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I used to, but it got to the point where the local distributors weren't offering me pricing that was any better than retail for the quantities that I buy. It made a difference 20 years ago, but now I can almost always get the same deal without having to deal with them.

I had to buy parts from Newegg today for the first time in about eight years. Newegg has stock on Ryzen 3700s and I need six of them. The purchase experience was awful. Turns out that all six are being shipped from a different seller's inventory, but FROM a Newegg warehouse, and some but not all...

I completely hate Adobe, but holy crap the neural filters that have recently been added to Photoshop are neat. Stuff like "copy the makeup off a face and put it on a different face" or "make somebody's stupid face look like a normal, realistic smile" or "completely (re)color a photo." I know...

'Tis the season to buy stupid crap. I just ran across this nVMe to 5 port SATA adapter on Amazon. It features everyone's favorite JMicron bridge controller, but it's a potential solution for people trying to figure out how to cram some extra SATA ports on to a contemporary SFF build. Amazon...

During the pandemic I had to explain to my co-workers, who have actually all been using VMs for years on their individual laptops, that we don't in fact actually have 22 different physical computers sitting at the datacenter. It turned in to an all day meeting because they didn't know that's how...

... and on the other side of the spectrum, a Acer/Gateway (but really Tongfang) Ryzen r5 3450U, 8GB, 250GB nVME, 15" FHD IPS system that is selling at Walmart for $360. Got it my It's-complicated as a holiday gift, mostly because it's purple, her signature color. This is the worst keyboard and...

Actually I see that Kingston released the KC600 in mSATA in early 2021 as well. I'm surprised to see new mSATA products.

As far as I know mSATA drives from reputable vendors topped out at 500GB. I punted after my Thinkpad needed extensive repairs, too. The current offerings just aren't worth the money if I can't have storage in the same package. I'm currently playing with a Gigabyte Aero 15 but now that I have...

Kiwi for Gmail is just a web scrape of various Google Workspace tools, but I'm finding that I really like it since I do spend a lot of time switching specifically between Gmail, Google Drive and the various Google productivity apps. If you have a Google-centric work flow, it makes a lot of sense...

Here's a somewhat lengthy breakdown of M1 vs the high end of mainstream notebook CPUs. The long and short of it is that the M1 trades blows with both Intel and AMD throughout testing, but is unquestionably better on battery power or for carefully selected workloads like editing in Apple ProRes.

Handy's Mac is ALSO a $2000ish computer. There is an ARM native version of Windows but it's pretty awful given the lack of available binaries made to run on it. I think it's the same old story where you can run Office and store apps

After looking through pretty much all of Lenovo's current offerings, I think the most viable current Thinkpad is probably the X1 Extreme gen 4. If you elect to buy "only" an RTX 3050Ti, you have 2xnVME and two DIMM slots. It has a 16:10 WQHD 16" screen and weighs under 2kg. Battery life is said...

PhotoPea is a nearly complete clone of Photoshop that runs in a browser. I'm not a Photoshop guy, but I know my way around the UI and core functions and as far as I can tell, it seems identical. You can even do things like import brushes you've saved. I'm sure it's missing out on high end...

Are you finding your choice of RAM amount to be at all limiting? The graphics guy in my office has a 16GB Macbook and M1 iMac and has told me that there are some projects he prefers to do on his Windows PC has four times the memory.

I keep writing W series, but they're Ps now. Same thing. Derp.

You can get a similarly equipped Thinkpad W series. One of my co-workers has a Thinkpad T480 with a Xeon and 64GB RAM. The battery life on that machine is abysmal. Historically, they're all using the same chipsets, so they'll all be roughly as capable. Lenovo's main selling point was sturdy...

Thinkpad W series actually do have discrete graphics and room for multiple internal drives. When I last looked at the T-series, I was extremely disappointed in the lack of flexible internal storage. My T470p DOES have discrete graphics (something just under what a mobile GTX1040 would...

Moto is not great with updates. Samsung and Google are best in that department, each giving about three years of software support on average, though Google is claiming more for the just released Pixel 6 series. Samsung promises support through two Android revisions past the release versions and...

I think Motorola is the gold standard for mid-tier Android phones. They tend to have 700-series Snapdragon CPUs and middling displays, but they tend toward the absurd end of battery life. I've suggested the Moto G Power or Ace for friends who aren't concerned about the camera. Samsung A5x...

There's never been any meaningful discussion of ChromeOS here. I picked up a Lenovo Duet this week. It's a little heavier and not quite as fast as my Tab S6, but I still like the utility of having a full desktop version of Chrome and somewhat better file management than Android. It has 48GB of...

SQL Express also has limits in terms of RAM and CPU cores that it'll use, but those aren't likely to be an issue for anything that runs at Access scale. I have a customer who has used Act CRM for about the last 25 years. I just looked and the total amount of actual data in that MSSQL instance is...

The only strictly-Windows programming I ever did was on Delphi (Object Pascal) and FoxPro/VFP, which was last updated in around 2007. Microsoft basically bought it to kill it, since its underlying database engine was substantially better than MSJet and could do about 90% of what MSSQL could at...

Supposedly Office 2022 can be purchased by individuals, which suggests that the individual applications can as well. Also, a Microsoft 365 subscription DOES include access to standard Windows applications, but web apps as well. A "Home" license DOES include Access and can be installed on up to...

I don't have a client system that's worth trying it, but Windows 11 should support SMB Direct if you're using advanced NICs and have links that can take advantage of them. I think Windows 10 needed some weird workstation version to use it, but on 11, we can supposedly enable it via Powershell...

Windows 10 and 11 will BOTH activate from any retail or OEM key for any Windows Edition that matches the product type you've installed, for any version of Windows after Vista. I have tested this many times. I've used keys that were on the bottom of laptops I found at my local recycling facility...

ShellExView can be used to fix Windows 11 context menus. If they had just put basic operations like Cut and Paste on there, I wouldn't be bothered, but that extra click is a click too far.

They just replaced the box. Meaning they sent it out again and didn't charge me for it the second time. The second time, the driver definitely did get a signature on the delivery.

A touch over $16,800 for a box slightly larger than a shoebox. The hilarious thing to me is that Amazon was just like "Yeah, we'll get you 16 more but it'll be Saturday if that's OK." They don't even care. I kind of want to go dumpster diving in that area tomorrow just to see if I can find them.

Today, a porch pirate hit the goddamned "What am I going to do with this?" lottery with my package of 16 4TB U.2 SSDs. Amazon didn't even mark the package signature required, and the delivery guy just left it by the front door to my customer's office, which is across the street from a 7-11...

I guess the requirements to mess with the Android on Windows 11 are fairly hefty; 8GB RAM and a 3000-series Ryzen. From what I've read so far, people aren't having much luck getting the Play Store framework to run, although it's not that hard to get individual apps sideloaded. Does anyone else...

I've been entirely ignoring my CS degree since about six months after I graduated. My best friend finished her CS degree in May. She did one three month contract for Amazon and now she's back to dancing. Don't knock the certs, though. They do get you noticed.

If you have any interest in seeing Dune, it's worth seeing in a theatre. It leaked online yesterday and I watched it, but just like Blade Runner 2049, the lingering atmospheric shots and gorgeous lighting deserve a big screen. I've been to the movie theater five times since May and I haven't...

There is some evidence that Windows 11 security features are often the culprit for reduced performance. For example, some people find that disabling Hypervisor Enforced Code Integrity (HVCI) fixes their issues.

My "unsupported" m83 only needed about 30 minutes to upgrade. It's a relatively vanilla PC with Office 2013 and some basic developer tool installed. Windows Update doesn't seem to do anything, but I can run the Offline Updater if I have to. Apparently, Office 2013 is unsupported on Windows...

Anyone tried installing on "unsupported" hardware yet? It looks like there are working scripts to bypass secure boot and TPM, but I didn't have the strength to spend any time on it this weekend, but I have a Lenovo m83 sitting here with with an i7-4785 and 32G RAM that I'm about to try to...

I think there are a couple third parties offering Start Menu replacements. The thing that drives more nuts more than that is that Microsoft moved the OG Context ("right click") Menu so that it's now a second-level submenu. 11 is also mildly clueless about printers; you get the Microsoft...

Stupid phone trick: If you create a contact named Fucking Fuck, autocorrect is much, MUCH better at letting you use that word appropriately.

That appears to be the case. I don't have anything that immediately qualifies aside from my big desktop at home. I suppose I'll find out, but I'm not super thrilled for it. Here's what I can say so far: I clean installed Windows 11 on an i5 NUC and upgraded an Asus Zenbook with a 4000-series...

From what I remember, the Via chipsets for SS7 were a step up from the SiS and ALI, but they were all a bit underdone in some way or other. I'm sure I have some Pro/100s sitting around if you want to try one. Probably an AWE64 as well, although for my money the AWE32 was neck and neck with the...

Windows 11 was released to the public today. You can get it using the Windows Upgrade Assistant or wait for Windows Update if you have a qualifying system.

I found an Android tool called Universal Copy that let me grab and export my dictionary from my old keyboard. It can recognize and grab text from any image as well. That's not something I think I'll need very often, but it solved a real problem for me.

I took my current roommate to a local phone repair place yesterday. Unbelievably, they still had a new in box Galaxy S20 Ultra, which DOES have a card slot. Not exactly the phone I wanted (it's a little too big and the model is a year old), but the owner threw in a pair of Galaxy Buds and a used...

That was a bit of a joke since I'm pretty sure it's mostly SSDs too, but it does look like 10TB+ drives are just perpetually stuck over $300. Maybe there just aren't that many consumers who want giant drives?

ChiaCoin: because it wasn't enough to make GPUs cost a fortune.

1. Just wipe and reload. 2. If you don't want to do that, you're probably going to have to use any one of a number of unlocking tools that you might find on a Hiren's or Strelec boot media. There are Linux distros for dealing with that stuff as well. It is actually fixable, but since Windows 10...

SATA in AHCI mode, other than the boot drive, should always be removable and there's no technical reason that you have to put a video card in a different slot, but as Chewy said sometimes motherboards do funny things if you are also trying to use nVME. If a board is keyed for m.2 SATA as well as...

If you had it installed, it auto-upgrades to the last compatible version. I still have to deal with a couple SBS 2003 systems. The net result from doing that is that you'll get "Hey, you REALLY need to update your Chrome" in a lot of places you visit. I'm not entirely sure you can fresh install...

I think that's basically marketing. Windows 7 is fine in the same way that XP was fine even after the release of Windows 8. Things haven't changed all that much aside from the regular shuffle of features that used to be in Control Panel that now get moved around the various Settings menus...

In some cases it is deeply surprising how far the roots spread for these companies. We can't opt out of Facebook ads ENTIRELY because it turns out Facebook owns some direct (Postal) mail operations now. Angular.js is a Google product that's used all over the web. Avoiding AWS and Azure because...

FWIW you should be able to get an AWS instance in that range, but if you can find enough to do with a low-end system like that, you can PROBABLY find enough to move on up to a self-hosted box somewhere. It's not hard to make a VM host on a 1U rack a profit-making item.