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Is there anything loose in the chassis? Even unsecured cables?

I wanted to put something together today because I haven't built a full desktop in ages. 😁 Also I want PCIe lanes more than I want a Thunderbolt port that'll never get used. The leftovers after I'm done will probably get assembled into a midrange PC that I can sell. A GTX1080 is STILL a...

I'm building a Ryzen 7600X / X670E system today. The CPU is a placeholder for whatever Zen 5 thing I get since it'll be easy enough to resell. I'm using GSkill DDR5 6000 EXPO RAM, a GTX 1080Ti and a Peerless Assassin HSF just to get the thing going. I assume this thing as it is will be a little...

All you need is a machinist and 10kg of copper!

Asrock? Microsoft stopped allowing Windows 7 and 8.x licenses from being used for Windows activations at the end of 2023. If you have updated to 10 or 11 prior to that, the license should still be available and should still re-activate. Microsoft doesn't lose the licenses once they've been...

LM, why not just customize your windows 11 install to remove the parts you don't like? What brand of device did you get?

Everyone should be blocking advertising at all times and on all devices. I don't think this is a controversial thought. Amazon does seem to have an issue with prioritizing certain products, but I can't tell if that's because of ads or favoring its own products over those of others.

DDG is in every way that matters just a front-end to Bing. So are Ecosia, AOL and Yahoo. Bing is not good at search. As far as what happened to search at Google: Google had an engineer at the head of the Search Product team until the mid 2010s. He was replaced by a guy with a background in...

You can uninstall it. It'll come back with the next major Windows update. You can also disable it through either a group policy object or registry hack. I suspect the GPO will be respected. I'm not fully certain that removing the registry setting is.

Sick of bullshit Google AI in your search results? In your browser of choice, find your Search engines section under Settings or whatever. Make a new entry, call it Verbatim, shortcut @v and use this search string: https://www.google.com/search?tbs=li:1&q=%s Google Verbatim Search is just...

If I had to guess, 95% of people who use Windows don't pay enough attention to directory names to know where things are saved beyond "Documents go in Documents and Pictures go in Pictures" and if they ARE made aware of the difference between c:\users\username\Pictures and...

Windows Recall is out of the picture for now. OneDrive DOES have a useful function. It can handle file versioning and off-site storage, so it's a form of ransomware mitigation. It's just that it is very invasive in how it operates. Google lets users add arbitrary directories to its sync...

The latest thing now is that Microsoft is turning on OneDrive backups without asking permission. Does anyone want a Windows 11 installer image that just doesn't have OneDrive in it?

FSR is real and it helps upscale graphics, which decreases pressure on your GPU cores to render each frame but increases pressure on your texture memory since the upscaled frames still have to be spit out in their upscaled resolution. This actually kind of benefits AMD and Intel hardware more...

A Chinese company makes this thing called the Odin. It's $200 - $550 (if you buy from their store instead of Amazon) and has either a Snapdragon 845 or SD 1 gen 2(!) in it with either 6600 or 8000mW battery, with a 6" FHD screen and the horsepower to run Windows on ARM, Linux or Android. The fit...

Looks like the review embargo on Sigma's APS-C lenses for Canon RF mount has lifted. They're just reselling lenses that existed for Sony and Fuji and apparently they work really well, even if they're optically less than perfect.

250GB SM951. It's still in use, still tests healthy and works just fine.

I have! In fact, my oldest X99 desktop has been running with a taped-down m.2 drive for probably over a decade, since I dropped and lost that tiny screw at some point and I never bothered to put in a replacement. It's currently someone's gaming PC and I know it's still operating.

You could just tape the smaller drive in place, LM. Electrical tape is your friend. But most systems with m.2 ports have a provision for moving the retention screw to a proper placement for your drive as well.

Surfaces were damned near impossible to repair in any meaningful way. I don't remember them burning any loins but they never have more than 2 USB ports and that sucks all on its own and they definitely get warm. I have somebody's retired Surface Book 2 sitting around and my OG Surface Pro 2...

You might like to know about Spybot Anti-beacon, if you're concerned about that. IIRC it has to be run on every boot cycle to be effective since there are so many subcomponents of Microsoft telemetry services.

Science Fiction author Charles Stross has some interesting thoughts about Window Recall. He's been a tech journalist as well as an award winning author of hard science fiction and he's usually coming from a place of tech wisdom. Also, AndroidAuthority has a piece up on using a Snapdragon...

Windows key + V turns on a clipboard history. Why isn't it on by default? I have no idea. It works in 10 and 11 both.

It's still being sold. For that matter, you can still get retail copies of Vista if you really want one. We'll see a real problem if AMD moves to a P and E core arrangement, since that will represent a real break in compatibility for Windows 10, or the day when your choice of content creation...

If you're still being hounded by debt collectors regarding student loans, ask them to provide proof that they own the debt they're trying to collect. In a lot of cases, they can't provide it. My partner got out of about $15k in medical debt that way. My older brother wound up with a useless...

And just to bring this thread back to the topic at hand, Microsoft removed instructions for switching a Microsoft account to a local one on Windows 11 from its support documentation.

I don't have much to say about EVs as such. I'm not buying a car again until my current car actually dies. Even if I'm spending a couple grand a year on maintenance, that's better than a car note, especially given the price of a new(er) car. Most people my partner's age are crushed by just three...

I think that if I contributed to this discussion of old-ass computers, it might be a get off my lawn moment, but here goes. The first actual PC we had in the house was an IBM clone with a 10MB hard drive that ran XENIX, Microsoft Unix, which eventually became my computer after my father...

Linux is a very mainstream OS with great hardware support for everything.

IIRC my go-to high end products up through the Pentium 3 era were Tyan, but it was experiences with Abit as the go-to for overclocking support that eventually put me on to Gigabyte, which I found to be much more stable and boring in a way I genuinely appreciated. I think it's funny that you...

As I understand it, the people at SpaceX are better at managing him in ways that let them work than some of the other concerns where he's more involved.

Oh Frick Go Back is a one shot tool to remove ad-related BS from Windows 11. This is something the world probably needed.

Which Abit board did you have? 😁 The RAM controller is on the CPU die, and it MAY be something that gets addressed with Ryzen 9000. Hopefully, they've addressed that and also the heat spreader design.

I have a cousin whose personality is "I have a Tesla" in the same way that some middle aged guys are all about their beard or beer snobs who are really, really serious about hops and whatever the fuck else goes in beer. He started on a Roadster and I'll admit they seemed cool. He's on his third...

I have a stack of servers that are using every bit of 384 or 512GB RAM right now, albeit in allocation to a VM of some sort. But some of those VMs will hit 90% utilization under load and could probably stand to be allocated an extra 50% more RAM soon. No, that's not a mainstream need for...

My boss's brother is a senior person for the Chicago office of the IRS. He's a GS13 or 14, don't remember which. Anyway, I saw him a couple weeks ago (late May, 2024) and his government issued laptop was a consumer model HP that had a Windows 7 sticker on it. He referred to it as his NEW laptop.

I don't think it matters, although having more RAM than you need is kind of a waste of electricity. On the other hand, if you're building a PC to keep for years and years, why not pad it out based on anticipated need? My workstation has 128GB of DDR4 3600 because it came with the motherboard...

No one ever. EVER.

Everything they brought me was either an expired Chromebook or had Windows 8 (no, not 8.1) on it. When I was finally given a password to get on one of them, it had Internet Explorer tabs still open from 2016.

A customer's wife asked me to look at their home computers. I told them that as long as she brough them to me and understood I'd charge for my time, no big deal. The computers were described as "brand new." The newest actual PC is a Surface 3, but there are also two Chromebooks old enough to be...

You have 24 threads. Using one or two to compress data in memory is probably pretty goddamned negligible in terms of impact on performance.

I generally give models commercial rights to their images unless I know that their financial status is materially changed from their work. I work with a couple people who can afford to pay me real money and that's enough. Anything else I do is just for fun anyway.

Microsoft decided it wasn't done inflicting Windows 11 on us. I think it plans to keep doing so until we say that we like it.

Every so often, pictures I take wind up in particular sorts of magazines that I can't believe are still being printed. Not necessarily those. OK also those. Seriously, some of my boudoir work has been used in tattoo pin-up magazines. I have no idea where to buy them; one of my IT customers is...

Most people are going to consider a ~$500 camera body to be adequate for most purposes and indeed I can get great results results I'd rather shoot with my old T3i than a new phone; that thing will absolutely smoke a 200MP Samsung Ultra-whatever for image quality, and that's what people are going...

I don't think even people whose entire living is based on Oracle or SAP expertise like those products. Given that my Samsung tablet S9 tablet can make a fair stab at denoising video on Android, I'm going to guess it's probably at least not anything to complain about.

My first few lenses were definitely kit lens cheapies, the Canon EF-S 18-55/3.5-5.6 and 75-300, plus some manual FD lenses my dad had from his time in the military that were a PITA to try to adapt on an EF body. Early on, it didn't seem like changing aperture did very much for me on the lenses I...

Cue Mystery Science Theater 3000 theme song. In this case, a super-intelligent robot made it, which is just a variation on the classic "A wizard did it" that a lot of speculative fiction uses. I've seen most of those movies several times. I don't remember them being described as either...

Their life cycle incorporates the DNA of the parasite that incubates from a facehugger. In Alien3 and the Aliens v Predator films and games, Xenomorphs that come from non-human hosts (a dog and the Youtja aliens, respectively) have clear signifiers of their parasitic parent's species...

Fun true fact: The Weyland-Yutani corporation, which owned the Narcissus and the Sulaco, the space ships in the first two Aliens movies, is name checked in Blade Runner as well and there's nothing in either series to make them incompatible with one another. This can further be extended to...