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Are you kidding me? Issues with durability and stability are considered features now, by the manufacturer at least. Anything to get you to trade something in that otherwise works perfectly well. My guess is that if the chemical formula's changed at all, it's to make it even cheaper so it falls...

Ah, yes. The classic move of countering a design flaw by adding another delicate electronic system that can break and cost thousands to repair. Then again, the people buying vehicles with leather seats typically don't need to worry about repair bills.

I'll keep my RAV4 thanks. EV adoption down here is... not great, I think the only supercharger station I've come across is the Bucee's in Foley off of I-10. The people I see driving Teslas and Ioniqs and such are the bougie types that have the chargers at home and never go further than a hundred...

Is the GPIO pinout RPi compatible? If not, what's stopping them? Does the RPi foundation or whoever have a patent on that pinout? That's my biggest question. As huge as the support has been for the Pi, anything x86_64 immediately has a huge leg up in compatibility. Do you mind giving a...

I took the opportunity at the start of the month to snag a 5700X for my main desktop so I could kick the 5500 downstairs and give my server a competent memory controller that could actually run four dual-rank DIMMs at full-speed. I should note that I wasn't at all upset or unsatisfied with the...

These are little NUC boxes that won't take a card and every USB one I tried didn't work for similar reasons. I just ended up installing 10 Pro and calling that good enough, and put my boss on notice that we'll want to price out and move them to proper (if lower-spec, their needs aren't crazy)...

The problem with that procedure, Merc, is that Hyper-V Server 2019, in its quest to eliminate bloat and tools that make it easy to admin -- because why would you want an easily-administrated hypervisor for free -- doesn't include Device Manager, you have to use pnputil to install INFs. And...

Merc I agree, I loved Skyrim when it came out but as time wore on and my tastes matured (ie I beat Morrowind and Baldur's Gate for the first time) I just can't stand how shallow it is without mods. I have an 80+ strong modlist that I need to even launch the game much less play it. Fallout NV was...

Well, that'd be it then -- I don't think I've ever taken public transport with my mom in my entire life. She drives absolutely everywhere.

Well, as it happens, I don't travel for fun usually. I have family in the Huntley/Elgin area and my mom's always picked me up at Midway. She doesn't like O'Hare for some reason.

Well, no, the Surface won't have enough ports. The Pro 7+ had one USB-C and one USB3 type A with a headphone jack and magnetic charge port. The 9s have dual USB-C and I can't quite remember but I think they drop the headphone jack. It's not really designed for someone like you who actually uses...

Between only the two, I've been more impressed by the build quality of the Surfaces, and I've had both in hand, although the Yoga wasn't particularly recent. I'm actually waiting on backorder for a Pro 9 through work right now -- the only thing I'll really be missing over my current laptop is...

Finally plunked money down on my trip to Chicago in October. Supposedly arriving at MDW around quarter after 7pm on the 5th, coming back the 15th. I used a coupon code and got both ways and a checked bag each way for ~180 bucks, which isn't bad at all. I could probably have done it maybe even a...

So, with the 5600X3D being a wet fart, I had to look elsewhere for my plan to upgrade my main machine so I could kick the 5500 downstairs to give my server a competent memory controller. Newegg has 5700X's for, like, 170 bucks. I think with tax and shipping I paid 190. That'll do. I also...

Oh, the things I got away with as a kid. And my parents were actually pretty savvy! I just happened to be savvier. But man, if they'd known about logging DNS requests, I'd have been a goner. :whistle: Yeah, honestly, if I end up in a situation where I'm somehow raising a kid, I'd implement the...

Lightning storm came through today and killed some pretty key equipment for one of our clients today. All of it was at minimum surge protected and usually on a UPS. Not a fun day. I managed to cobble something together that'll last them until the RMA units arrive, but when we replace these guys...

That's fairly common actually, the speakers in my grandparents' TV did that back in the day. I think it was because it wasn't properly grounded.

There's some rumbling of a coming 5600X3D. My guess is that they're trying to offload 5800X3D chips that didn't pass mustard with all of their cores, but if the pricing is right (i.e. less than a used 5800X3D) I may buy one so I have the 5500 to then pass down to my server. I really need the...

Well that was a complete disaster. The Linksys card I bought has a Broadcom 4321b/g/n chipset, because I accidentally bought a v1 revision of the product instead of the v2 I wanted. Even with the firmware, and even with the proprietary driver compiled for my kernel, I couldn't get it to work...

That's all true; most chipsets/boards of the era couldn't take them. AMD was a pretty safe bet, but on the Intel side, it was a good way to ask for pain. However, I'm 126% sure that the i830M chipset does support them in the correct configuration -- I think the one I was trying to use might have...

Nope, no built-in WiFi, but I can add it -- take off the keyboard and there it is, a mini PCI slot and two little antennae. If I find something more useful to do with the PCMCIA slot, I might grab a card for it. As it is right now it's fine without it. Unfortunately in the pursuit of making a...

Everyone's cutting costs, no one can make a product that doesn't kill itself to save their life, all anyone wants is your money and they don't care about making a quality product and getting said money legitimately.

I don't actually think my model is equipped with an 802.11b card -- that's fine by me, I've got an 802.11g PC card sitting on my desk that should support WPA2-AES last I knew, though the kernel module for it (prism54, later p54) has been orphaned since ~3.10 I believe, so it'll be fun prodding...

I was given a Latitude C400, on the condition that I destroyed the hard drive. Thankfully they let me handle that, and didn't just take it, because it's one of those models that uses a caddy and a pin-header to edge-connector adapter. I don't mind giving up or destroying a 22 year old hard drive...

I heard about this yesterday, and thankfully it seems mine isn't one of the models listed. For some reason either they neglected to mention any X470 parts, or the X470 parts genuinely aren't affected -- not that it matters anyway mind, since I don't run Windows and would have turned off any...

That's actually really good to know, thank you. I guess I'll be preparing a standard image after all!

Naming AC'97 and HD Audio codec suppliers might be a bit of cheating. ;) Yeah, I have no excuse for forgetting ESS either, I have and quite enjoy one of their AudioDrive cards. I'm intrigued by the Solo-1 and how it supposedly offers full DOS sound support on PCI without any emulation...

The way I handled deploying Office 2021 (we used it for a mass deployment on some Surfaces before we wisely just began selling them Microsoft 365 on a tenant account in yearly commitments instead) was I used the Office Deployment Tool to download the data for 2021, then used the same tool on the...

I have to admit I've come around to their point of view. What works in my personal home office doesn't do so hot in a company where the turnaround for a breakdown means lost revenue.

NEC also implemented some 186 instructions. Hilariously I think that let them run some things that normally "required" a 286 or better -- I think the VGA driver for Windows 3.0 used said instructions. There's a patched version floating around now that gets around that for whatever use-case one...

Right, the actual core was a VLIW thing I think, and it emulated the x86 instruction set. There was an optimization engine that supposedly made repetitive tasks a bit faster the more you did them, but I don't know how well that would work on a more complicated operating system than Windows 9x.

Well that's downright annoying, isn't it? I already had to do a rain dance and throw salt behind my shoulder to get Windows 10/11 to upgrade from Home to Pro on an OEM key, but that is at least understandable to a certain extent. It boggles my mind that they seem to expect you to completely...

That's a fair point on the SSDs, though I wonder how many of them use the same NAND chips from Micron or whoever. Chewy also forgot Aureal and Crystal audio, though to be fair Aureal chipsets usually found themselves sold on Turtle Beach PCBs. For graphics vendors, a couple other notables would...

It's much the same as with everything else. Used to be you had more than just two options for hard drives. More than the three (four?) options for video cards. Hell, you even used to have a third or fourth option for CPUs -- compatible with your motherboard and all. I also understand why it's...

I love my A770, but I bought it expecting problems and it delivered a few times. I'm also not really able to leverage the compute power since the programs I would like to use only accelerate with CUDA. I bet it's a folding monster, but I'm not really interested in incurring the wrath of my...

Abit, DFI, EPoX, FIC, Shuttle... all were great in their day, none are around to tell the tale.

I find I don't have much trouble with ASRock, but their stuff does tend to be a little on the weird side. I bought my B450M Pro4 because it was the most reasonable option in my price range at the time. These days I don't know if I'd do the same, frankly I don't much care for any particular...

I get that, I really do, but the few on-prem QB installs I support are just complete nightmares. There are features that they paid for that just flat out do not function (mostly payroll related, they get around that by using an external thing to do that) and the server install I maintain (so...

Quickbooks is intended as a small business application, yes, but I've found it in use in a couple questionable environments.

As far as I know there are only a couple of speeds commonly sold (and not at all anymore, they'd sell you an SSD instead) that were faster than 7200rpm. And yes, it's a confusion with hard drives. The real solution is to stop running on-premises Quickbooks. (grabs squirt bottle) No. Bad!

The funny part is the second kit of RAM I ordered just arrived -- the first one seems to have been lost in the mail so far. Amazon says if it doesn't get here by tomorrow I can get a refund the next day. I kind of hope that happens so I can turn around and get the other kit in the mail in a week...

Yep, those are the ones. Apparently ERC is the generic name and TLER is WD's particular implementation of it as I understand it. I'd be more hesitant but this array is for me and myself alone, I keep good backups, and I'm aware of the risks. I personally don't need enterprise-grade hardware...

Newegg had a big sale (possibly still has?) on 8TB WD Blues, model 80EAZZ. Notably these are CMR. They don't have ERC, but it realistically hasn't been a big issue, and considering 4TB Reds are still like $120 each, I'll take the added potential headache of the occasional array rebuild if a...

Let me elaborate -- I have no interest in obtaining anything else, because my counter space is limited and the electric kettle is multi-purpose. I don't drink enough coffee to care -- maybe a cup or two in an entire month. Usually I'm a tea drinker.

Call me a neanderthal, but I found a local instant coffee brand I like since I only have my electric kettle and never drink more than a cup so it's wasteful to brew a whole pot or buy a keurig.

I use Spotify to find new artists and music, and then buy the lossless files to use over Jellyfin. I stopped using Plex because Jellyfin does 90% of the same things and i don't need a stupid pass for HW transcoding and such. My account here has been around for over a third of my life.

The problem is, there's no limit to the numbers that can call on my work number (it's posted publicly) so it's infeasible for me to do that. It's a whole lot easier to just separate by SIM.

Anecdotal, but the Google Phone app doesn't work so hot on a device that uses dual SIMs. I separate my calls by which SIM they're coming in on using ringtones, but the Google Phone app just uses the same one for both and I wasn't able to configure this.

I'm in that awkward position where I'm technically early Gen Z having been born in 1998, but I can't relate to really anyone born after 2001 or so. I think the term that's picking up steam for that is "zillennial". I could probably get dates if I wanted, but I don't have the time, money or...

Interstate 76 is one of those games that are notoriously finicky and not a single config I had could properly run it either. I could get in-game, but everything was way too fast and the physics were busted -- this on a Pentium III. I also seem to recall VTMB to be similarly finicky. Icewind...