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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...

Not sure what you mean by work full time. Get a job working for someone else 40 hours a week for a lousy $10 or $15 an hour? I was done with that over 30 years ago. The 15 or 20 hours a month I'm doing now working from home is about as much work as I care to do. I want to go back to living again...

Thanks all for the condolences. The hardest part, namely the funeral and burial, is over. Once I feel myself again, I'll easily go back to doing projects to fill my uncommitted time. I'm also working about 15 to 20 hours a month on a new project for my friend who owns the taximeter shop. I...

As some of you may know, I've been care taking for my mother for about the last decade. Things got more involved when she stopped walking about 6 years ago. I had to bathe her, put her on the toilet, move her from her bed to her recliner, and so forth. I semi-retired in 2018, both to take care...

Why would you need to work 900 years? People can usually save enough to retire on by their 60s. The very point of living longer is so you have a more years without working.

I think splitting the country into the two coasts, and middle America, would be the best outcome. Let them have their theocracy, so long as it doesn't come to where I live. I'll feel sorry for anyone who lives there, but hopefully they'll still be free to leave. It would be more than a bit...

Regardless of whatever media you choose, it's worth noting that degradation slows down dramatically at lower temperatures. Put the media in a sealed bag to avoid condensation, then stick in the freezer. If it was good for, say, 20 years at room temperature, it might be good centuries later in...

It boils down to where I'd feel comfortable. I'm a megacity person who gets around by walking, cycling, and public transit. I like big city life in general. Outside of NYC, there's no where in the US I'd really want to live. The closest analogue to NYC are Asian megacities like those in China...

I'm curious what they would have against retiring in the country with your own source of income. I get all the other objections. The Netherlands has a great bike network, among other things. If Trump gets a second term, I'm seriously considering leaving the country. No idea where I would go...

I guess it'll be OK. We're not talking about high power level per square mm like a microprocessor. Like you said, anything is better than air. The thermal paste probably isn't that much worse than many thermal pads anyway.

How much of a gap? Heat sink compound is generally designed to be used only to fill very thin gaps on the order of a few thousandths of an inch. If used in thicker layers, there might be too much thermal impedance.

It's highly likely it'll still work. Just take the board out of the enclosure and let it dry thoroughly for a few days. Electronics and water are mainly a problem if they sit in water for more than a few days. A wash/rinse cycle doesn't qualify. That's not long enough for the water to start to...

I'm used to °C for all my engineering work. I just don't have an instinctual grasp of it as it relates to weather. If someone tells me it's 20 outside, I expect to be freezing unless I'm wearing a few layers. I have to convert C to F in my head to get an idea of the temps I'm dealing with. Also...

Just as an aside I've been using metric on my bike computers for years. The higher number just sounds better. I can tell people I was cruising at 35, or bombed down a hill at 60. Sounds much better than 22 and 37, respectively. Can't get used to metric for temps though. It still sounds strange...

Or the grid needs to be upgraded to handle them, often at great expense. It's a chicken or egg thing. Until more people own EVs, in many places the math just won't work out for charging stations. Provided you can charge at home, for most EV use they're not needed anyway. You'll be seeing them...

I know that. A 240VAC, 30A dryer outlet is a lot more practical for home EV charging, assuming your EV is compatible with it.

Or pass an extension cord out the window.

Pretty much every business fudges its numbers. That's why it's better to look at independent, real world data, like in the article I linked to. Here's another: Tesla Model 3 Owners Get Candid About LFP Battery Health And Degradation Can you charge where you live? For most EV owners most of...

Except real world date shows the battery may well outlast the rest of the vehicle: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/researchers-surprising-discovery-lifespan-ev-110000330.html Also, there are two types of batteries being used in EVs now. The first type is regular nickel cobalt lithium ion (the...

Obviously it would need to be done in an isolated area.

Have you ever tried a shotgun or machine gun? That would probably be the most dramatic way to destroy a drive short of explosives.

Glad to hear he's alive and well, and thanks for reaching out to him.

He passed away? Or you're simply using "late" to mean it's been a while since he's been around?

Maybe the 4TB are more reliable? Yes, it seems strange they didn't upgrade to larger drives. They must have run the numbers and found some reason to stick with the older drives.

They are practically dead for anything but data centers, and a handful of home users with huge storage needs. https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2021/08/03/death-of-the-hard-disk-could-come-sooner-than-we-thought/?sh=616e8e2c146b However, with further evidence of SSDs showing greater...

Well, SSDs are getting a lot cheaper. We're at around $30/TB for the commodity stuff. Commodity HDDs are maybe only half that at this point, but SSDs are falling in price faster than HDDs. Probably only a matter of a year or two before SSDs get cheaper than HDDs. The highest capacity stuff...

Does anyone still even use a fax these days?

Yeah, I got XP to use over 4GB in a VM using some components from Windows Server 2003, but the exact same build would crash before booting on a real machine, presumably due to driver issues. In the end as you said, XP generally works fine with 2GB anyway. 3GB is just gravy. I think I went that...

I can't help much on the hardware part but I had an Athlon XP system and Windows XP SP3 running with 3GB, so basically XP will use whatever RAM you throw at it. Going beyond 3GB makes little sense though even if your M/B could handle it. With some of the addresses reserved for hardware, you'll...

You have to be very careful here. Strictly speaking, most of the LED retrofits are illegal. The issue is that the optics in your headlights are designed to work with the very specific light pattern emitted by the OEM halogen bulb. Most LED retrofits can't mimic this enough to meet specs. The end...

One of my concerns would be the drives failing to work when you need them. Anything second hand could be heavily used. Also, with drives being mechanical devices if they sit unused for a while they might not work. For safety reasons, I'd probably want 2 or 3 drives on hand just in case of...

The earlier ones, which cost a few bucks each, were. By the time they became commodity items of course reliability suffered. In any case, it's moot now given how useless they are for any kind of back up. I haven't had a floppy drive on my main machine for the better part of a decade.

I thought tape was obsolete like a decade ago. As for reliability, weren't 3.5" floppies the pinnacle of reliability, and it's been all downhill ever since? Granted, the capacity made them useless for most backups even 2 decades ago but with magnetic bits that large they're probably immune to a...