This IS how many people troubleshoot that particular issue. Just chuck in a new one cuz they’re cheap and because they usually last something like ten years.
Quite a few modern BIOSes have added the CMOS voltage to their system health page, though. Might be worth a peek.

—Patrick

Had to switch out keyboards today because the enter key on my old Gateway MediaCenter keyboard had finally snapped and wasn't registering. Fortunately I have an NMB 104-key IBM-equivalent keyboard, but it doesn't have the volume controls the old keyboard had.

My husband's job is giving everyone an extra $25 a month for internet expenses since everyone is mandatory work from home until at least January. We decided to upgrade out home Internet to gigabit, which actually saves us $3 a month because how the plan worked out. Being locked in to a new contract hardly matters because there's not likely to be another better option in the next year. But the actual rant is that the setup of the new plan claimed out current modem was fine, but that turned out to be a lie, as it can only pull 600/5 and not the up to 1000/35 we are actually paying for. (And there is a 600 plan, so they can't even try that nonsense) We can't open a ticket on it online until our current order goes through, and neither one of us has the desire to be on hold with comcast right now, so I guess when we go in to swap the TV equipment, we'll just bring the router too. The closest office is in Longmont anyways I think, and those guys never have anything to do because everyone there uses Nextlight anyways.

Dei said:

My husband's job is giving everyone an extra $25 a month for internet expenses since everyone is mandatory work from home until at least January. We decided to upgrade out home Internet to gigabit, which actually saves us $3 a month because how the plan worked out. Being locked in to a new contract hardly matters because there's not likely to be another better option in the next year. But the actual rant is that the setup of the new plan claimed out current modem was fine, but that turned out to be a lie, as it can only pull 600/5 and not the up to 1000/35 we are actually paying for. (And there is a 600 plan, so they can't even try that nonsense) We can't open a ticket on it online until our current order goes through, and neither one of us has the desire to be on hold with comcast right now, so I guess when we go in to swap the TV equipment, we'll just bring the router too. The closest office is in Longmont anyways I think, and those guys never have anything to do because everyone there uses Nextlight anyways.

Click to expand...

FIVE up? How the fuck have you been streaming?

GasBandit said:

FIVE up? How the fuck have you been streaming?

Click to expand...

Poorly. That's why I bullied about upgrading our internet.

I guess technically we get between 5 - 6 up, but my point stands.

Heck even *I* get at least 10 up on my 100/10 plan (though my ping is in the 30's).

--Patrick

comcast is famous for shitty upload...its shocking they haven't offered something non-business for people who want higher upload speeds...everytime i have asked about getting a better up ratio they suggest maybe i should switch to business >_>

my comcast services is 330 down, 12 up.

Bones said:

everytime i have asked about getting a better up ratio they suggest maybe i should switch to business >_>

Click to expand...

That's because the ONLY reason you could possibly want faster upload is because you are running some kind of web/file server, and they more or less mandate you be on a business plan if you're running a "server" machine.

PatrThom said:

That's because the ONLY reason you could possibly want faster upload is because you are running some kind of web/file server, and they more or less mandate you be on a business plan if you're running a "server" machine.

Click to expand...

I realize now that I have obviously made a mistake by my previous comment, wasnt expecting a "no shit, you idiot" response. guess thats my bad for feeling like we deserve more than 5 Mb up when we are paying for 500 Mb down.

Unity is so retarded.

I literally have to install a different version of it for every thing I do.

Making beat saber avatars? That's 2017.1.4.

Making VRChat avatars? Whups, better install 2018.1.2.

Making vtuber avatars? Welp, download and install 2018.20.2.

Jeesh.

Bones said:

I realize now that I have obviously made a mistake by my previous comment, wasnt expecting a "no shit, you idiot" response. guess thats my bad for feeling like we deserve more than 5 Mb up when we are paying for 500 Mb down.

Click to expand...

I think Pat's comment had at least some amount of sarcasm in it.

Bones said:

I realize now that I have obviously made a mistake by my previous comment, wasnt expecting a "no shit, you idiot" response. guess thats my bad for feeling like we deserve more than 5 Mb up when we are paying for 500 Mb down.

Click to expand...

Oh, this is definitely not a "no shit, Sherlock" kind of answer.
It's me railing at ISPs because they're using the excuse of "you must be a business trying to sneak by on a residential plan" as a way to push customers up into more expensive plans, even when they already subscribe to "unlimited."

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

Oh, this is definitely not a "no shit, Sherlock" kind of answer.
It's me railing at ISPs because they're using the excuse of "you must be a business trying to sneak by on a residential plan" as a way to push customers up into more expensive plans, even when they already subscribe to "unlimited."

--Patrick

Click to expand...

oh, my bad, I read it as a serious response, I asked them the last time about something with more upload speed, maybe 50 Mb up as I back up a large amount of data to cloud storage regularly and also upload media to major sites like youtube. the agent just laughed at me when I asked about the possibility. I was willing to pay a bit more money(20-30 bucks a month more) for more upstream speed.

ive also been threatened with legal action when i inquired under the same idea that im trying to do something illegal, and my usage would be investigated for wrong doing.

Bones said:

ive also been threatened with legal action when i inquired under the same idea that im trying to do something illegal, and my usage would be investigated for wrong doing.

Click to expand...

Yup. To hear them tell it, if you want more than whatever paltry upload speed they give you, then you must either be a dirty illegal torrenter, or else you're a cheap-ass business. Remote backups? Large family? Power user? Work from home? "Ha ha what are those myths? Also would you like to see our business-class plans? The ones that don't have data caps? They start at $129/mo for 50down/50up..." And then you get a faster upload speed, but they slash the download speed to make up for it. And if your business is a bar/restaurant/apartment building, well then it starts to get even more complicated.

I DON'T CARE how many flavors/colors it comes in. Just. Give. Me. Internet.

--Patrick

Hilariously, even though online setup said we needed a new TV box and not a new modem, they sent us a modem, not a new TV box. So I guess somewhere in the pipeline after online setup is a person who actually makes sure everything is correct.

My download speed is still no where near where it should be, but woo @ my upload speed.

Dei said:

My download speed is still no where near where it should be, but woo @ my upload speed.
View attachment 35765

Click to expand...

That's common for gigabit. It's the old "UP TO 1000mbit!" charade that means you can't get mad when you don't get it. Mine's the same way, I usually get around 600 as well, down. But man, that 50 up is what I really am paying for.

GasBandit said:

That's common for gigabit. It's the old "UP TO 1000mbit!" charade that means you can't get mad when you don't get it. Mine's the same way, I usually get around 600 as well, down. But man, that 50 up is what I really am paying for.

Click to expand...

But there's a separate 600mb charge, so we're probably going to call to see if someone will come uselessly check it.

Dei said:

But there's a separate 600mb charge, so we're probably going to call to see if someone will come uselessly check it.

Click to expand...

I know that. That's just what happens with gigabit. Sometimes, during peak hours, you'll get 400mbit or less. I don't think I've ever actually gotten more than 700mbit on my gigabit.

This is just how cable modems roll. What are you gonna do, get some OTHER gigabit cable service?

GasBandit said:

I know that. That's just what happens with gigabit. Sometimes, during peak hours, you'll get 400mbit or less. I don't think I've ever actually gotten more than 700mbit on my gigabit.

This is just how cable modems roll. What are you gonna do, get some OTHER gigabit cable service?

Click to expand...

The point is more one of trying to get Comcast to concede something on price, because they are actually worried about towns trying to follow suit with Longmont. Either way it doesn't matter, it still ended up being cheaper in the short term.

Dei said:

The point is more one of trying to get Comcast to concede something on price, because they are actually worried about towns trying to follow suit with Longmont. Either way it doesn't matter, it still ended up being cheaper in the short term.

Click to expand...

Even with your proximity to Longmont, I'll be VERY surprised if Comcast does anything at all about your speed (or price).

Cable companies are notorious for this stuff, and Comcast is renowned to be the worst of the bunch.

So I'm working today on site... commissioning a big combined classroom. I get up to go to the bathroom, and lock my laptop naturally.

I come back to see a mother fucking windows 10 update in progress.

I had a bunch of shit open and unsaved >_<

Fuck. You. Microsoft.

NEVER. UPDATE.

GasBandit said:

NEVER. UPDATE. ALWAYS. SAVE.

Click to expand...

FTFY

—Patrick

PatrThom said:

FTFY

—Patrick

Click to expand...

As a programmer who's lost so much work to crashes, etc....I just habitually hit control-s every 5 minutes or so. I barely even think about it any more.

Tinwhistler said:

I just habitually hit control-s every 5 minutes or so.

Click to expand...

Yep. Just like tapping the reload button between skirmishes.
Be prepared!

—Patrick

GasBandit said:

I come back to see a mother fucking windows 10 update in progress.

Click to expand...

Also:


—Patrick

A few days ago, Windows 10 wouldn't shut down. I'd tell it to shut down, it would, and then it immediately started up again. At first I thought I'd accidentally selected "restart" instead, but nope, it was starting itself back up after shutting down. I was mildly spooked.

I had to disable something called "fast startup" to get it to stop doing that. I didn't even know I had fast startup enabled. My computer had never done anything like this before. Not sure if this was due to a recent Windows update or something, but it was a bit annoying and creepy.

It's time for my annual "Let's try Linux". I wanted to test the performance of emulators in my pc with linux. I have three screens. The icons appeared in one screen, the menu in another, and the main screen was empty. I can't find how to correct that. Also my pc needed to reboot after updates. I thought that didn't happens on linux.

Cog said:

Also my pc needed to reboot after updates. I thought that didn't happens on linux

Click to expand...

Certain things, like some drivers and especially kernel-related updates, require a reboot. It's far less often than with Windows, but it happens.

Network admins will fight tooth and nail and sandbag for hours to avoid doing one task that would take them 90 seconds.

Also, I get griped at for e-mailing them directly. I have to e-mail someone else so they can put in a request to someone else so they can assign the task to the network admin. Because that way it takes 2 hours to get something done instead of 5 minutes.

Whatever, I guess. I'm paid hourly.

Looks like Phision and Silicon Motion are finally releasing native (i.e., faster & lower-power/heat) PCIe v4.0 NVMe controllers instead of the less efficient 4.0-interface-bolted-onto-a-3.0-controller method they’ve been doing.

...which is great because the specs for PCIe 6.0 are on track to be released next year. Starting to wonder if anyone is going to bother using v5.0 for anything.

—Patrick

The D:\ drive on my laptop has vanished. So now I'll probably have to open this sucker up and fiddle with the cables, see if that fixes it.

Oof, I just watched a teardown video for this. I can see myself accidentally breaking a couple of things within the first three steps or so. Maybe I should send it in for repairs.

PatrThom said:

This thread is now about scalpers.

Click to expand...

Ok, so is this one.
I know we had a discussion about Apple's new headphones, and how a price point of $550 seemed... high.
But apparently there's plenty of people willing to spring that much for them, since they're apparently being scalped on eBay for $1500... and up.

Scalping is the new Bitcoin, I guess. Instead of hashrate, we're going to see people start rating their GPUs by their scalprate, by how many times a second that GPU can reload a webpage to try to submit a purchase order.

--Patrick

Playing Crossout on my PC tonight (yes I still play it), when my gaming computer suddenly makes a sound like you hear when someone throws a branch into a wood chipper, and I immediately exit the game mid-match and shut it down to find out what is causing the loud VRRRRRRRRR it is now making. Pop the side off and look around and, near as I can tell, the front intake fan either had a big ball of lint break loose and get sucked into the fan blades or else it was one of these bastards getting mulched while looking for a cozy place to wait for Spring.

Stupid Arthopoda.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

Playing Crossout on my PC tonight (yes I still play it), when my gaming computer suddenly makes a sound like you hear when someone throws a branch into a wood chipper, and I immediately exit the game mid-match and shut it down to find out what is causing the loud VRRRRRRRRR it is now making. Pop the side off and look around and, near as I can tell, the front intake fan either had a big ball of lint break loose and get sucked into the fan blades or else it was one of these bastards getting mulched while looking for a cozy place to wait for Spring.

Stupid Arthopoda.

--Patrick

Click to expand...

that is why my case has screens, fuck that on ice.

Bones said:

that is why my case has screens

Click to expand...

This case is reeeeeeally old.
Like, flip-down shutters over the DVD/CD drives, I-don't-know-what-HDMI-means, no USB3 support old.

--Patrick

Wanted to blow the dust out of my case for the first time in forever. The front cover resisted coming of, so I tug a little harder. The cover did come off, but snapped 90% of the pins holding it on. It's still secure after putting it back, but dammit.

I have the side panel off permanently, because the front fan needs to be manually stopped a few times before it'll whirr away happily. Otherwise it just sounds like a vacuum trying to suck up metal ball bearings. Used to restart 3 times every time I wanted to do something but I've now found just sticking my hand in there to stop the blades works just as well, and it's probably better for the computer.

Chrome mobile now enforced the use of grouped tabs, and I absolutely hate hate hate it. I'm sure there'll be some hidden way of turning it off (I haven't checked flags etc yet, just the settings).
I can see how it ought be useful in some cases, but for people who browse like me, it's just a hassle, a whole bunch of extra clicks, and if slows switching over down a lot. Also, swiping downward opens a bar at the bottom of the screen to quickly jump to other tabs in the same group... Taking up my screen real estate. This quick bar might help the slower switches... If it would just stay away unless I want it to. That's NOT every time I swipe downward. Grrr. Arghhhh.

I found it here:

Go to
chrome://flags
Search grid
And disable

I had to restart my phone before I could change it.

I finally got to wire all of the things required for my first animatronic part - an eye mechanism. It did nothing, so now I get to figure out how to debug hobby electronics, which I have literally no time for (I was following an online design and using my birthday as an excuse to take the time to do this).

A moment of silence, please, for my old GPU* which failed after something like 8 years of service. Replacing it with something new is going to be next to impossible without bending my wallet backwards over a counter. Buuut...


--Patrick
*had to update the video, the first one was so annoying,

Cranky FINALLY decided to take the dive to newer storage.
He's been running since 2015 on a 400GB Intel 750 SSD (which is an absolutely amazing SSD, even today) but trying to install games has been a nightmare because a single game install these days can eat up as much as 80-120GB. So this past weekend we finally had him step up to a 2TB HP EX950 mounted in a carrier. Don't knock the fact that it has an HP logo on it, it's actually one of the top performing PCIe v3 drives out there, and it was on sale.

Installed card & carrier, system recognized it just fine, downloaded and installed the free version of Macrium Reflect and successfully cloned the drive over on the first try. Even remembered to increase the partition size from 400GB to the full 2TB before hitting "go!" Moved the new card to replace the old one aaaand... it wouldn't boot. Boot settings were correct. Couldn't even boot to diagnostic boot because boot would just hang on start with the drive activity light staying on for many minutes before going dark and staying there.

So I swapped out the new drive for the old one to return it back to the original configuration. Still wouldn't boot (or else would take ages and ages to boot, not a good sign for such a fast SSD). Scandisk found nothing. "Repair boot issues" did nothing. Hours pass. And then I realize something... where did the D: drive go?

See, because his (old) SSD has such a low capacity, I added 2x 2.5in 1TB WD Red in a 3.5in RAID-1 adapter connected via SATA to give him a place to offload any stuff he didn't need fast access to, with the idea that it would be safer than a single external drive. Well apparently the RAID adapter (or one or more of the drives inside of it) picked exactly that day to fail. So I disconnected it. Computer now boots flawlessly. Swapped to new drive. Computer still boots flawlessly. Left him to gleefully download probably 500GB of game data overnight.

So now I have to find out what's up with the RAID adapter and either fix it or extract and manually hook up the drives inside of it to get back what was on them. So stupid.

--Patrick

We're a software company...

Far said:

View attachment 37831


We're a software company...

Click to expand...

I called a customer today, and when I asked her to open a file in Excel, she asked me to call back later when someone from IT could be there to help.
I tried, but, yeah, no, she really did need someone to open it for her.

So, I think my ssd might be dying. It started with some steam games... downloading an update lead to corrupted files. Trying to uninstall and reinstall the game lead to more corrupted files. Trying to reinstall steam leads to steam not working, and now an automatic update left my pc completely unable to boot, requiring that I rollback to before the update. Does this sound like drive problems to anyone else?

Ravenpoe said:

Does this sound like drive problems to anyone else?

Click to expand...

Could be. Many SSDs switch to "read-only" mode when they fail BUT the thing they usually don't tell you is that it will only keep working until you reboot, after which it probably stops recognizing the drive. So if it's still working, grab what you wanna save onto an external, just in case.

It could also be a flaky cable or controller, so it MIGHT not actually be the drive. You might try reading the drive's S.M.A.R.T. data to see if that reveals anything. The three main ones to watch for are "Bad sector count" (drive) "Pending sector count" (drive) and "CRC error count" (cable).

--Patrick

This probably belongs more in a "funny pictures" type thread, but whatever.


( @GasBandit can appreciate this, I'm sure)

I can intimately feel the exasperation in this post. It is palpable.
But what I also find amusing is that someone decided to make a subreddit for IT that uses the F7U12 nomenclature. SUCH an IT nerd thing to do, and adds so much meta.

--Patrick

Don't know where to put this, could've gone here, could've gone in the regular minor rant thread, or the stories from work thread (but that's more lighthearted I guess)...
So anyway, we support a whole bunch of software and online solutions. One of the fairly new ones is not being really properly supported at the moment, so we now got a questionnaire to fill in to gauge everyone's knowledge of this to see where and what is needed as far as training goes. Fair enough.
It starts off fairly easily ("do you know where to find the installer?" and that sort of thing).
And then it goes on to questions like "explain your understanding of all functionalities in the Agent"
Err, the user manual is 198 pages. I'm not saying I know all about all functions available, but do you really need me to list off "new shipment" - click this for a new shipment, "cancel shipment" - click this to cancel a shipment, "printer locations" - click this to open a menu to choose which printers to use, "pending shipment" - click this to go to the Pending Shipments screen" and so on and so on? Mind you, I asked, and I'm NOT ALLOWED TO USE SCREENSHOTS, TEXT ONLY.
Whoever created this questionnaire is a MANIAC. And whatever manager approved this idea is an IDIOT.

Bubble181 said:

Whoever created this questionnaire is a MANIAC. And whatever manager approved this idea is an IDIOT.

Click to expand...

The questionnaire might have been created for different software with much less functionality and was repurposed for use with this software. The manager that signed off on it is still an idiot though.

I guess it may have been adapted from something else, but some of the other later questions were very solution-specific ("how do you set up option X to work with integrator tool Y to achieve result Z", "how many projects would you need to set up to turn this type of input files into a stable solution that would output valid labels and show examples" (yes, work out how to set up flows and writing it all out by hand...ARGH). Someone who knew the software at least added questions.
Half of these questions frankly don't even apply to me, I'm support, if it's about setting up new workflows I'm supposed to just send it on to Field, I'm not allowed to mess with that. Still wrote the explanation on how to do it, though

WELL-I'm either gonna have to get a new mother board, return the legacy Nvidia I got, OR start a fresh build, either way that's on me for not checking.

Yoshimickster said:

WELL-I'm either gonna have to get a new mother board, return the legacy Nvidia I got, OR start a fresh build, either way that's on me for not checking.

Click to expand...

Why would you need a new motherboard? A new case, maybe, but a new board?

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

Why would you need a new motherboard? A new case, maybe, but a new board?

--Patrick

Click to expand...

WELL-the motherboard is fine, its just theoretically I can't add the part I want to the system because the HDMI port on my Motherboard MAY be permanently disabled, and the graphics card I got don't got a HDMI port. I MIGHT be able to be work around it in BIOS but LORD knows if I know the cheatcode to get it to work, mucked around in it too much today and I had to re-insert the CMOS battery just so's I can get my PC to show up on my monitor.

Yoshimickster said:

WELL-the motherboard is fine, its just theoretically I can't add the part I want to the system because the HDMI port on my Motherboard MAY be permanently disabled, and the graphics card I got don't got a HDMI port. I MIGHT be able to be work around it in BIOS but LORD knows if I know the cheatcode to get it to work, mucked around in it too much today and I had to re-insert the CMOS battery just so's I can get my PC to show up on my monitor.

Click to expand...

Amazon product

I use these alllll the time. Almost every single job, customer gives us a PC with only displayport outs, and we gotta have HDMI for our AV gear.

GasBandit said:

Amazon product

I use these alllll the time. Almost every single job, customer gives us a PC with only displayport outs, and we gotta have HDMI for our AV gear.

Click to expand...

Sweet strawberry Jesus, THANK YOU, I'd say it'd muck up my USB organizational system but FUCK it I'm doin' it!

ALSO-are Amazon ads not showing up on anyone else's PC, or is that an Adblock thing?

Adblock.

My surplus Optiplex doesn't have HDMI, but it does have DisplayPort. I bought a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter from Best Buy and never looked back.

Easy to go DP or mDP -> HDMI, much harder to go the other direction.
So usually if a card only has one kind of output it's gonna be some flavor of DP.

--Patrick

My laptop is gradually failing piece by piece. First the D:\ drive will only be detected about half the time when I start it up, so if it doesn't find the D:\ drive then I need to shut down and restart until it does. Then the touchpad started becoming unresponsive, but I usually use a USB mouse so it's not a huge deal. And now the built-in microphone has apparently died, which is more problematic because I use this laptop for remote meetings, and it only has one 3.5mm port that functions as both the headphone jack and the microphone jack, depending on what you plug in. Sure, I could plug in a microphone, but then I'd need to use the laptop's speakers, and that's not a good idea for remote meetings.

bhamv3 said:

My laptop is gradually failing piece by piece. First the D:\ drive will only be detected about half the time when I start it up, so if it doesn't find the D:\ drive then I need to shut down and restart until it does. Then the touchpad started becoming unresponsive, but I usually use a USB mouse so it's not a huge deal. And now the built-in microphone has apparently died, which is more problematic because I use this laptop for remote meetings, and it only has one 3.5mm port that functions as both the headphone jack and the microphone jack, depending on what you plug in. Sure, I could plug in a microphone, but then I'd need to use the laptop's speakers, and that's not a good idea for remote meetings.

Click to expand...

I recommend a USB headset.

Unless you can, you know, swing a new laptop.

GasBandit said:

I recommend a USB headset.

Unless you can, you know, swing a new laptop.

Click to expand...

A USB headset is an option, because I do have the spare USB port for it. Though I am also thinking about getting a new laptop, because the recent lockdown in Taiwan has led to my wife pretty much taking over the desktop computer, resulting in me doing most of my gaming on my laptop. And this laptop isn't exactly bad for gaming (i5-8250U, GTX 1050, 12GB ram) but it could be better.

Now my D:\ drive will randomly disappear while I'm using the laptop. I suspect it's a hardware issue, probably a loose connection or something, but from my rudimentary research this laptop is really finicky to crack open and fiddle with.

So time to get a new laptop I guess.

So now I have a new laptop.

I7-11800H@2.30GHz, 16GB of RAM, RTX 3070.

You didn't tell us what size your drive is. Hopefully at least 512GB, 1TB would be even better.
Your next stop will no doubt be 32GB RAM, unless you run out of drive space within the next 6mo.

--Patrick

Originally it was a 512GB SSD but I sprung for the 1TB upgrade. I believe I can also stick a HDD in there if I want, but I haven't looked into it in detail.

I've been thinking about building a new pc for a good long while now, but prices... Man, it's ridiculous.
The same graphics card costs $1400 in the USA, €1270 in Germany (about $1490), and... €1490 in Belgium (about $1750).
I could literally have a forumite buy this stuff and FedEx it to me, pay all import and shipping fees, and still be cheaper off. Sometimes taxes really suck.

Of course, on the other hand... While I still like to consider myself a gamer... I've still never run into a game I wanted to play but couldn't, and those I have that are near the edge I don't play anyway (I have Jedi Fallen Order installed and have literally not booted it up once), and given my current mental health half of me is telling myself not to invest in that kind of stuff because I won't be around in 3 months anyway, and it all adds up to "not going to happen any time soon".

I honestly can't recommend doing a new build right now unless you absolutely HAVE to. Pricing and availability are stupidly weighted in favor of seller(s) right now, and the speculators are murdering anything decent that does happen to make it to market.

--Patrick

Laptops are still somewhat reasonable, but yeah, building a new desktop PC right now is going to come with a 200% markup.

I know, but it's been like that for... What, three years now? I remember "wait 'til the 2000-series drops so the 1080ti drops in price" way back when. The 1080ti is still one of the more viable bang for buck cards now and it's four years old.

Bubble181 said:

it's been like that for... What, three years now?

Click to expand...

I thought it started some time in late 2019/early 2020, but it looks like the actual start date of ballooning GPU prices was December of 2017 (GeForce GTX 10x0/Radeon Vega), meaning we're coming up on four years of this shit.


--Patrick

Bubble181 said:

I know, but it's been like that for... What, three years now? I remember "wait 'til the 2000-series drops so the 1080ti drops in price" way back when. The 1080ti is still one of the more viable bang for buck cards now and it's four years old.

Click to expand...

TBH, unless you're doing a lot of VR (like, AR embedded VR that you are then streaming in real time) or insisting on 4k at 60fps. you don't need a 3000 series card. My 1060 3gb, the most bargainy of the 10 series, still plays everything that doesn't go in goggles marvelously in 1080p60.

Microchip shortages, CPU/GPU(/console) scalpers, RAM/flash price fluctuations, alleged "spy chips" on motherboards, cryptocurrency demand, and now...

...yes that's right, now it's not just chips, but also other surface-mount components like resistors, chokes, capacitors, and so on. Companies like Rubycon, Nippon-Chemicon, and other well-known names in the electronics industry are all succumbing to COVID-19 and other factors, leading to shortages of even the most basic electronic components found on circuit boards everywhere. Heck, even raw material prices are going up due to supply constraints. I didn't even really know anything about Ho before reading these stories. And supplies aren't expected to recover for as much as six months...IF nothing else happens to disrupt things even further, that is. It's gonna get to the point where you can't even buy a wireless doorbell or a walkie-talkie if this keeps up.

--Patrick

Microsoft, regarding Windows 11: "We pretty much require that your system be built around Intel's 8th generation ‘Coffee Lake’ CPU or newer architecture or else your system will be flagged by the upgrade advisor tool as not meeting the requirements for Windows 11."
The *nix community: "Goddammit, Intel! Why did you hopelessly break HPET reliability in your 8th generation and later CPUs?"
Consumers: "You guyyys! I just wanted to dual boot my machine! "

--Patrick

Why does imgur not show me any progress for my uploads on the app or in my browser? People are paid more than I will ever make to design this

Cat said:

Why does imgur not show me any progress for my uploads on the app or in my browser? People are paid more than I will ever make to design this

Click to expand...

Imgur's been on the downslide for a long time now. Just waiting for the next starry-eyed idealist startup to come along for everybody to jump to, that gets its 12-18 months before it has to actually start making a profit/paying for overhead, and turns into what all other image hosts turn into since even flickr and photobucket.

GasBandit said:

Imgur's been on the downslide for a long time now. Just waiting for the next starry-eyed idealist startup to come along for everybody to jump to, that gets its 12-18 months before it has to actually start making a profit/paying for overhead, and turns into what all other image hosts turn into since even flickr and photobucket.

Click to expand...

I've been using bc it's so easy to bulk upload but on my desktop it's not even putting them in the right order

Cat said:

I've been using bc it's so easy to bulk upload but on my desktop it's not even putting them in the right order

Click to expand...

I've never had it upload multiple things in the right order. Then I fix the order... then it reverts back to the wrong order.

GasBandit said:

I've never had it upload multiple things in the right order. Then I fix the order... then it reverts back to the wrong order.

Click to expand...

The app at least gets the order right for me, I had to move my screenshots to my phone for the upload lol

Cat said:

The app at least gets the order right for me, I had to move my screenshots to my phone for the upload lol

Click to expand...

The phone app has sooooo many other issues though, from what I read. I refuse to use it in any case.

GasBandit said:

The phone app has sooooo many other issues though, from what I read. I refuse to use it in any case.

Click to expand...

I can believe that if even what is functioning correctly is still shit

To be fair, when you copy a group of files, Windows does not properly order the list that it passes to whatever program/api. It's been like this since like Win3.1.
Here's a 6 year old StackOverflow question bitching about it.

So if you're selecting a bunch of files and dragging them to Imgur on the web, imgur is at the mercy of whatever random file order Windows decides to send.

Tinwhistler said:

To be fair, when you copy a group of files, Windows does not properly order the list that it passes to whatever program/api. It's been like this since like Win3.1.
Here's a 6 year old StackOverflow question bitching about it.

incorrect order of files in dragdrop event in vb.net 2013

I'm dragging multiple files from Windows Explorer into my VB.net program. Everything works, except that in the DragDrop event the order of files that I get from e.Data.GetData, appears to be random...

stackoverflow.com

So if you're selecting a bunch of files and dragging them to Imgur on the web, imgur is at the mercy of whatever random file order Windows decides to send.

Click to expand...

Huh, did not know that

Edit: tried deleting an album and now I have 50 loose images to delete goddamnit

Cat said:

Huh, did not know that

Edit: tried deleting an album and now I have 50 loose images to delete goddamnit

Click to expand...

If you use the website from a PC, you can select multiple images to delete all at once.

GasBandit said:

If you use the website from a PC, you can select multiple images to delete all at once.

Click to expand...

I was, didn't notice an option to select more than one post at a time so I used tabs and hit delete as I flipped through them

Nowhere is safe from superfluous RGB.


NOWHERE.
(available for iPhone and Android)

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

the board I've chosen is absolute effing overkill

Click to expand...

Ha ha well looks like supply is so tight that suppliers are only selling this board directly to OEMs or as part of an entire system and not to the general public. I have a call in to a supplier to see if they can release one (just one!) board for me, but I've already ordered most of the other components (because I didn't know there was any kind of restriction on the boards) and if/when they get here it's gonna be a real shame if I can't get my hands on a board to slot them into. Whooops.

--Patrick

Why is it so hard for my ISP to maintain an Internet connection? Every few months the Internet will start going down for several hours at a time. I'd call, they'd send a tech, the tech will mess around with things, the connection will come back, and then the cycle repeats.

Next time, find out what they're messing with.

--Patrick

Last time around the guy replaced some of the cables physically connecting the router to the... connection thingy in the wall. He suspected that there was something wrong with the cable or the connector.

bhamv3 said:

Last time around the guy replaced some of the cables physically connecting the router to the... connection thingy in the wall. He suspected that there was something wrong with the cable or the connector.

Click to expand...

What's your uplink? Is this cable modem? DSL? Or just an ethernet plug that goes somewhere-you-know-not?

GasBandit said:

What's your uplink? Is this cable modem? DSL? Or just an ethernet plug that goes somewhere-you-know-not?

Click to expand...

Cable, I think. The router (provided by the ISP) connects to an F type connector that goes into the wall. That's pretty much all I know.

bhamv3 said:

Cable, I think. The router (provided by the ISP) connects to an F type connector that goes into the wall. That's pretty much all I know.

Click to expand...

It's rare for a router to have a coax uplink, it's probably a modem with a built-in router. It seems rather odd to me that a bad coax cable would take several visits, but I suppose dumber things have happened.

GasBandit said:

It's rare for a router to have a coax uplink, it's probably a modem with a built-in router. It seems rather odd to me that a bad coax cable would take several visits, but I suppose dumber things have happened.

Click to expand...

Any suggestions on what I could do? Aside from harass the ISP every time my Internet goes down?

bhamv3 said:

Any suggestions on what I could do? Aside from harass the ISP every time my Internet goes down?

Click to expand...

Unfortunately, if it is upstream of your modem, it is pretty much out of your hands. Of course, the modem itself could also be the problem, especially if it uses the Puma chipset. Replacing it with one of your own that uses a Motorola chipset might help in that case, but it is a bit of a hassle to get your ISP on board with it sometimes. At the very least, you will have to spend time on their support line to tell them your new modem's CMAC.

Keep an eye on whether anything interacts with that cable--furniture, pets, weather, guests, foot traffic, other nearby electronics, mechanical strain, etc. If none of those things are a concern, you may want to peek at the cable itself just to see whether the center wire is too long/too short at either end, or consider getting a shorter cable (if possible). If the cable is fine, then it is either upstream OR something to do with your router. If you reboot your router and everything goes normal, then it's probably sloppy router software that just needs to be rebooted every month. If that doesn't resolve it, then we're starting to get into stuff that's outside of the consumer realm (router config, intrusion attempts, other people on your loop).

--Patrick

Also, if there are any cable splitters before your modem, try to remove them (if possible) - those degrade signal too.

I hate tech people online, especially anime fans. Everybody's a fucking Mort.

"Hey, Yameii, when you name your torrent 'Show name 6th season episode 4' Sonarr thinks it's season 1 episode 4 because the ENTIRE TORRENTING WORLD has standardized on S06E04 for season and episode codes and you're just being contrarian. Would you mind naming things in accordance with established practice?"

"No, Sonarr sucks, you should use Medusa."

"Sonarr has worked just fine for literally every other show that YOU have not uploaded. You are literally the only group I have to manually spoon feed, and it's because of this issue. But just to give it a try, I have now tried to set up medusa and it is 9 flavors of arcane inscrutable bullshit that never works and often makes things worse. So your pet favorite niche torrent scraper only works for you and your iconoclastic naming convention. So that's a no go. And it sucks that I have no alternative other than to manually load your torrents and manually import in sonarr them because no other group will duplicate the effort since you're doing it already. But it's not like I'm paying you to do your thing so I guess I just have to put up with it."

God I miss Golumpa. His shit worked just fine. Now the only consistent purveyor of english dubbed anime torrents is Yameii. I almost hope Yameii gets busted too. Almost.

In case anybody's confused by what I mean about being a "Mort."

I keep getting these weird network hiccups on our LAN. I thought it was the wireless, so I completely disabled one of our three APs. Didn't get worse, but also didn't get better. Finally thought about a ping test, and I can now confirm that what we're having is either due to our modem or my router, because it happens just like this even on a computer connected directly to the router, like so:
75ohm Internet cable -> ISP-provided modem -> 1m Cat5 -> ridiculously overbuilt 8-port router -> 1m Cat5e -> Test computer
See, this is the part I don't get. My connection/turnaround time is ROCK SOLID (only varying by a bare handful of milliseconds each ping)...except that it'll just up and lose what, 1 out of every 32 packets? I thought it was due to the flow control I have on the router (which is set to occasionally drop packets for any client that tries to suck up all the bandwidth in order to throttle it down), but it continues even after I turned off the traffic shaping, so it's not that.
The rant? Now I have to contact my ISP and attempt to get them to understand that 1) I have a problem, and that 2) it is definitively being caused by something on their end, which will require being connected to someone who understands these things well enough to be just as confused as I am about what's going on.

--Patrick

Someone at your ISP is an XKCD fan?

It looks like it may have been the patch cable between the modem and my router. My speed was upgraded from 100Mbps (110ish effective) to 200Mbps (180-210 effective), then again to 300Mbps (265ish effective) BUT nobody upgraded the patch cable from standard Cat5 to at least Cat5e, meaning the link from my modem to my router officially only supported up to 100Mbps. The tech who came out did also find we had a second coax run from the distro box to our property that wasn't terminated and another few things, and also replaced our DOCSIS 3.0 modem with a newer DOCSIS 3.1 model. So who knows what the real reason was? ...but it was probably the older patch cable.

ANYWAY: On to my new rant.
Why is it so dang hard to find a new monitor??? All I want is a monitor that is:

• 240Hz
• IPS or xLED (not VA or TN)
• 10-bit HDR 400nits minimum
• At least 2K (1440p) resolution
• HDMI 2.1 (will accept 2.0) and DP 1.4
• Minimum 27in diagonal measurement
• Under US$1000

Every monitor I can find is lacking in at least ONE of these categories. Arghhhhlgl...
Oh sure, CES was full of a bunch of really interesting monitors, but most of them don't even have prices yet and aren't going to be coming out on the market until around Christmas of 2023, according to the mfrs.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

aren't going to be coming out on the market until around Christmas of 2023, according to the mfrs.

Click to expand...

Unsure if you mean manufacturers or motherfuckers.

I mean, that IS a pretty stringent level of requirements.

GasBandit said:

I mean, that IS a pretty stringent level of requirements.

Click to expand...

it is not it's perfectly normal you hush I know you are but what am I

--Patrick

240Hz is kind of a crazy requirement to me. Especially since you didn't list Freesync, or is that just a given for 240Hz monitors?

figmentPez said:

240Hz is kind of a crazy requirement to me. Especially since you didn't list Freesync, or is that just a given for 240Hz monitors?

Click to expand...

Most monitors in that class have some form of VRR included. It's practically expected at that point.
I don't know which video card I'll ultimately be using with it, so at this point which one(s) it includes is less of a concern.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

All I want is a monitor that is:

• 240Hz
• IPS or xLED (not VA or TN)
• 10-bit HDR 400nits minimum
• At least 2K (1440p) resolution
• HDMI 2.1 (will accept 2.0) and DP 1.4
• Minimum 27in diagonal measurement
• Under US$1000

Click to expand...

Eventually settled on the Gigabyte M27Q-X (US$450-ish). I ordered it on Thu afternoon from B&H and it arrived Sat 10a.
The rant? Between taxes and work schedule and other obligations, I won’t even be able to open the box until Wed afternoon at the earliest.

—Patrick

I really hate how crappy Google's search algorithms have become over the last few years.
Sick, so trying to replay some easy-on-the-mind old classics. In this case, Warlords: Battlecry. Yes, the first one.
Now, several years ago (when this was already an old game), I could use google and easily find WBC walkthroughs, guides, and all that. There are far more for WBC2 and 3, but you could easily tell them apart, tell Google not to look for those, and with the right search choices and such, it was easy to get those for the first game on the first page of results.
These days, even with literally telling it to exclude ANYTHING containing the word "sequel" or the numbers 2 or 3 or the Roman numerals or whatever, on the first 11 pages of Google results (yes, I actually went beyond the first page), I managed to find 3 links, all leading to the same walkthrough (which is not the one I'm looking for. I remember the file). Everything else is "popular" WBC3 guides, trainers, cheat lists, or WBC2 guides, sponsored links, suggestions, ads, etc.
Google has just gotten so incredibly unusable to find anything but the most popular or successful page that is somewhat tangentially related to your search terms it's appalling. If I just type in some random crap, ok, fine, but if I'm using multiple search operators MAYBE TAKE THOSE INTO ACCOUNT YOU PIECE OF CRAP.
I swear, I'd go back to using Altavista if it still existed. This can't be "the best search engine around". By now I'd damn well prefer using the Google of 2005 which actually showed what I was looking for. They're just making themselves useless.

OK, while I didn't find the actual old file I was looking for - BING returned better, more accurate results. BING.
That's like finding Internet Explorer actually providing a better experience than Chrome. Holy crap.

I, too, miss Lycos.
And Dogpile.

—Patrick

What's good for users is usually shitty for ad revenue.

What's good for ad revenue is usually shitty for users.

Companies built up a userbase in phase one, floated by investment capital that wants in on phase 2's profits.

Phase 2 is the enshittening of the user experience through monetization, because the users are now being sold as a product.

Phase 2 lasts until enough people get sick of the shittiness and move on to the next phase 1 venture that the thing in question collapses/gets sold to yahoo who shuts it down a few years later.

A week ago PatrThom said:

I won’t even be able to open the box until Wed afternoon at the earliest.

Click to expand...

Another week gone, still in the box.

--Patrick

Bubble181 said:

OK, while I didn't find the actual old file I was looking for - BING returned better, more accurate results. BING.
That's like finding Internet Explorer actually providing a better experience than Chrome. Holy crap.

Click to expand...

Modern day Bing is very much a better search engine than modern day Google. No, it's not great but despite its reputation it is decent - and that's more than Google has been able to honestly claim for years.

mikerc said:

Modern day Bing is very much a better search engine than modern day Google. No, it's not great but despite its reputation it is decent - and that's more than Google has been able to honestly claim for years.

Click to expand...

It is FAR and away superior if you're trying to find specific varieties of porn.

GasBandit said:

It is FAR and away superior if you're trying to find specific varieties of porn.

Click to expand...

The algorithm is so trained on finding what gas is looking for that it's learned to feel disgust

Ravenpoe said:

The algorithm is so trained on finding what gas is looking for that it's learned to feel disgust

Click to expand...

That's not disgust it's feeling .

GasBandit said:

It is FAR and away superior if you're trying to find specific varieties of porn.

Click to expand...

Now want a comparison of each search engine's response to the goat question.

--Patrick

OH MY GOD SO MUCH THIIIIIIS

--Patrick

Am on vac 'net so slow 4Mb/s 4000ms ping.
Civilization calls to me but not enough bars to answer.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

Am on vac 'net so slow 4Mb/s 4000ms ping.
Civilization calls to me but not enough bars to answer.

--Patrick

Click to expand...

That's enough to stream 720p from plex!

GasBandit said:

That's enough to stream 720p from plex!

Click to expand...

The drop-outs are long enough that it sometimes takes 15min before I can reconnect to HF.
The spread between my signal/noise varies between 20dB to only 3dB over 802.11n and my AP is something like 30m away.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

The drop-outs are long enough that it sometimes takes 15min before I can reconnect to HF.
The spread between my signal/noise varies between 20dB to only 3dB over 802.11n and my AP is something like 30m away.

--Patrick

Click to expand...

"Time to move out of the sticks, gentlemen." - Winston Wolfe

I'm in the middle of bumfuck nowhere in France and I have 5g here. I don't even get that at home!

Am currently here:

According to Wikipedia, they had a total population of just 136 in 2020. And I can believe it. The cell coverage map just kinda fades out as you get closer to the tip of the Keweenaw. The annual snow thermometer shows they managed to “only” get just over 21ft (6.5m) of snow this year.

—Patrick

Computers are annoyingly weird sometimes. On my PC Netflix playback stutters when subtitles appear on screen. If the subtitles remain up playback smooths back out, but if they stop then the next line of dialogue causes stutter again. Turning subtitles off makes playback smooth. But here's the weirdest part, it's only full screen, and only when the window is in focus. If I put another window in focus, even the tiniest little bit of another program in the corner of the screen, playback with subtitles is smooth. I have no idea why this is. Reminds me of an issue I had back in the WinXP days where some sort of video playback would only be smooth as long as I kept moving my mouse.

figmentPez said:

it's only full screen, and only when the window is in focus. If I put another window in focus, even the tiniest little bit of another program in the corner of the screen, playback with subtitles is smooth.

Click to expand...

This sounds like a viewport issue. The subtitles are being treated as their own window, which knocks your computer out of fullscreen (i.e., “exclusive”) mode in order to display layered windows. If your player has an option for “windowed” or “fullscrren-windowed” try that and see if that fixes it.

—Patrick

PatrThom said:

This sounds like a viewport issue. The subtitles are being treated as their own window, which knocks your computer out of fullscreen (i.e., “exclusive”) mode in order to display layered windows. If your player has an option for “windowed” or “fullscrren-windowed” try that and see if that fixes it.

—Patrick

Click to expand...

It's Netflix, the player is probably a browser.

Which leads to the next question - WHICH browser?

And, of course, what video card, and are your drivers up to date.

GasBandit said:

It's Netflix, the player is probably a browser.

Which leads to the next question - WHICH browser?

And, of course, what video card, and are your drivers up to date.

Click to expand...

Microsoft Edge, because that's the only one that does 1080p (Chrome and Firefox are limited to 720p on Windows, and Linux, according to Netflix). The issue also happened with the Netflix app, the last time I tested with it.

Video card is AMD RX 480. Graphics drivers are up to date, but this has been a periodic issue for years. At least I think there have been times when it hasn't been an issue.

figmentPez said:

Microsoft Edge, because that's the only one that does 1080p (Chrome and Firefox are limited to 720p on Windows, and Linux, according to Netflix). The issue also happened with the Netflix app, the last time I tested with it.

Video card is AMD RX 480. Graphics drivers are up to date, but this has been a periodic issue for years. At least I think there have been times when it hasn't been an issue.

Click to expand...

The app might just be a wrapper for an Edge instance without exposing the URL, a lot of crappy devs do that sort of thing.

I wonder, even at 720p, does firefox experience the same subtitle issue? This kinda smells like SmEDGEma to me.

I'd also be curious if watching something with subtitles in, say, crunchyroll or plex in a browser has the same symptoms.

GasBandit said:

I'd also be curious if watching something with subtitles in, say, crunchyroll or plex in a browser has the same symptoms.

Click to expand...

I thought that Netflix was the only problem, but I re-tested to be sure. Disney+ and Amazon Prime are fine. I don't have HBO Max anymore, so I can't retest, but it was working fine. Freevee stutters, though; which is weird because Freevee is tied to Prime Video, and I thought they were using the same player (the interface looks the same). I've tried two different Freevee shows, and they both do the subtitle stutter, but an Amazon Prime show does not.

Freevee does not have a stutter problem on Firefox (and can do 1080p*). I'll test Netflix on Firefox when I get a chance, I'm not currently logged-in there.

*Arbitrary DRM weirdness. Prime Video happily does 1080p in Firefox on Windows, but on Linux (on my Raspberry Pi, but I think in general as well) Prime is limited to 480p. Other streaming services play 720p on Linux, but won't do 1080p on Firefox+Windows. I assume this is because Microsoft has a deal with them to make Edge the "better" browser, but I can't figure out what Amazon has against Linux.

figmentPez said:

Computers are annoyingly weird sometimes. On my PC Netflix playback stutters when subtitles appear on screen. If the subtitles remain up playback smooths back out, but if they stop then the next line of dialogue causes stutter again. Turning subtitles off makes playback smooth. But here's the weirdest part, it's only full screen, and only when the window is in focus. If I put another window in focus, even the tiniest little bit of another program in the corner of the screen, playback with subtitles is smooth. I have no idea why this is. Reminds me of an issue I had back in the WinXP days where some sort of video playback would only be smooth as long as I kept moving my mouse.

Click to expand...

these guy found the same issue, and use an always-on-top window to basically 'solve' the problem without fixing it.

figmentPez said:

*Arbitrary DRM weirdness. Prime Video happily does 1080p in Firefox on Windows, but on Linux (on my Raspberry Pi, but I think in general as well) Prime is limited to 480p. Other streaming services play 720p on Linux, but won't do 1080p on Firefox+Windows.

Click to expand...

I believe this is because Widevine is required to properly play back the encrypted HD content, and Google is, uh, … resistant to providing a FOSS (and thereby reverse-engineerable) version of Widevine for the *nix crowd.

—Patrick

PatrThom said:

I believe this is because Widevine is required to properly play back the encrypted HD content, and Google is, uh, … resistant to providing a FOSS (and thereby reverse-engineerable) version of Widevine for the *nix crowd.

Click to expand...

That's the excuse for why most streaming services are limited to 720p on Linux. However, that doesn't explain why Prime Video, seemingly alone among the streaming services, is limited to 480p on Linux, while at the same time being more permissive with browser playback on Windows.

I think we’d be able to draw some conclusions if we were able to see the real-time streaming stats/metrics, but I don’t know if the respective players allow you to do that any more.

—Patrick

No Safari, but I assume this was meant to specifically represent the choices available on WinOS.
Still. Yeah. This.

--Patrick

Liked because we don't have a "this is scary" rating.

PatrThom said:

View attachment 45041

No Safari, but I assume this was meant to specifically represent the choices available on WinOS.
Still. Yeah. This.

--Patrick

Click to expand...

This meme format makes me nerd mad because it's backwards, in that scene Peter could only see clearly without his glasses.

Ravenpoe said:

This meme format makes me nerd mad because it's backwards, in that scene Peter could only see clearly without his glasses.

Click to expand...

Oh good, I wasn't the only one.

--Patrick

FIFY

Thank you, that's much better.

--Patrick

I loathe the push to make ad supported devices standard, but this one is exceptionally bad:

Telly, the ‘free’ smart TV with ads, has privacy policy red flags

First, this TV is "free" because it has a second screen dedicated to showing nothing but banner ads, and it has sensors to detect how many people are in the room watching (and probably gather a whole lot more information about them as well).

The sketchy levels get even higher when reading the privacy policy, which includes comments from someone at the company asking if they actually have the ability to delete information gathered about children under 13, as they claim to be able to do.

I hope this stinking pile of dog shit goes up in flames.

Permanent on screen banner ads just reminds me of one thing.

"GO WAY, BATIN. OW MY BALLS IS ON"

This is what Pluto does after selling to Paramount for $340mil, I guess.

--Patrick

Earlier this month, Google introduced eight new top-level domains (TLD) that could be purchased for hosting websites or email addresses.
The new domains are .dad, .esq, .prof, .phd, .nexus, .foo, and for the topic of our article, the .zip and .mov domain TLDs.
[N]ow that they are TLDs, some messaging platforms and social media sites will automatically convert file names with .zip and .mov extensions into [clickable] URLs.

Click to expand...

WHAT NO NO NO NO

--Patrick

At a certain point it gets really hard to attribute it to stupidity instead of malice.

PatrThom said:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ne...ins-spark-debate-among-cybersecurity-experts/

WHAT NO NO NO NO

--Patrick

Click to expand...

It would have to be some terrible programming indeed to mistake
https://thissite.com/thisfile.zip (obviously a file)
with
https://thissite.zip (obviously a tld)

though I suppose if you were generically discussing a file...like "open mycontent.zip in your local drive"...but how often does that come up in casual conversation?

Tinwhistler said:

It would have to be some terrible programming indeed to mistake
https://thissite.com/thisfile.zip (obviously a file)
with
https://thissite.zip (obviously a tld)

though I suppose if you were generically discussing a file...like "open mycontent.zip in your local drive"...but how often does that come up in casual conversation?

Click to expand...

"Can you download notascam.zip to keep as a backup please?"
"Hey man, you got to see this aweosme new video of Scarlett Johansson ScarJonaked.mov!"
"Please click here to download the videos of your trip to Jamaica: ScubaDiving123.zip!"

Tinwhistler said:

how often does that come up in casual conversation?

Click to expand...

Because so many client OSes automagically use logic to convert any displayed text strings that they recognize as URLs (such as "halforums.com") into clickable links, the worry is that websites, notes, emails, messages, or the like -- even ones that were created prior to these TLDs being released -- will be "gamed" by people abusing this detection logic in order to convince clueless users to visit a website. As an example of this gamed logic, imagine you are emailing a pics.ZIP file from yourself to yourself, between a work and personal computer, let's say. When you open the email on the destination computer, you will see your email "Here are those pics I needed" or whatever, and there will be the icon in the email showing the file "pics.zip," which you can click on to download the file. The email client program will of course put the name of the file under that icon (again, "pics.zip") because that's what email clients do. BUT if someone registers the http://pics.zip/ URL and sets up a site, the existing URL-detection logic on the client's computer will say, "Oh hey, that's a text string that is also a URL" and so light it up as a hyperlink which you could easily click on because you would expect it to download the linked .ZIP file. They then have their site auto-download a file named "pics.zip" which is actually something entirely different than what you expected, and you go and automatically double-click on it because innocent ol' you is expecting it to be the pics that you just sent yourself, but nope! Malicious payload!

This is something that an email client could easily be updated to avoid, but of course the threat actors are counting on it to take a while before the IT community at large comes around to guarding against this sort of thing.

--Patrick

I hadn't even considered email..which would be a major issue, I agree

Son's HDD just failed.
Well, there goes 1TB of Minecraft worlds and mods/packs, we'll see what we can salvage once the drive gets replaced.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

Son's HDD just failed.
Well, there goes 1TB of Minecraft worlds and mods/packs, we'll see what we can salvage once the drive gets replaced.

--Patrick

Click to expand...

I just bought a 16 TB external. That gives me about 40 TB spread across 8 drives RAID 10 format. Hot swapping on the fly can be so nice.

Dave said:

I just bought a 16 TB external. That gives me about 40 TB spread across 8 drives RAID 10 format. Hot swapping on the fly can be so nice.

Click to expand...

What made you decide to go raid 10 instead of, say, 5? Are you doing something that requires the faster write and rebuild time?

(I use raid 5 on my server)

I’m probably going to upgrade him to a 1TB SSD. He’s not gonna know what to do with that kind of speed.

—Patrick

GasBandit said:

What made you decide to go raid 10 instead of, say, 5? Are you doing something that requires the faster write and rebuild time?

(I use raid 5 on my server)

Click to expand...

Some of the disks are plate read so I wanted faster read/write speed. I had the extra space so fuck it. I know it uses more space but I only do it for my media/plex stuff. My M.2 drives hold my games.

Dave said:

Some of the disks are plate read so I wanted faster read/write speed. I had the extra space so fuck it. I know it uses more space but I only do it for my media/plex stuff. My M.2 drives hold my games.

Click to expand...

Well, it's not like you did anything wrong. Raid 10 is definitely the most solid way to go. But it's also the most expensive per byte.

But you get 90% of the read speed of 10 with 5 (though 66% of the write speed due to having to do parity calculations), and get to use n-1 drives worth of your total space instead of n/2. So if you had 4 10tb drives, a raid 5 would give you 30tb of space whereas a raid 10 would give you 20. And you have to expand your 10 in pairs, whereas you can expand a raid 5 1 drive at a time. 5 is a good option for those looking to get speed and redundancy for less money. And even if you're doing platter drives, motion video needs, at most, ~50 mbit per simultaneous user, and even the slowest single non-raid platter drive out there is gonna give you 600.

PatrThom said:

Son's HDD just failed.
Well, there goes 1TB of Minecraft worlds and mods/packs, we'll see what we can salvage once the drive gets replaced.
I’m probably going to upgrade him to a 1TB SSD. He’s not gonna know what to do with that kind of speed.

Click to expand...

Salvaged all of it. Put it all on freshly installed SSD.
Too bad he can't play right now because his privileges are taken away until he gets his schoolwork caught up, but at least that's complete.

My own rant: Built this new machine almost 2 years ago now. Only just last week finally installed the IGP drivers. Couldn't install 'em earlier because I had the IGP set to "Auto" in the BIOS which means it never got lit up since I never plugged anything into it, and that means 2 years where I never got to enjoy the benefit of Intel's v8 QuickSync (not that I was transcoding all that much, but still).

--Patrick

Roku has filed a patent for your TV to detect when you're paused and play 'relevant ads'. Nope, no thank you, not for me I'm afraid https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/ro...t-ads-nope-no-thank-you-not-for-me-im-afraid/

The article I saw had it titled like this:
...because what we here at Roku have determined is that you are not seeing enough ads.

--Patrick

God damn it we love our roku! You were supposed to be the chosen one!

Dave said:

God damn it we love our roku! You were supposed to be the chosen one!

Click to expand...

Here at (corporation), one of our guiding principles is line go up. Our other guiding principle is rate at which line go up go up. And we will burn any bridge and poison as many wells as we need to in the pursuit of those principles.

GasBandit said:

Here at (corporation), one of our guiding principles is line go up. Our other guiding principle is rate at which line go up go up. And we will burn any bridge and poison as many wells as we need to in the pursuit of those principles.

Click to expand...

Ah, I see you also work in (corporation). Hello, colleague. Let's go make line go up more.

Let me get this straight, local maroon-flavored university...
I have to train your IT staff to code as part of a 1 hour meeting? Well enough to make me completely unnecessary? I mean it's not like people spend years to get to the point I am or anything.

Why the FUCK do companies give you a USB cord with USB-C to USB-C ports? My PC doesn't have any USB-C plugs. I'm pretty sure MOST PCs don't.

And yet, I just bought a Rugged USB-C external hard drive. I wanted to move all my GoPro footage onto it because I'm running out space on all of my hard drives. But the only plug it comes with is a USB-C to USB-C.

I tried using the cord I use to charge my phone, a USB-A to USB-C. My computer recognizes the device, but then it does nothing. It keeps making clicking noises and doesn't show up in File Explorer.

I give up. I'm returning this POS to Best Buy tomorrow.

ThatNickGuy said:

Why the FUCK do companies give you a USB cord with USB-C to USB-C ports? My PC doesn't have any USB-C plugs. I'm pretty sure MOST PCs don't.

I tried using the cord I use to charge my phone, a USB-A to USB-C. My computer recognizes the device, but then it does nothing. It keeps making clicking noises and doesn't show up in File Explorer.

Click to expand...

USB-C started becoming "normal" on personal computers in 2016 or so.
One of the reasons it is finally spreading faster now is that USB-C ports can carry more power than USB-A ports, which are limited to just 12W or so. This means no more "hydra" Y-adapter plugs required to boost power, faster charging for phones and such, etc. The reason your drive is not working properly is likely because it is expecting at least 20-30W to come down that cord, but that would exceed USB-A's limit. You can probably get a powered hub that will make up for the power requirement, but that'll mean buying another thing that goes on your desk.

--Patrick

I can also attest that USB-C is becoming the de facto norm. Almost all the new PCs are coming with them now, and laptops have been coming with them since, as Pat says, 2016 or so. In fact, my USB-C port is pretty much the *only* port on my work laptop I use because it's what my docks connect to. And it's gotten so that I won't even consider buying a laptop that doesn't have a USB-C port that is both 100w power-accepting and Thunderbolt compatible.

Most of the pro AV laptop content inputs in the solutions we sell and program have started including USB-C connectors for laptops, many of them also delivering 60w or more to keep the laptop powered by that same port while getting video from them. They also join the room's cameras, mics, and speakers so that the entire room can be used in zoom/teams/webex/discord/whatever for videoconferencing.

So yeah, I understand that there's a lot of legacy gear out there, but for things to really be getting serious... the kid gloves come off, and USB-C is a standard that serious users insist on.

Heck, the dock connector for the Steam Deck is USB-C.

ThatNickGuy said:

I'm pretty sure MOST PCs don't.

Click to expand...

I'm absolutely positive you're wrong. Laptops have been outselling desktop computers for about a decade now, and every single modern laptop has USB-C ports.

figmentPez said:

I'm absolutely positive you're wrong. Laptops have been outselling desktop computers for about a decade now, and every single modern laptop has USB-C ports.

Click to expand...

This is just anecdotal, but since 2015, I've had two new PC towers and a laptop. None of them have a USB-C port.

It's true that there were some holdouts who didn't want to add the new ports. Maybe they thought it was a passing fad, another new connector that wasn't going to go anywhere, or maybe they would just add one as a kind of token gesture, but the momentum definitely accelerated, and they're just about everywhere now. Especially what with Europe mandating them, and all.

--Patrick

The alienware desktop computer I bought in 2022 has 4 USB C ports in the back and one in the front.

The laptop I bought years before that has 2 usb C ports as well

My tower desktop does not have a USB-C connector, but it's 10 years old now.
My work laptop has one USB-A connector and three or four USB-CS, (depending on if you include the one for the power cord/docking station).
And yes, like Pat said, a lot of it has to do with power throughput.
Having said that, I've been annoyed by only getting a C-to-C connector too.

Whoever decided that wifi network adapters should require drivers that must be downloaded from the internet should be shot.

My TV, also my computer monitor, is slowly going out. it's darkening from the bottom up. Saddening. I'm not prepared to buy a new one, and there's no way I could afford one I would want.

blotsfan said:

Whoever decided that wifi network adapters should require drivers that must be downloaded from the internet should be shot.

Click to expand...

The first step on any new build is always to go to another computer to download the drivers to put on a floppy USB stick and hand-carry over to the new build so I can download and install the everything else.

--Patrick

Well, my HDD seems to have died. My computer is old as Dave, so I have a small 128 GB boot SSD, and a 2 TB HDD for games, files, everything else. And suddenly that last one is gone. Boot can't find it, Windows cant find, it's like it's physically not there.
Minor rant so far because I haven't investigated yet, off to cable management etc we go I guess...

....OK, the first thing I tried - replace the power connector from the PSU to the HDD with another loose connecter that was left over - solved it. I thought. The drive was visible again in Windows Explorer, Steam could see it and even say how muc hof it was Steam and how much of it was other stuff....Try to install anything....Disk write error. And after another reboot, the drive is gone again. Hrmph.

Connected it to another connector on the same cable, and it's showing again - and now usable...For the time being. I don't have much faith in this drive right now.

I'd get any data you want off of it immediately.

...in small, controlled bursts. Like, one folder at a time.

--Patrick

And do not try to write anything new to that drive.

Yeah, intend to do that. But it's about 3/4 full and I don't have THAT many external disk space lying around.
Though most of it is gog/steam stuff I could download again if necessary. Save games, some weird abandonware stuff, documents and photos will be moved shortly though.

Trying to copy stuff off, fails;..chkdsk > station type is RAW. Uh-oh. Booted again, no drives to be found. Booted again, drives are NTFS again, and chkdsk finds no errors at all. Right, sure.
Don't know what's going in with it, but obviously it's not going to last much longer.
Which again raises the question of if it's even worth getting a new HDD for this PC or I just just get a bigger SSD now, or just build a new PC - I'm overdue as it is but I'm sure Patrick will tell me it's just not the right time now :-P

Case for new computer build arrived. has a scratch all along the glass pane side. I was hoping to build it next week, but with return times being what they are, that's never going to happen now.

I fucking hate Xfinity/Comcast. My internet is only about half working right now. I can get to some sites okay-ish, but some other sites (like xfinity dot com) won't load at all. When trying to get to stuff like Netflix, DisneyPlus, and YouTube I'll periodically get bumped to a page telling me that my device has been paused and that I need to go to Xfinity's website and unpause it. I'm the only one who should have access to my account. If I turn off the WiFi on my phone I can get the Xfinity app to work, and it'll tell me that my network is fine, and that none of my devices are paused.

Trying to use Xfnity's automated system just tells me that everything is working, and that if I want to do more I'll have to schedule a technician to stop by in person. The earliest appointment they have is three days from now, and I know that if I schedule that it'll come with the threat of making me pay money if they don't find any problems.

Fuck Xfinity and their "limited" monopoly.

figmentPez said:

I fucking hate Xfinity/Comcast. My internet is only about half working right now. I can get to some sites okay-ish, but some other sites (like xfinity dot com) won't load at all. When trying to get to stuff like Netflix, DisneyPlus, and YouTube I'll periodically get bumped to a page telling me that my device has been paused and that I need to go to Xfinity's website and unpause it. I'm the only one who should have access to my account. If I turn off the WiFi on my phone I can get the Xfinity app to work, and it'll tell me that my network is fine, and that none of my devices are paused.

Trying to use Xfnity's automated system just tells me that everything is working, and that if I want to do more I'll have to schedule a technician to stop by in person. The earliest appointment they have is three days from now, and I know that if I schedule that it'll come with the threat of making me pay money if they don't find any problems.

Fuck Xfinity and their "limited" monopoly.

Click to expand...

Disabling MoCA seems to have fixed my problem. While technically this may mean that the problem was closer to my end than theirs, I'm still baffled at how this issue isn't just automatically detected by their system. Surely if there are two cable modems on two different accounts that are causing conflicts by trying to connect with each other, their system should be able to recognize that?

figmentPez said:

Disabling MoCA seems to have fixed my problem. While technically this may mean that the problem was closer to my end than theirs, I'm still baffled at how this issue isn't just automatically detected by their system. Surely if there are two cable modems on two different accounts that are causing conflicts by trying to connect with each other, their system should be able to recognize that?

Click to expand...

You're expecting competency from Xfinity?

You always suspected it, and now there's even more evidence for it.

The agency claims that it is legal for phones and devices to listen to users. Cox says this is made possible by including consent to use Active Listening in the multi-page terms of use agreements – which few people ever read – that appear with new app downloads or updates.

Click to expand...

--Patrick

Of all the absolutely BONEheaded things you could do, this has to rank right up there with Russian soldiers leaving their cellphones going when in the field.

--Patrick

Computer died last night. Bought a replacement today. Will not be posting specs, because I cannot handle any criticism right now. It's a pre-built that's on the cheaper side, and it just needs to be enough to keep me from freaking out.

I was already stressed from moving physical locations, I did not want to have to move PCs, too.

UGH, I really hate setting up a new PC. So many settings to fix, programs to install, sites to login to. Hopefully installing the old drives into this new PC will work.

First Nvidia graphics card in over 20 years. I've been all ATI/AMD since I got a Radeon 7500. My last Nvidia graphics card was a RIVA TNT.

So stressful.

figmentPez said:

Will not be posting specs, because I cannot handle any criticism right now.

Click to expand...

The best camera computer is the one you have on you.
It's not that prebuilts are always garbage, it's just that their inevitable compromises are ones not of your choosing. If the choice was between "I need a computer NOW" and "Wait three weeks to build a better system," then that's completely understandable. If you ever want to start looking for upgrades, you know we'll be there for you.

--Patrick

I concur. If all my PCs broke tomorrow, I'd be buying the firstest, localest, whateverest thing I could get just to get back online here, and worry about the rest later. Hell, I might do a $99 chromebook, if those are still a thing.

I can't remember what thread I last posted about my PC woes in, but holy shit this PC has been one of the most obnoxious I've owned since Packard Bell.

The short version:

Bought a CyberPowerPC from Costco because it seemed like a reasonable deal and they've got a good return policy. Got it home, got it up and running, and started getting random restarts with blue screens saying "critcal_process_died" within the first day of owning it. Tried to restore Windows, and that failed. Could only restore by wiping all the stuff I'd installed. Ended up getting blue screens and reboots again. So I returned it and got a replacement of the same model. Same type of crashes and reboots happened with the replacement, so it's likely software and not hardware.

Also had electrical problems with microwave (display flickering, replaced under warranty) and humidity sensor activated bathroom fan (replaced with a dumb switch), so we had an electrician come out to check for issues, none found.

Restored Windows to fresh again, scanned everything for malware, ran chkdsk, ran memtest, didn't find any problems. Chkdsk has never found any problems, regardless of when it's been run. I updated my MoBo's firmware, but that didn't help. Eventually figured out that GigaByte Control Center was routinely crashing, probably while trying to install drivers. Uninstalled GCC, and manually installed as many drivers as I knew how to, and had about a week of stability. Played Saints Row 2022 and Nobody Saves the World without issue. Only persistent problem was video hitching when I was playing something in the background while scrolling through a site loading a lot of small videos (e.g. Imgur, Tumblr, etc.). Then I was trying to play the FF4 randomizer while watching Netflix, so RetroArch running bsnes in one window with MS Edge playing video in another, and the whole display would occasionally freeze and recover.

Trying to troubleshoot this error, which I thought might be tied to a missing DLL that was showing up in Windows event log, I installed C++ distributables, and that's when things went very wrong. I started getting critcal_process_died errors within minutes of booting. Most of the time I couldn't do anything before the system froze up and bluescreened.

My current theory is that GigaByte Control Center didn't do a good job of uninstalling itself, and that missing DLLs were the only thing keeping part of it from starting up and crashing again. Though I could be wrong. Currently I've had Windows wipe everything and try to start afresh. Havne't crashed yet, but then I've only installed Firefox thus far. I told GCC that it can fuck off, and hopefully never installing it in the first place will keep things from devolving into crashing again.

Oh, and this last bout of constant crashing came while I was really sick. I've spent most of the last 4 days laying in bed exhausted. Even when I haven't been sleeping I've been lying down because I'm slightly dizzy and very tired. Left my computer completely off for like an entire day because I coudln't do anything with while I was so tired. Thank goodness for being able to use my Raspberry Pi and my phone to stream stuff to entertain myself.

Stuff like this makes me wish you lived closer. Nobody should have to go through this, prebuilt or otherwise.

--Patrick

figmentPez said:

I can't remember what thread I last posted about my PC woes in, but holy shit this PC has been one of the most obnoxious I've owned since Packard Bell.

The short version:

Bought a CyberPowerPC from Costco because it seemed like a reasonable deal and they've got a good return policy. Got it home, got it up and running, and started getting random restarts with blue screens saying "critcal_process_died" within the first day of owning it. Tried to restore Windows, and that failed. Could only restore by wiping all the stuff I'd installed. Ended up getting blue screens and reboots again. So I returned it and got a replacement of the same model. Same type of crashes and reboots happened with the replacement, so it's likely software and not hardware.

Also had electrical problems with microwave (display flickering, replaced under warranty) and humidity sensor activated bathroom fan (replaced with a dumb switch), so we had an electrician come out to check for issues, none found.

Restored Windows to fresh again, scanned everything for malware, ran chkdsk, ran memtest, didn't find any problems. Chkdsk has never found any problems, regardless of when it's been run. I updated my MoBo's firmware, but that didn't help. Eventually figured out that GigaByte Control Center was routinely crashing, probably while trying to install drivers. Uninstalled GCC, and manually installed as many drivers as I knew how to, and had about a week of stability. Played Saints Row 2022 and Nobody Saves the World without issue. Only persistent problem was video hitching when I was playing something in the background while scrolling through a site loading a lot of small videos (e.g. Imgur, Tumblr, etc.). Then I was trying to play the FF4 randomizer while watching Netflix, so RetroArch running bsnes in one window with MS Edge playing video in another, and the whole display would occasionally freeze and recover.

Trying to troubleshoot this error, which I thought might be tied to a missing DLL that was showing up in Windows event log, I installed C++ distributables, and that's when things went very wrong. I started getting critcal_process_died errors within minutes of booting. Most of the time I couldn't do anything before the system froze up and bluescreened.

My current theory is that GigaByte Control Center didn't do a good job of uninstalling itself, and that missing DLLs were the only thing keeping part of it from starting up and crashing again. Though I could be wrong. Currently I've had Windows wipe everything and try to start afresh. Havne't crashed yet, but then I've only installed Firefox thus far. I told GCC that it can fuck off, and hopefully never installing it in the first place will keep things from devolving into crashing again.

Oh, and this last bout of constant crashing came while I was really sick. I've spent most of the last 4 days laying in bed exhausted. Even when I haven't been sleeping I've been lying down because I'm slightly dizzy and very tired. Left my computer completely off for like an entire day because I coudln't do anything with while I was so tired. Thank goodness for being able to use my Raspberry Pi and my phone to stream stuff to entertain myself.

Click to expand...

It looks like it's a common error:


Most common solution seems to be wiping all the pre-installed data and doing a full windows reinstall, which sounds like you've already done, but given just how prominent this error seems to be with this exact manufacturer, if you're still within the return period I'd consider refunding and getting a different computer.

Ravenpoe said:

It looks like it's a common error:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CYBERPOWERPC/comments/1f7k0cd/critical_process_died_error_cpsupport/

Most common solution seems to be wiping all the pre-installed data and doing a full windows reinstall, which sounds like you've already done, but given just how prominent this error seems to be with this exact manufacturer, if you're still within the return period I'd consider refunding and getting a different computer.

Click to expand...

I'm going to try to talk my mother into doing just that. She doesn't want to abuse Costco's return policy, but this really seems to be a case of a defective product line.

My latest re-install of Windows has started crashing again, and I've only got Firefox, Chrome and Steam installed. I though Gigabyte Control Center was messing things up, but that's not it.

I'm fucking exhausted. If I can convince my mom that I should just buy a different computer all together, can anyone help me figure out a good pre-built to buy for ~$850 or less? It's really hard to shop around for a PC when your PC isn't working.

figmentPez said:

I'm fucking exhausted. If I can convince my mom that I should just buy a different computer all together, can anyone help me figure out a good pre-built to buy for ~$850 or less? It's really hard to shop around for a PC when your PC isn't working.

Click to expand...

I'm a bit of an Asus fanboy. If I were getting a computer at Costco, it'd probably be this one (But it is online only)


It's got a solid processor and a good amount of ram, but only an intel GPU. But that can be upgraded later when you can afford it.

Could you do a Steam Deck?

I don't have to buy from Costco, and I'm pretty sure I want a desktop.

I have thought about a Steam Deck, but I'm hesitant to have a Linux handheld as my only PC. Especially since I would not use it's portable features much.

GasBandit said:

I'm a bit of an Asus fanboy. If I were getting a computer at Costco, it'd probably be this one (But it is online only)

https://www.costco.com/asus-s5-mini-tower-desktop-s501mer---13th-gen-intel-core-i7-13700---windows-11.product.4000266670.html

It's got a solid processor and a good amount of ram, but only an intel GPU. But that can be upgraded later when you can afford it.

Click to expand...

I'll keep looking. Upgrading later has historically been an issue. It'd probably be easier to try to get any sort of gaming capable card now, than do an upgrade later.

figmentPez said:

I don't have to buy from Costco, and I'm pretty sure I want a desktop.

I have thought about a Steam Deck, but I'm hesitant to have a Linux handheld as my only PC. Especially since I would not use it's portable features much.

Click to expand...

I understand your trepidation. I kinda felt the same way, til I got one. Now I'm done buying windows PCs - my next gaming PC is going to be a Steam Deck (and a dual monitor USB-C dock).

I'm still sick, so this really sucks. I don't feel competent to be doing this right now, but I don't want to be without a PC any longer than I have to be. I'm typing this post on my Raspberry Pi while watching a movie on my phone.

Anyway, specs of the PC I have now that is crashing:
Intel i5 14400F
32GB DDR5
Nvidia Geforce RTX 4060 8GB
2TB NVME SSD

Looking around that would be a damn good set of specs for the price, if it worked. I can't find anything with that much RAM and storage for the same price.

My price range is not set in stone, but I also need to remind myself that a reliable PC is better than a flaky one with better specs.

Okay, I'm starting to feel dizzy from sitting up too long.

figmentPez said:

Looking around that would be a damn good set of specs for the price

Click to expand...

I would say that is firmly in "too good to be true" territory, personally. I would expect to pay ~$1000 for those specs... though I'd probably insist on an i7 which would probably take it to $1200.

GasBandit said:

though I'd probably insist on an i7 which would probably take it to $1200.

Click to expand...

That depends entirely on what it's going to be used for. If it's just going to be for games and web browsing, you can get away with a pretty low spec cpu and save a lot of money.

Ravenpoe said:

That depends entirely on what it's going to be used for. If it's just going to be for games and web browsing, you can get away with a pretty low spec cpu and save a lot of money.

Click to expand...

There's been a number of games now that are starting to shift some load back from the GPU to the CPU (especially VR titles, though Pez may not be interested in that), but I've been noticing a LOT more CPU load in games lately that make it so that I'd call the i5 a bare minimum and i7 a happy medium.

Even here as I sit playing baldur's gate 3 and idle champions while web browsing in windows 10, my CPU is pulling about 80%. Granted it is MANY generations behind, but I have definitely noticed a trend over the last few years for game devs to stop leaving those idle CPU cycles on the proverbial table.

GasBandit said:

as I sit playing baldur's gate 3 and idle champions while web browsing in windows 10, my CPU is pulling about 80%.

Click to expand...

The biggest question here is core/thread utilization. Is that 8 cores* each running at 80%? Or is that 7 cores maxed out at 100% and one core practically idle?

--Patrick
*Assuming 4+4 due to hyperthreading.

PatrThom said:

The biggest question here is core/thread utilization. Is that 8 cores* each running at 80%? Or is that 7 cores maxed out at 100% and one core practically idle?

--Patrick
*Assuming 4+4 due to hyperthreading.

Click to expand...

8 at 80.

figmentPez said:

specs of the PC I have now that is crashing:
Intel i5 14400F
32GB DDR5
Nvidia Geforce RTX 4060 8GB
2TB NVME SSD

Click to expand...

Do you know if the motherboard is B760 or H770? Also which brand is the SSD?
<checks Costco site>
Ok so it's B760...
<checks Gigabyte's site>
...and going by the pictures has to be either Gigabyte's B760M D3HP or B760M G AX motherboard (because white southbridge) but has to be the D3HP because it has 2x PCIe x1 slots listed in the specs (G AX only has one).

Things to look for:
-If this IS indeed the D3HP motherboard (and CPU-Z should confirm if it is), then make sure you update to the F5 BIOS which is suppose to finally fix the CPU microcode voltage crashing thing that's been kicking Intel's behind for the last two years. This update just came out Sept 27th, so it's likely your board might not have it yet.
-If it already has the F5 BIOS, then make sure you're using the "Intel defaults" setting rather than any performance settings. Better to lose a few FPS but not crash, right?
-Your SSD should be installed in the upper M.2 slot (the one between the GPU and the CPU), and NOT the lower slot (the one near the white southbridge).
-If you only have 2 memory modules installed, they should be installed one into the slot closest to the CPU (should be labeled "B2") and the third one from the CPU (should be labeled "A2"). If it's 4 then obviously one in each.
-If you are only using 2 memory modules, try locking the RAM speed in the BIOS to DDR5-4800 (PC5-38400). If you are using 4 memory modules, instead lock it to DDR5-4400 (PC5-35200). Memory is supposed to step down the speed when you double up the modules, but in case it is trying to overclock itself (because XMPGaMerZ), locking it down to the slower speed might tame it. This assumes your memory is rated for 4800/38400 speed or higher. If the labels on the RAM do NOT say DDR5-4800/PC5-38400 or higher, then definitely lock the RAM speed to whatever lower number is printed on the modules.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

...and going by the pictures has to be either Gigabyte's B760M D3HP or B760M G AX motherboard (because white southbridge) but has to be the D3HP because it has 2x PCIe x1 slots listed in the specs (G AX only has one).

Click to expand...

It's a B760M C and I have updated the BIOS to the latest version.

I'll check on the rest of your advice after I shower and lie down for a while. Even after over a week of being sick, I took a turn for the worse today.

EDIT: the SSD is Western Digital, from memory, but I'll get you specifics later.

figmentPez said:

It's a B760M C

Click to expand...

Well then their website pic is a LIAR.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

Well then their website pic is a LIAR.

--Patrick

Click to expand...

Costco's listed specs are wrong, too. It's only got 1 place for a 5" internal drive, not two. And that's just screw holes in the bottom of the case.

Anyway, does anyone know what MSI's current reputation is, and what does anyone think of this deal?

MSI AEGIS R 13NUD-461US (i7-13700F RTX 4060Ti) - $949.00

-The i7 CPU on that deal is far better than the i5 in your current rig.
-GPUs are almost the same, but the second one is better.
-RAM is the same (possibly better, if your current rig has 4x modules instead of just 2).
-SSD is half the size, so you'll probably want to upgrade that to a PCIe 4.0 2TB at a later time, but PCIe 3.0 1TB should be enough for a while, so long as you're ok shuffling things back and forth to the HDD whenever you want to switch.
-WiFi is identical. Ethernet is faster, but don't know if you'll notice, depending on your router.
-PSU is 50W better on the MSI.

The MSI seems like a better deal all around (except for the SSD), though of course if you go for it I would make sure to check for that BIOS update right away if one is available. As far as MSI's reputation goes, they are middle-of-the-road for reliability.

--Patrick

figmentPez said:

Anyway, does anyone know what MSI's current reputation is, and what does anyone think of this deal?

MSI AEGIS R 13NUD-461US (i7-13700F RTX 4060Ti) - $949.00

Click to expand...

Went ahead and ordered this one.

The dud PC has gotten so bad that it can't even fully load the desktop, except in safe mode. A normal boot starts to freeze before the system tray icons load in, and bluescreens into a reboot shortly after. I can't even get it to restore Windows, it just says that something went wrong.

It runs in safe mode, though, seemingly indefinitely. At least that allowed me to check that none of my files remain on the drive (at least not obviously). Maybe I just wasn't spending enough time in safe mode for the instability to hit.

Maybe CyberpowerPC can figure out what component is causing all this havoc, when they try to refurbish it / salvage the parts, but I sure as heck have no idea what caused all this. Temperatures were fine whenever I checked. Chkdsk never showed anything but minor errors, and mostly nothing. Windows Defender never found any infected files. None of my data was lost, except when I wiped it to restore Windows to as pristine a state as possible. I had a couple of long stretches of stability to play Saints Row 2022 and Nobody Saves the World, and Saints Row only crashed on me once or twice (which is actually pretty damn impressive for a game known to be buggy and unpolished).

Probably should have run memtest on this one while it was stable. I did run that on the first dud, but didn't get any errors in the hour that I ran it.

Oh well. Guess I get my internet via my phone and Raspberry Pi for an estimated 5 - 7 days. ($24 for overnight shipping didn't seem like good value.)

At this point, I want to tear into it just for closure's sake, like WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU??? The computer specs show it is built primarily with off-the-shelf parts, none of which appear to be proprietary, so there is no good reason why it and its brethren should fail so frequently just because of whose name plate is attached to the exterior of the box. There has to be some common thread, and I'm willing to bet it's going to be a spectacularly dumb one, at that.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

At this point, I want to tear into it just for closure's sake, like WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU??? The computer specs show it is built primarily with off-the-shelf parts, none of which appear to be proprietary, so there is no good reason why it and its brethren should fail so frequently just because of whose name plate is attached to the exterior of the box. There has to be some common thread, and I'm willing to bet it's going to be a spectacularly dumb one, at that.

Click to expand...

My pet theory, and it's based on very little, is that something went wrong with assembly/manufacture (newbie bending pins? A batch of bad capacitors? who knows.) A $150 instant rebate making an already good price into a too-good-to-be-true deal? Maybe CyberPowerPC knows there are issues, and they're trying to cycle units out as quickly as possible so they can get enough units back to refurbish in a large batch.

I would propose that you are conspiracy theorizing...BUT I've already seen too many PCs where someone plugs every accessory into the same power rail, or tries to plug the MLB +4+4 power cables into the GPU's 8-pin connector (there's a reason it doesn't fit there, buddy!), or tries to connect the front panel audio to a USB header (doesn't fit there, either!) or plugs a PCIe card into a slot that specifically says "resources shared with USB ports 4&5, pick one" -- junk like that.

--Patrick

It doesn't even have to be every single unit. If, hypothetically, 10% of the units are faulty, that's still way above what I've read is the average (about 1 - 5% within the warranty period). Getting two duds in a row would still be a 1 in 100 chance, but far from implausible.

figmentPez said:

It doesn't even have to be every single unit.

Click to expand...

Oh, believe me...when someone tells me, "Everyone on the Internet is talking about this problem!" I think "Sure they are, buddy. Sure they are."

--Patrick

figmentPez said:

Went ahead and ordered this one.

Click to expand...

While I wait for my new PC to arrive, I've got a janky temporary setup. I'm surfing the web on a Raspberry Pi 4, but since that can't play video and surf the web at the same time I'm borrowing a Roku from my parents, and it's plugged into an old monitor sitting on a stool next to my desk. Since the speakers on that monitor suck I'm using a bluetooth speaker with a line-in connected to the headphone jack on the monitor.

I think I'm past being sick, but now allergy season is hitting me like a sack of hammers. So I'm still suffering, but I'm also getting less sleep, and my anxiety is ramped up. Technically I've got more energy, but I'm not really capable of doing much with it.

Things are really not going well for me. I hope that changes soon.

figmentPez said:

Went ahead and ordered this one.

Click to expand...

Still waiting on it to arrive. Didn't get a tracking number until the 27th, which then showed that it had already been moving around in Amazon's warehouses since the 25, making it's way from Hoboken, NJ to Katy, TX. There has not been any update since. Supposedly Woot/Amazon is handing the package off to USPS, but nothing has been logged.

Hopefully I won't be waiting as long as @GasBandit did for his PineTime smartwatch.

figmentPez said:

Hopefully I won't be waiting as long as @GasBandit did for his PineTime smartwatch.

Click to expand...

I still haven't gotten it. I've basically given up.

PatrThom said:

At this point, I want to tear into it just for closure's sake, like WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU???

Click to expand...

Reddit recommended a thread to me, which had comments about updating the firmware on the WD SDD.

October 16: https://community.wd.com/t/critical...that-can-cause-bsod-on-windows-11-24h2/298372


The SSD in the model I had is on that list.

Wish I'd found this info before returning the PC.

Dangit, I knew about that, too. But the WD SSD was mentioned only in passing, and didn't trigger putting the two together.
reddit also recommended this one to me:

--Patrick

figmentPez said:

Still waiting on it to arrive. Didn't get a tracking number until the 27th, which then showed that it had already been moving around in Amazon's warehouses since the 25, making it's way from Hoboken, NJ to Katy, TX. There has not been any update since. Supposedly Woot/Amazon is handing the package off to USPS, but nothing has been logged.

Click to expand...

The same model I had ordered went up for sale again on Woot, this time $50 cheaper. That got me to bug support again, and I could not get any sort of meaningful response from email, so I was forced to make a fucking phone call. They finally admitted that it was lost in shipment. So I had my order refunded, and re-ordered at the lower price (they could not just price match and send me a replacement). This time I paid the extra $24 for 1-day shipping, in hopes that the extra charge will mean they'll work harder to actually get my package to me.

I just want to play video games on a larger screen again!

figmentPez said:

I just want to play video games on a larger screen again!

Click to expand...

Okay, not just that. There are a lot of things I miss about having a full fledged desktop PC. A Raspberry Pi is surprisingly capable as a makeshift computer, but there are definitely shortcomings. Which I won't rant about now, because I need to get back to making dinner.

I was very frustrated that my computer did not ship/arrive on Monday because the estimated delivery date was Nov 11, but eventually I realized that Monday was Veteran's Day, a federal holiday. Apparently Woot's automated system does not account for holidays (and possibly not even weekends).

figmentPez said:

I was very frustrated that my computer did not ship/arrive on Monday because the estimated delivery date was Nov 11, but eventually I realized that Monday was Veteran's Day, a federal holiday. Apparently Woot's automated system does not account for holidays (and possibly not even weekends).

Click to expand...

Are you fucking kidding me? My computer still hasn't shipped.

I am so tired of this bullshit.

The CTRL key on my laptop keyboard is sticking. When I press it, sometimes it'll register as "pressed" for an extra few seconds. This occasionally happens to other keys nearby, such as SHIFT and ALT, but it's most prominently happening to my CTRL key. This is detrimental to both my gaming and my typing.

I've tried removing the key and cleaning out underneath it, but it hasn't helped much. I suspect it's an issue with the membrane.

I could maybe send the laptop in for checks and repairs, but then I wouldn't have a laptop for a while, and that sucks.

This laptop is about 3 years old, so it's not completely outrageous to look into getting a new one... but to be honest it was a pretty expensive laptop when I bought it, and I initially chose this one because I wanted future-proofing. I didn't want to have to get a new one just a few years down the line.

I am annoyed.

bhamv3 said:

The CTRL key on my laptop keyboard is sticking. When I press it, sometimes it'll register as "pressed" for an extra few seconds. This occasionally happens to other keys nearby, such as SHIFT and ALT, but it's most prominently happening to my CTRL key. This is detrimental to both my gaming and my typing.

I've tried removing the key and cleaning out underneath it, but it hasn't helped much. I suspect it's an issue with the membrane.

I could maybe send the laptop in for checks and repairs, but then I wouldn't have a laptop for a while, and that sucks.

This laptop is about 3 years old, so it's not completely outrageous to look into getting a new one... but to be honest it was a pretty expensive laptop when I bought it, and I initially chose this one because I wanted future-proofing. I didn't want to have to get a new one just a few years down the line.

I am annoyed.

Click to expand...

You could still plug in an external keyboard. Heck, when I'm at home I never use the built-in keyboard because I have it on a dock.

Also I would be willing to bet that the keyboard on that laptop is modular and replaceable. It's probably just held in by screws and attached to the motherboard with a ribbon cable. Replacing it would probably be easy to do yourself.

figmentPez said:

Are you fucking kidding me? My computer still hasn't shipped.

I am so tired of this bullshit.

Click to expand...

I finally have a tracking number, and a new estimated delivery date of Monday the 18th.

Woot also refunded the $24 that I paid for one-day shipping. Which is something, I guess.

Went down to the repair shop and they replaced my keyboard in about two hours. It cost less than 1/20th of what a new laptop would've cost.

"1:15 pm A carrier delay has occurred."

Are you god damn fucking kidding me????

figmentPez said:

"1:15 pm A carrier delay has occurred."

Are you god damn fucking kidding me????

Click to expand...

Nearly three full days later and my package is still stuck in limbo. There have been no updates to the tracking since that message. All that happened is that the status changed from "delivery by 11pm Nov 18" to "Delayed".

I emailed customer service on the evening of the 19th. I still haven't heard back. I called customer service this morning, and they tried to act like it's normal for a package shipped via 1-day shipping to go completely silent for three days.

This is not acceptable, but I get the impression that it's becoming increasingly common for Amazon's shipping services.

Tomorrow it will have been one month since I first placed my order for a computer from Woot.

figmentPez said:

Nearly three full days later and my package is still stuck in limbo. There have been no updates to the tracking since that message. All that happened is that the status changed from "delivery by 11pm Nov 18" to "Delayed".

I emailed customer service on the evening of the 19th. I still haven't heard back. I called customer service this morning, and they tried to act like it's normal for a package shipped via 1-day shipping to go completely silent for three days.

This is not acceptable, but I get the impression that it's becoming increasingly common for Amazon's shipping services.

Tomorrow it will have been one month since I first placed my order for a computer from Woot.

Click to expand...

dude I had something shipped two Mondays ago 2-day priority, it arrived on Tuesday of this week, you are in good company.

I'm still waiting on that smartwatch. I'm out way less money and inconvenience than Pez, to be sure, but shipping sure has gone to shit lately, yeah.

There's a lot of crap to be said about FedEx, UPS, USPS, DHL and co (a LOT), but Amazon's own delivery service is without a doubt the crappiest one with among the worst service and highest delays. Something about paying peanuts and getting monkeys. r/fedexers and similar are all full of people trying to get from Amazon to FedEx (or other transportation companies).

I'm dreading calling back customer service, because I'm afraid that cancelling the order is the only viable option at this point. I just don't want to have to go through the stress of searching through more computers and once again having to make a decision to spend money. I have literally been in tears multiple times dreading having to go through that stress again. I'm so tired of trying to find the right PC to buy.

figmentPez said:

I'm so tired of trying to find the right PC to buy.

Click to expand...

It's not just you. It is such a terrible time to buy a new PC right now.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

It's not just you. It is such a terrible time to buy a new PC right now.

Click to expand...

That's not really helping bring my stress levels down.

figmentPez said:

That's not really helping bring my stress levels down.

Click to expand...

My apologies. This was intended to reassure you that the Universe is not specifically targeting Pez, the difficulty is one being shared by all.

--Patrick

Anyway, to try to help me figure out what deal I should settle for:

1. Disregarding my budget, what would you buy if you were trying to get the most bang for your buck from a computer that you intend to keep for a while?

2. What would you do to expand the storage on a system that only comes with a 1TB SSD?

3. Is getting 32GB of RAM important compared to 16GB?

I'm so tired of sorting through all this shit. I'm still kicking myself for not being able to figure out that the SDD on the CyberPowerPC needed to have it's firmware updated. FUCK.

Should I be looking at laptops at all? I'm still hesitant to go with a Steam Deck, since I intend to do most of my gaming on a monitor, and I haven't looked into what you do for cloud storage (Dropbox and Google Drive) on Linux, among many other things that may not be coming to my stress addled mind.

Any help in picking a PC, or better understanding how much money I can justify spending, would be really helpful. I need a new PC, I'm going nuts without one.

And now I can't even talk to Woot customer service. I get put on hold and then the call hangs up on me.

figmentPez said:

Anyway, to try to help me figure out what deal I should settle for:

1. Disregarding my budget, what would you buy if you were trying to get the most bang for your buck from a computer that you intend to keep for a while?

2. What would you do to expand the storage on a system that only comes with a 1TB SSD?

3. Is getting 32GB of RAM important compared to 16GB?

I'm so tired of sorting through all this shit. I'm still kicking myself for not being able to figure out that the SDD on the CyberPowerPC needed to have it's firmware updated. FUCK.

Should I be looking at laptops at all? I'm still hesitant to go with a Steam Deck, since I intend to do most of my gaming on a monitor, and I haven't looked into what you do for cloud storage (Dropbox and Google Drive) on Linux, among many other things that may not be coming to my stress addled mind.

Any help in picking a PC, or better understanding how much money I can justify spending, would be really helpful. I need a new PC, I'm going nuts without one.

Click to expand...

It's really hard to say "Here's what you should buy regardless of budget" because the top end of budget is limitless, you can always spend more, but the amount you spend for the performance increased is going to have diminishing returns. Some people need those higher marks, some people don't, I'm going to guess you don't.

So instead, what's your budget you're looking to spend, and what are you looking to do. Mostly playing games? Are you keeping your monitor? What's the resolution and refresh rate of your monitor. Is it 4k? 2K? 1080p? What are some of your favorite games, or what are some games you'd really like to be able to play?

Gimme a short list of those answers and I'll see if I can come up with something. I really enjoy building and shopping for computers. Though do note that my opinions and Pats differ on what one should focus on, because I know he'll have some slightly different answers to what I'll give (hint, if your budget is really constrained I'm going to skimp a lot more on the cpu, he doesn't like to do that)

Ravenpoe said:

but the amount you spend for the performance increased is going to have diminishing returns.

Click to expand...

That's why I said "bang for the buck". I'm trying to figure out what the god damn fucking price break is. Where does price to get more start to skyrocket? Where is the floor where saving a buck means loosing a lot of utility? Anything to help me narrow down the choices. FFS.

I'm too upset right now to answer more. God dammit. I'm not completely unaware of the concept that computers have a nearly unlimited price ceiling. I'm just trying to figure out what the current pricing curve is.

I'm trying to not take my frustration out on others, but I want to scream right now.

figmentPez said:

That's why I said "bang for the buck". I'm trying to figure out what the god damn fucking price break is. Where does price to get more start to skyrocket? Where is the floor where saving a buck means loosing a lot of utility? Anything to help me narrow down the choices. FFS.

I'm too upset right now to answer more. God dammit. I'm not completely unaware of the concept that computers have a nearly unlimited price ceiling. I'm just trying to figure out what the current pricing curve is.

I'm trying to not take my frustration out on others, but I want to scream right now.

Click to expand...

Well, for about $600 I can give you a parts list that will play just about any modern game at 1080p max settings no problem, and higher resolution at around medium settings with also no problem, though 4k is going to be limited if you care about that (I think 2k is the sweet spot).

For a thousand dollars, probably closer to around 1200 or 1300 dollars, I can get you a computer that does all that at 2K with max settings and full raytracing on (I can speak from experience that finding games that utilize ray tracing well can be hard but some, like cyberpunk, look damn cool) but also maybe you don't care about ray tracing or running at full resolution and would rather have that extra money in your pocket.

Lemme shop around a little, I'll put together some options.

figmentPez said:

Anyway, to try to help me figure out what deal I should settle for:

1. Disregarding my budget, what would you buy if you were trying to get the most bang for your buck from a computer that you intend to keep for a while?

Click to expand...

A Mid-tier LCD steam deck ($450) and dock ($40). Using your existing 1080p display, mouse, and keyboard.

2. What would you do to expand the storage on a system that only comes with a 1TB SSD?

Click to expand...

A 1TB SD card in the above steam deck.


That should be sufficient for gaming, if you need media storage, I suggest a NAS or USB external drive

3. Is getting 32GB of RAM important compared to 16GB?

Click to expand...

That depends entirely on what you're going to do with it. Latest, greatest, biggest, nastiest games on a windows system? Yes.
On a steam deck? No.

I'm still hesitant to go with a Steam Deck, since I intend to do most of my gaming on a monitor, and I haven't looked into what you do for cloud storage (Dropbox and Google Drive) on Linux, among many other things that may not be coming to my stress addled mind.

Click to expand...

I haven't tried the cloud storage on it, but I have DEFINITELY done real monitor (1080p) gaming on my steam deck. The exact steam deck and dock I recommended above.

This is me, playing Doom (2016) and using halforums on my steam deck.

That should be sufficient for gaming, if you need media storage, I suggest a NAS or USB external drive

Click to expand...

NAS are expensive. Can you leave a USB HDD plugged in 24/7 and not have it die?

I haven't tried the cloud storage on it

Click to expand...

That's a make or break issue for me.

GasBandit said:

A Mid-tier LCD steam deck ($450) and dock ($40). Using your existing 1080p display, mouse, and keyboard.
View attachment 50013
View attachment 50014


A 1TB SD card in the above steam deck.
View attachment 50015

That should be sufficient for gaming, if you need media storage, I suggest a NAS or USB external drive


That depends entirely on what you're going to do with it. Latest, greatest, biggest, nastiest games on a windows system? Yes.
On a steam deck? No.



I haven't tried the cloud storage on it, but I have DEFINITELY done real monitor (1080p) gaming on my steam deck. The exact steam deck and dock I recommended above.

This is me, playing Doom (2016) and using halforums on my steam deck.

Click to expand...

I agree with you, gas, that this is probably the best 'bang for buck' you can get with a prebuilt, but I also think Pez would hate it. No offense at all meant to Pez, I'm not saying he isn't technically handy, but I get the very, very strong feeling that he doesn't want to have to futz around with settings and tinker with things to get them to work. And while I love the steam deck, it is for tinkerers, not for people who just want something that will work.


@figmentPez I'm going to make this easy for you. Buy this:

Is this the perfect gaming pc? Of course not, some compromises were made. Will you notice them playing at 1080p? (since that seems to be your monitor) I doubt it. You might want to upgrade the RAM at some point but that can always come later.

If you want a slightly higher spec machine to go above 1080p performance, try this:



Again, you'll want to upgrade the ram at some point, and the downside to this one is it's fuck ugly, but we don't care about looks, we care about performance. But if you're happy with 1080p I think the first one is a pretty darn good value.

I don't know why the links are being weird but they work now

figmentPez said:

NAS are expensive. Can you leave a USB HDD plugged in 24/7 and not have it die?



That's a make or break issue for me.

Click to expand...

Yes, On my previous server, I left 4 USB HDs plugged in for about 4 years straight before they started to die (in the same order I got them). They're really, usually, just regular SATA hard drives with a squished-on USB adapter built in to the "case."

That Wal-Mart computer Poe linked might be the way to go if you absolutely have to do windows, which will make things like onedrive much easier to accomplish.

While I know you're not especially interested in building your own PC, I'd still suggest having a look at https://www.logicalincrements.com/ to see what kind of power you can expect for what kind of budget, and what trade-offs may or may not be worth it. Obviously when going with a pre-built PC you'll always be subject to some whims of whoever made it, and it'll be slightly more expensive bang-for-buck-wise, but it's still a good comparison point. Also because they do a fairly good job of rating their price builds for several types of use, e.g.:


Is that $80 more worth it? Not if you're only using it for web surfing, but for gaming, probably, yeah.



$120 more, but...no really big improvement. Worth it? Eh, maybe a bit more future-proof.



Are you going to be doing any 4K gaming, VR, rendering? No? Then everything above this is pretty much overkill at the moment.

A lot of my questions are going to relate to longevity. Is it more important to compute and play NOW, or do you want something that's "good enough" but that you can swap out a piece or two to keep you going for another few years? I tend to lean more towards the latter just because of the long-term benefits, but if you're willing to sacrifice a few years on the far end, you can still get 3-5yrs out of something less expensive.
My wife is waiting anxiously to go over Black Friday deals she has found before they expire in ten minutes or whatever, I will try to research some value parts once she has calmed down.

--Patrick

Entirely IMO, some hastily compiled examples of "value" are:
CPU - AMD 5800XT (8 core) - $200
SSD - Decent 2TB SATA SSD 2.5in - $200
GPU - RTX 3060 12GB - $300
But throw a decent PSU and case in there and we're already talking about something north of $1000, and we haven't even gotten to RAM yet. So any place advertising a full package for under $1200 is probably worth it just to scavenge for parts. Of course, if they're giving it to you all in one box, you probably won't be paying the above "single-part" rates, so there's that.

--Patrick

I'm having such trouble with this because money is one of my major anxiety triggers. I really don't have a clue about my financial situation, or how to plan for my future. I've avoided thinking about money as much as possible for a long time because I've already been up to my eyeballs dealing with the stress of just keeping myself alive. I realize that I'm very privileged to be able to ignore money and still live in comfortable housing with a steady supply of food and entertainment. I can't expect anyone to make financial decisions for me, so I was hoping to get an idea of what "normal" people do when deciding how much to spend on a computer, so at least I could say I was being reasonable by some standard.

Mostly playing games? Are you keeping your monitor? What's the resolution and refresh rate of your monitor. Is it 4k? 2K? 1080p? What are some of your favorite games, or what are some games you'd really like to be able to play?

Click to expand...

My current monitor is 1080p 144Hz FreeSync. I'd love to upgrade to a higher resolution display, but... see above.

Demanding games I'm most looking forward to: Marvel's Spider-Man 2, Borderlands 4 and here's my Steam Wishlist

Realistically I have a huge backlog of games I could have been perfectly happy playing on my old system, so I don't really need something capable of doing ray-tracing and other cool stuff, but I'm very interested in playing with all that cool stuff. I just don't know if I can justify it.

Gaming is my main hobby, if only because it's the hobby I can most easily participate in. All my other computer related interests can be handled by just about any PC these days (streaming video, word processing, art via Inkscape, etc.) I'd probably stream if I had enough headroom to do so, but I play enough low demand games that I can stream with any computer.

but I have DEFINITELY done real monitor (1080p) gaming on my steam deck.

Click to expand...

You have not been playing Marvel's Spider-Man at 1080p 60fps on a Steam Deck. Now, I'm no stranger to playing games at lower than native resolutions, but if I'm not going to take advantage of the Steam Deck's portable nature, then it's not hard to find a desktop that can outperform it.

Is it more important to compute and play NOW, or do you want something that's "good enough" but that you can swap out a piece or two to keep you going for another few years?

Click to expand...

Probably something that's "good enough" in regards to the video card/RAM. Upgrading a processor sucks, IMO, and see below for how I already want more storage than most of these systems come with (though I don't really need it all in an SSD, I'm fine with swapping stuff on and off of other storage. I rarely play more than one big game at once.)

---
Still waiting for a more general answer to:
2. What would you do to expand the storage on a system that only comes with a 1TB SSD?
I know that 1TB won't be enough storage for me. I was always running out of storage when I had a 128GB SSD and a 1TB HDD. Still not sure if my 6TB internal HDD is actively dying, or if it just got wounded when I accidentally bumped my computer case while it was running.

---

Any thoughts on this system: iBUYPOWER TraceMesh 7 Gaming Desktop - 14th Gen Intel Core i7-14700F - GeForce RTX 4060 - Windows 11 - 32 GB RAM - 2TB SSD - Black $1,000

I'll tell you this much, if this one goes to shit, Costco's return policy will make it MUCH easier to deal with.

figmentPez said:

I'm having such trouble with this because money is one of my major anxiety triggers. I really don't have a clue about my financial situation, or how to plan for my future. I've avoided thinking about money as much as possible for a long time because I've already been up to my eyeballs dealing with the stress of just keeping myself alive. I realize that I'm very privileged to be able to ignore money and still live in comfortable housing with a steady supply of food and entertainment. I can't expect anyone to make financial decisions for me, so I was hoping to get an idea of what "normal" people do when deciding how much to spend on a computer, so at least I could say I was being reasonable by some standard.



My current monitor is 1080p 144Hz FreeSync. I'd love to upgrade to a higher resolution display, but... see above.

Demanding games I'm most looking forward to: Marvel's Spider-Man 2, Borderlands 4 and here's my Steam Wishlist

Realistically I have a huge backlog of games I could have been perfectly happy playing on my old system, so I don't really need something capable of doing ray-tracing and other cool stuff, but I'm very interested in playing with all that cool stuff. I just don't know if I can justify it.

Gaming is my main hobby, if only because it's the hobby I can most easily participate in. All my other computer related interests can be handled by just about any PC these days (streaming video, word processing, art via Inkscape, etc.) I'd probably stream if I had enough headroom to do so, but I play enough low demand games that I can stream with any computer.



You have not been playing Marvel's Spider-Man at 1080p 60fps on a Steam Deck. Now, I'm no stranger to playing games at lower than native resolutions, but if I'm not going to take advantage of the Steam Deck's portable nature, then it's not hard to find a desktop that can outperform it.



Probably something that's "good enough" in regards to the video card/RAM. Upgrading a processor sucks, IMO, and see below for how I already want more storage than most of these systems come with (though I don't really need it all in an SSD, I'm fine with swapping stuff on and off of other storage. I rarely play more than one big game at once.)

---
Still waiting for a more general answer to:
2. What would you do to expand the storage on a system that only comes with a 1TB SSD?
I know that 1TB won't be enough storage for me. I was always running out of storage when I had a 128GB SSD and a 1TB HDD. Still not sure if my 6TB internal HDD is actively dying, or if it just got wounded when I accidentally bumped my computer case while it was running.

---

Any thoughts on this system: iBUYPOWER TraceMesh 7 Gaming Desktop - 14th Gen Intel Core i7-14700F - GeForce RTX 4060 - Windows 11 - 32 GB RAM - 2TB SSD - Black $1,000

Click to expand...

Roughly the same performance as the first Walmart PC I linked you but for $300 more. You do get more cores for your money but I don't think you'll notice the difference for your use case. But it's not bad if that's what you want to go with.

Ravenpoe said:

Roughly the same performance as the first Walmart PC I linked you but for $300 more. You do get more cores for your money but I don't think you'll notice the difference for your use case. But it's not bad if that's what you want to go with.

Click to expand...

I will notice the 2TB SSD, though.

figmentPez said:

I was hoping to get an idea of what "normal" people do when deciding how much to spend on a computer, so at least I could say I was being reasonable by some standard.

Click to expand...

IMO, for a system that is intended for "gaming" these days, it would be completely reasonable to expect a quote of $1800-$2500 for a "decent" system.

figmentPez said:

My current monitor is 1080p 144Hz FreeSync. I'd love to upgrade to a higher resolution display, but... see above.

Click to expand...

1080p is still completely reasonable, no matter what you hear anyone else say, even the "1440p is the new 1080p" people. Time and time again, polls and informal research prove that gamers rank fps as more important than screen resolution, and it is easier to achieve 144fps with a modest graphics card at 1080p than it is at 1440p.

figmentPez said:

Still waiting for a more general answer to:
2. What would you do to expand the storage on a system that only comes with a 1TB SSD?

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Pretty simple here, just add another drive. Whether you add it internally or externally depends on your purpose: Does it need to be always available to you while you use your computer? Does the speed with which you move stuff onto/off the drive matter? If so, add it internally. Whether you choose SSD or HDD depends on capacity, cost, and, as you already mentioned, vibration resistance. It also depends on intended purpose. Is it just additional storage? Is it also being used as a disaster backup? Many people make the mistake of believing that an external drive is somehow magically more reliable than a drive mounted inside of a computer, which is not the case. If you have something you don't want to lose (documents, saved games, game installers, TaleSpin porn, whatever), then your only real defense is to have that content stored in/on a minimum of TWO devices. So if transfer speed is not an issue, you might want to set your sights on two mechanical drives...a 2TB for inside the computer, and a (minimum) 3TB for outside the computer to hold a second copy of everything important from the first two. This is not an(other?) attempt to ratchet up your anxiety, I promise. I just get to witness (at my job and IRL) far too many people lose all their stuff waaay too often, and I don't want you to have to deal with that, and so I am taking the opportunity to again remind everyone that losing your stuff sucks and backing things up is a relatively easy and inexpensive way to avoid that mess.
tl:dr; Buy two drives. Make backups.

(conventional) SSDs are faster than HDDs by 4-5x when it comes to reading data. But they are 40-50x faster at finding that data (the so-called "random reads" statistic in the reviews you might see) which is where they really shine. These days a bare 2TB HDD can be had for ~$70, but since the price for bare 4TB HDDs is frequently only $5-10 more, it makes more financial sense to go for the 4TB. A (decent) 2TB (SATA 2.5in) SSD can set you back about $150, with a 4TB version costing $300 or more, so if you're considering getting a SSD as a second drive because you want faster transfers, or because you intend to work with multimedia files (e.g., video/audio editing) and want the faster access time, you just have to balance whether that increased speed is worth the noticeable increase in the price per gigabyte (drives are frequently ranked by review sites with "$/GB" so you can figure out the breakpoint of price v. capacity).

figmentPez said:

Any thoughts on this system: iBUYPOWER TraceMesh 7 Gaming Desktop - 14th Gen Intel Core i7-14700F - GeForce RTX 4060 - Windows 11 - 32 GB RAM - 2TB SSD - Black $1,000

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Why does iBUYPOWER make it so hard to look up their specs? Argh! Anyway...
...only real complaint (aside with their lack of transparency with the exact parts used AND of course their insistence on Win11) is with the RTX 4060, but that's NVIDIA's fault, not yours. The 8GB issue is a real thing, but it matters more to the people using screens 1440p and up than it will to you and your 1080p screen. The same caveats apply about checking for BIOS upgrades to ensure your CPU doesn't degrade prematurely, of course. And I guess after the last incident you would want to visit the websites of every single component in the machine to see whether they have updates for their respective bits as well. The rest of the system is fairly decent, going purely by the stated specs, and should easily be relevant for the 3-5 year "cushion" I like to see.
Oh, and I tend to hate tempered glass on cases, so you might want to use your crafting skills to apply a layer of window film to the inside surface of that case panel. If the glass never breaks, then you just have a nifty visual feature (depending on which film you choose), but if it ever does shatter, cleanup will be a LOT easier.

Anyway blah blah I really hope you get this all straightened out and we can start hearing about how wonderful it is to play something newer than 2022 at higher than 35fps.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

Pretty simple here, just add another drive.

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No so simple on my last prebuilt. It had two SATA ports on the motherboard, both were occupied. There were no extra drive bays inside the tower. To increase the storage on that one I had to replace one of the existing drives.

And you'll recall that the CyberPowerPC I previously got from Costco lied about how many drive bays it had, and I had to contact tech support to figure out what they were calling a 5.25" bay (spoiler: it was 4 mounting holes in the bottom of the case.)

I'm not making any assumptions about what upgrades I can make these days. Things changed too much since last built a computer. I've never installed something to an m.2 slot. (On my last PC the m.2 slot was filled with the WiFi/Bluetooth module.)

So if transfer speed is not an issue, you might want to set your sights on two mechanical drives...a 2TB for inside the computer, and a (minimum) 3TB for outside the computer to hold a second copy of everything important from the first two.

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I previously had a 2TB external drive I'd been using for backup, and now have a new 4TB drive I intend to use for backup going forward. If I can't put a HDD inside my new computers case for some reason, I guess I'll use the old 2TB, now that I know external drives can be left on and running.

If you're out of ports, the additional drive doesn't have to be internal, though of course that would mean it's harder to boot from it (if that matters).
I agree that only having 2 SATA ports onboard is borderline neglectful these days, even though optical drives aren't as common now as they used to be.
There are some M.2 ports that don't support drives, basically being just glorified USB ports. WiFi cards will work there, but (most) drives don't.

--Patrick

figmentPez said:

I will notice the 2TB SSD, though.

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Deciding factor: It's in stock at the local Costco and I won't have to put up with the gamble of shipping again.

EDIT: Will be going to get it on Monday. Hopefully it doesn't sell out over the weekend.

I used to build my own PCs. I spent so much time researching parts, and learning all sorts of tips and tricks. Back then I thought I'd always build my own.

But it's been at least a dozen years since I built my last system. It was a Core 2 Duo but I can't remember what Radeon card it had. I built it with one card, but then the PSU died taking that video card and the HDD with it, and I ended up replacing the two-slot card with a single slot from the next generation, or something. Lot of waiting for RMAs and refunds with that build.

I think that was the build where I got it all assembled and it wouldn't boot at first because I had too many stand-offs installed and one of them was shorting the motherboard.

PatrThom said:

I agree that only having 2 SATA ports onboard is borderline neglectful these days, even though optical drives aren't as common now as they used to be.

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The crazy thing was that, despite the limited expansion options and lackluster amount of RAM, it was a crazy good deal. In 2017 I got an i5-6400 with an RX480, 8GB of RAM, a 128GB SSD, 1TB HDD, WiFi, & Bluetooth for under $500 (including tax and shipping). Absolutely insane, at the time, to find a desktop computer that cheap with an SSD and a high end graphics card. It was refurbished, but it was mostly stable (though I had to clean it out regularly to avoid overheating, and near the end of it's life I had to overvolt and underclock the GPU to play some games without crashing).

Also, it had an optical drive, but I'm pretty sure that connected via some sort of dedicated (proprietary?) connector. I think it was a laptop drive that was basically built into the case.

Games were almost always CPU bound, but I still played Marvel's Spider-Man at over 40fps with 1080p and medium settings. Well, after the RAM upgraded to 16GB and the SSD to 512GB.

There's zero chance I could have built my own system for that cheap. There would have been a lot of other advantages, but I would have had to pay for them.

---

Also, thinking of nostalgia for old systems. I remember the first time I assembled my own. It was an Athlon XP 1600+ with a Radeon 7500. I went with the Radeon because it was the best for dual monitors. I sacrificed having DX8 compatibility so I could run a 19" CRT and use my old 17" CRT as a secondary (ah, the days of Trinitron). Interestingly enough, it turned out I got generally better gaming performance because of it. The 7500 was excellent for DX7 gaming, and a lot of early DX8 cards couldn't run DX8 games very well.

I think I eventually upgraded the video card to a Radeon 9600XT, which was an impulse buy and not one of my better tech purchases.

figmentPez said:

Deciding factor: It's in stock at the local Costco and I won't have to put up with the gamble of shipping again.

EDIT: Will be going to get it on Monday. Hopefully it doesn't sell out over the weekend.

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New PC has been acquired, and partially set up.

Motherboard is an ASUS Prime B760M-A AX6, and I've already updated it to the latest firmware.

SSD is an ADATA Legend 800 Gold 2TB. Haven't updated it yet, but I don't know if it needs anything either.

Any other specs you guys are interesting in knowing?

Should I install Asus Armoury Crate? Opinions online seem to be mixed on if it's useful or bloatware.

Going out to Trader Joe's with my mom and sister today, so I don't know when I'll get to put the new PC through it's paces.

figmentPez said:

Should I install Asus Armoury Crate? Opinions online seem to be mixed on if it's useful or bloatware.

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I personally would not bother, but I also would not chastise you for deciding to do it yourself. I've had Asus' software packages actually come in handy maybe... twice. And I've been using ASUS gear for 20+ years.

I tend not to install the branded, vendor-provided packages unless they offer some function I can't get with the standard/generic drivers. Especially since vendors often have a habit of "forgetting" to update said add-ons after just a year or two.

--Patrick