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
[Rant] Tech Minor Rant Thread
- Thread starter DarkAudit
- Start date
Like, flip-down shutters over the DVD/CD drives, I-don't-know-what-HDMI-means, no USB3 support old.
--Patrick
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 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 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...
...good thing when I bought it back in 2014 or whatever, I also bought a spare!
--Patrick
*had to update the video, the first one was so annoying,
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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
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
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?
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
( @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.
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.
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
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.
Why would you need a new motherboard? A new case, maybe, but a new board?
--Patrick
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.
GasBandit
Staff member
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.
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?
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.
GasBandit
Staff member
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.
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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".
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".