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I've had it badly since my late 20s, to the point I was no longer able to work full-time from that point on. It runs in the family. My mother had it, my sister has it. I think my maternal grandmother may have had it also.

I don't think so. One of two things will happen, maybe both. One, it will act as a Faraday cage, which is almost a certainty. Two, it'll start heating up when absorbing the output from the wireless charger, similar to an induction stove. As for carbon, consider they use it on bikes. By...

Which thread? I'd gladly post in it instead of here but I don't know which thread you're talking about.

They should wait forever. Tariffs just hurt the common person. Lots of these products subject to tariffs are mostly made in China and won't be made in the US in the foreseeable future. The tariffs on EVs especially irk me. I want BYD to flood the US market with sub-$10K EVs to light a fire under...

I wish he had this judge when sentencing time comes: https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/b95d9252-7879-4c65-90a7-f564ed00fa5a

Sadly, people get the leaders they deserve. I saw firsthand during covid how ignorant and selfish a large part of the population is. This is Trump's base. He has the kind of momentum he does because these people want to be him. They want to get their way regardless of how it hurts others. We saw...

For a while after I switched to Verizon I was only getting ~100Mbps speeds, but around 400 to 500 Mbps when using devices with wifi. I didn't know why since I had connected the router to the 1Gb Ethernet port on my PC. I forgot exactly what I did, but it may have been a setting to get the port...

I hear you. Honestly, I wouldn't want to put a bunch of work or money into a place I don't own, either. I was suggesting your landlady pay for it, given it would make the place more attractive, as well as save energy. Where you are you obviously don't have to worry about heating given the...

I think it depends on what you get. The very fast SSDs get hot. Heat is the enemy of all electronics. For me even the slowest SSD is worlds faster than any HDD. The thing here is HDDs are one bump away from data loss. Maybe I accidentally bump into my PC case. Now I'm looking at replacing the...

Honestly, even new HDDs give me pause these days. The bit density has gotten way too high. If any one part of the drive fails, you lose data. I trust stored bits on a chip, instead of bits of rust spinning at thousands of times per minute, a lot more. The last HDD I purchased was a 2TB, 5400 RPM...

I don't know if any of these helps, but an ongoing project I'm doing is to get the house better insulated. For now, I did the following: 1) Installed cellular shades (the double-cell ones) in my bedroom and the kitchen. I'll probably eventually get them for all the windows. Windows are by far...

Totally agree, Doug. The high prices don't just hurt people looking to buy. They hurt those like me who might face buying out their siblings if they want to stay in their parent's house. My parents bought the house for $52K in 1978. Had prices kept up with the CPI, it would be worth about $250K...

Home price inflation is a problem for almost everyone. As I mentioned a while back, if my siblings insist on getting their share of the market price of the house, I'm out on the streets. Basically, I need $600K or more live on for the rest of my life. I might end up with $275K from my third of...

Regarding radiators, if you want to go cheap pull the evaporator out of an old A/C someone is discarding (after they have the refrigerant removed, which is usually required before putting it out by the curb), get some car radiator fans, and you're in business. With the fans running at a fairly...

That's 5 to 10 watts less than my entire system, less the monitors, pulls from the wall socket for most of my use. Graphics or computational intensive stuff can get me around 125 watts, but that's relatively rare.

If MediaTk/Nvidia can come out with an APU which also has some fast, dedicated VRAM that would be a winning combo. A big bottleneck for iGPUs is the fact they use system RAM, not dedicated, much faster VRAM. Even a relatively small amount (i.e. a few hundred MB) of VRAM in the same package as...

Just wondering if it would be remotely possible to install Win 7 on a modern system with, say, a Ryzen 8000G?

Yes, noise and the cost of electricity. Plus in summers it's that much more heat the A/C needs to deal with. With my intermittent but all day long use patterns, my PC is on 24/7. The monitors shut off after 10 minutes. At ~45W while idling, that's OK. It comes to only ~30 kW-hr/month. Something...

Well, that explains a lot. Honestly, when I first tried running Open Rails on my laptop, I crossed my fingers that the performance would at least match that on my desktop. When I saw it was probably 2x better, I was pleasantly surprised. I didn't know Intel closed the gap with AMD this much...

Same here. I'm going by how often you would actually need that extra performance. Take my use case. About the only thing I currently do which taxes my iGPU is play Open Rails. Even then, 90% of the time I'm getting 40 to 60+ FPS, with 30s most of the rest of the time. Maybe a few percent of the...

Isn't quite a bit of power used just sending data to and from a discrete GPU? When everything is on one chip data transfer is a lot more efficient. It's easily possible that a 65 to 105 W APU can come close to the performance of a 65W CPU and ~100W graphics card as a result. Even if the discrete...

I'm thinking the reason for these monster graphics cards might have to do with the fact iGPUs have gotten good enough for most people to not need a graphics card. They essentially fill the niche which used to be taken up by lower end graphics cards. I guess the reasoning goes, why make a $50 or...

The 20th century model worked fine. The problem is businesses think their profit margins should be a lot higher now. It's the difference between making a reasonable profit providing a good or service, versus an obscene profit. It's also the result of defacto monopolies like Microsoft. In theory...

Sounds like a much better idea than every home having a furnace and hot water heater. Are there any heat exchangers to recover some heat from wastewater? In theory if you could recover most of the heat once you "prime" with some hot water to get things started you would need to add very little...

I looked into that first for the kitchen sink. They have ludicrous power requirements, starting at well over 5 kilowatts. That doesn't even get you a great flow rate. If your incoming water is 40°F (typical in NYC winters) and your outgoing is 110°F, 5 kW only gives you ~0.5 gpm, maybe twice...

He repairs PCs for a living, so that at least gives him some credibility. Truth is people are too complacent. We should have nipped this whole thing in the bud years ago. It's not just happening with PCs, either. Too many things are becoming rentals instead of buy once and use forever.

Yeah, I'm getting the impression we're fast approaching a time where a PC will need to be on its own circuit breaker, much like a larger air conditioner.

Speaking of that I was in MicroCenter the other day and saw what I thought was a heat exchanger for a small air conditioner inside one of their display computers. I think it was an RX7900 video card. So much for more efficient processors. Unless I needed a space heater, I'd never run one of...

Honestly, I smell a big class-action lawsuit against MS for stuff like this. You shouldn't have to jump through all their hoops just to access your own data. I get security to some extent but you should be able to disable it. I'm the only one who will ever access my PCs. Nobody lives with me...

That explains why using a picture doesn't work. I guess if you cut off someone's head and attempted to use that to log in it wouldn't work, either. I'm surprised more fingerprint ID sensors don't use IR also. True story here-one of my family members was scammed by someone. A relative (who is now...

I don't recall being asked for a PIN when I set up my new laptop. It is set to log me in with facial recognition. Maybe to future-proof that against my appearance changing radically I should make a cast of my face. Merc, I wonder if you could get an artist to do something similar with that guy...

I don't get that, either. A driver's license, or non-driver's ID, issued by the state with your picture should be sufficient to serve as ID on a video call.

Seems like only a $20 to $30 difference between 500GB and 1 TB. I'd just go with 1TB. It's possible he may do stuff which needs more space later.

I'm guess that's low-end commodity stuff which people on a budget buy. I definitely did see SSDs going for $35/TB last year. I also recall 8TB HDDs going for $100, give or take. If fact, here we go...

I saw prices of commodity SSDs drop to as low as $35/TB last year. Now it seems $45 to $50 is about the best deal you can get. Longer term of course, the trend is still down, as it's been with DRAM.

This is a textbook case of why you should back up your data in multiple places, like thumb drives, external hard drives, the cloud, etc. As for passwords. I've long ago made spreadsheets of passwords I use for various sites. There's no way I'm going to remember many or most of them. Besides, a...

For me personally, it seems like there's 5 years between noticeable differences, but at least a decade between differences which are large enough to merit a hardware upgrade. My last desktop hardware upgrade was to the A10-7870K about 5 years ago. Comparing this to the i7-13700H laptop I bought...

Do Macs still need special hard drives, or can they at least finally take regular commodity HDDs? I remember that being another quirk with them years ago where the pinout on the cable was different, no doubt so you could only buy hard drives from them at grossly inflated prices.

That pretty much would negate any need for heating my house in the winter. And 20 petaflops? Holy cow! I was impressed with just the few hundred gigaflops today's CPUs can manage.

There's one about half a mile from me. You're basically getting the graphics card thrown in for free once you add up the regular prices of all the other stuff. Looking at some data, the A770 can do roughly 20 Tflops single precision. That's about 10 times as much as the integrated GPU on my...

I actually did find a setting in MyAsus called battery care mode. I enabled it. It limits battery charge to 80%. I guess that's the same setting as on my sister's machine.

Yes, exactly. Intel's integrated GPUs sucked back then. I knew AMD's CPUs didn't quite match Intel, but for my uses they were "good enough". Now their Zen cores give Intel a run for their money. Definitely. It's worlds ahead of my A10-7870K for sure. I could do it that way. I have a Samsung T5...

It's Windows 11 Home, and the OS was installed on February 21, 2024. BestBuy does a fresh install on all their open box items. It's essentially like getting a new computer. The drive appears to be this one: https://www.newegg.com/micron-512gb-2400/p/0D9-0022-000N3 Read speeds up to 4500 MB/s...

Yeah, I don't use AV programs beyond Windows Defender and Malwarebytes. They all drastically slow the system down, especially when doing file operations. Still using 7 on my desktop. No compelling reason for me to upgrade. It works, plus I'm way too entrenched to start over. Only thing I...

I didn't have any vested interest in Windows 11 until now. I just bought a new laptop. Open box excellent condition (which looks brand new to me) for $662.99. However, I just got a new credit card which gives a $200 cash back bonus plus 1% on purchases if you spend over $500 in the first 3...

Thank you.

Can someone remove the link to my mother's obituary in the first post? My sister saw it and mentioned it could open the door to identify theft using my mother's name now that she's dead.

I rode 2,500 miles last year. I might have ridden more if not for my rides being limited to 1 to 1.5 hours (the most I felt comfortable leaving my mother alone). I'll see if I can get back to my old normal of 3,000 to 4,000 miles a year this year or next.

I make around that working at home as an independent contractor. That's the only kind of work I'm interested in now but not for 40 hours a week. If this latest project eventually gets to 10 or 15 hours a week that's enough. It's almost all taxes anyway if I ever got much over about $100K, so not...