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1 hour ago, RichardR said:

I'd be willing to dispute that

The N900 did not use open-source hardware. 

3 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

seeing as you go from one big drive being being a liability to 2 drives being a liability.

Given the failure rates of SSDs, the added risk is very very minimal.  But because with RAID0 you are writing half as much data to each SSD's NAND chips, each SSD's NAND lasts longer than a single large SSD's NAND would.  So instead of 1PB of total write endurance, you'd get around 2PB, or 1.5PB if the smaller SSDs have slightly less endurance than the large one.

Keep the WiFi disconnected and let Windows Defender do a full scan of the PC (if you have any game cracks etc, be sure to whitelist those folders first). 

If that doesn't find anything, Avira may have messed up some of your drivers when it started acting up, which could cause the problem you're having now. 

In that case I'd start by uninstalling WiFi and Radeon drivers and reinstalling those. 

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.  First let's see how the Defender scan turns out.

I built a new one in 2016 to replace the one I built in 2011.  Needed to scratch that X99 itch.  Once I started using the new one, I realized that it was a huge waste of money. 

Not making that mistake again. 

I still have the old one, and it gets plenty of use still.  I did upgrade it a bit over the years.

"Silver Lining"

Holy necro !

Oh well, seeing as it's on page 1 again ...

I replaced mine with a sit-stand affair since.  Almost the same looks, exactly the same size (180x80cm).  Height can be adjusted from 65cm to 130cm.

Oh, and I replaced the screens, the main rig's case, the speakers, the mic, the webcam, added the old rig to the setup, moved the printer to another desk setup (the old desk).  Only the cabinet, mouse, trackball and keyboard remain.

40 minutes ago, Viking of Asgard said:

Avira

That's most likely your problem. 

Disable Avira and use Windows Defender.  If that picks up a virus as well, THEN you can start getting worried.

43 minutes ago, ElfenSky said:

After all, no1 can get the data if there is no data.

Ah, the Seagate philosophy

This is a good move. 

I'm surprised they ended up doing it after all.  I figured it just wasn't going to happen.  As the article points out, we've known about these hardware encrypting issues for 10 months now. 

The best way to find out is to do some testing. 

Open task manager, go to the Performance tab.  Once you get a graph of your CPU usage history, start your games and play a while while the task manager is running in the background.  suddenly alt-tab in the middle of playing and see what the CPU graph shows.  If it was at 95-100% right until you alt-tabbed, your CPU is bottlenecking the card.  But it's hard to say how severe the bottleneck is. 

Sandy and Ivy bridge non-K CPUs have a limited unlock (4 clicks past max turbo, so 4.0 GHz in the case of the 3470).  Is yours running at stock speeds still?  If so, go into the BIOS and increase the multiplier to x40.  No need to mess with voltages or any other settings. 

1 hour ago, dizmo said:

The 1TB is rated at what, 330TB? Who even writes that much? It'd take many, many years to reach that point, and by then you'll have likely upgraded or swapped it out for something else.

Many SSDs will happily do a multitude of the rated write endurance. 

As for who writes that much and how long it takes to wear out an SSD, I just did a Crystal Disk Info check of my old 1TB 840EVO, which is mostly used for multiplexing fresh Blu-Ray rips and editing audio files.

48TB written in just over 5 years (I bought that drive in August 2014), with 0 reallocated sectors and 100% drive health still.

Samsung doesn't give a maximum write endurance for this drive, but the 250GB version in Techreport's endurance test died shortly before hitting 900TBW. 

At this rate I'll need 88 more years to hit that 900TBW number.  Seeing as I'll be well into my 120s by then, I'll probably wear out long before the NAND does.

Not a fan of haggling in general.

When I put something up for sale, it has a hard price and I do mention that it's non-negotiable.  Whenever people still try to offer less I'll simply tell them to get back to me when they can actually afford it.

If the multiplier doesn't go beyond x42, you probably have a regular i7-2600 instead of a 2600K.

Messing with the BLK on Sandy and Ivy Bridge does give you higher frequencies and better benchmark results, but in real-world usage you'll find that the system easily becomes unstable.  I'd revert it back to stock BLK.

2 hours ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

While dramatically overkill, I make sure my backup drives get powered up and read at least once a month, especially the ones that have static data on them, to avoid the danger of corrupting or losing data due to charge leakage during downtime.

That's never a bad idea. 

That being said, I recently plugged in the 240GB 840EVO (TLC) that holds my old rig's Win7 install.  That drive had been in a drawer for 6 months and it still booted just fine.  Even the video files in the download folder played without any visible or audible artifacts.  And that model is known for slowing down due to charge leakage if data was kept static, even if the drive was powered on. 

Didn't do any checksums though, so I can't verify that there was no bitrot at all.  I'll do some next year when I put it back in storage at the end of the winter (end of folding season).

On 9/28/2019 at 3:44 AM, TempestCatto said:

Would be interesting to see what the LMG team thinks now. With this info coming out will they rethink their sponsor spot here?

This info has been known a while.  The Daily Mail article at the top of my post is from January, which IIRC is way before they started advertising with LMG.  The whole thing with the app controversy and the police is from June-July.

Both will be just fine. 

As for recovery service, with a good backup strategy you won't ever need that.  Never rely on one single drive to hold all your data or backups.

Remember the 3-2-1 rule of backups: 3 copies of your data, on 2 different media, with 1 of the backups stored off-site. 

Yes, it's expensive to store everything 3 times, but if a hard drive fails it's usually outside of warranty and then you'll still be paying the full price for data recovery. 

1 hour ago, TheAlmightyOS said:

But is it worth it to get an SSD for a laptop that is nearly ten years old? Sure, it isn't showing its age just yet, but for how much longer will it last? And would I even see a benefit? What are your thoughts?

How long it'll last is always the big question.  An SSD is never a bad investment though.  If the laptop fails, you can always put the SSD in another machine, or you can put it in a 2.5" USB3 enclosure and use it as a fast external drive.

You'll definitely see a benefit if you're using Windows 10.  That OS likes to read and write a lot, especially shortly after boot.

As for which brand, I never had any issues with Samsung or Crucial.  Heard good things about Adata too. 

2 hours ago, rcorkum said:

windows is such an experience, what most often fixes is reboot.

That makes things easier for anyone working in IT though.

It depends.  If you only put a stick in the good RAM slot, does the PC work properly or does it still BSOD? 

If you can keep it running with just one stick of RAM, by all means keep using it.  But if you need to spend any kind of money on it, you may want to ask yourself if it still makes sense to do so. 

6 hours ago, Mr. Budget said:

Q6600 (does anyone even use these anymore? even the gt 710 could be bottlenecked by this)

Those things overclock like crazy.  Go beyond 4GHz and they have no problem keeping up with a GTX770.

Anyway, The Verge will hold the title of "worst build" for quite some time.  Jay and Kyle both built a PC completely wrong on purpose and the end result still was better.  

28 minutes ago, kfly54 said:

The bios says that my ssd is a "windows boot manager". Could that be affecting the speed?

nah, that only means it boots from there.  Gimme a bit to check your motherboard's manual.  I'll edit this post when I find where the setting is.

EDIT : looked up the Prime B350 BIOS (most brands have very similar BIOSes across the range) and I don't see an option for switching the M.2 slot between SATA and PCIe/NVMe. 

So all I can suggest is to blow extra air onto the drive and seeing if that helps to drop the tempaerature and increase the speed.

0x0000001A sounds like a RAM problem indeed.  Seeing as you found one of the RAM slots to not work, there might be a short circuit or something which can cause the occasional BSOD.

0x00000101 (the second picture) points to the CPU being unresponsive. 

The big question here : is it the RAM slot that's causing the CPU to lock up creating the second BSOD code?  Or is there something wrong with the CPU causing it to report random errors ... like for example a bad RAM slot?  If part of the CPU itself failed and it can't detect that RAM slot as a result, all bets are off.

With the info I gathered from your post, the first thing I would do is look for a compatible CPU that I can borrow.  Assuming that it is a socketed CPU, of course. 

A quick search reveals that the B500 has a Core 2 Quad Q8400S, which would be socket 775.  That's OLD.

Then again either option is bad. 

If it's the RAM slot that's causing the BSODs even with no RAM inside it, forget about fixing that.  You basically have to scrap the motherboard. 

If it's the CPU ... do you really want to buy a second-hand CPU in an attempt to squeeze that bit more life out of a 10 year old machine?  What if it blows a capacitor next week?

Yeah, that's a bit hot, but not worryingly.  It's slow though.  You have an NVMe drive rated for 2000MB/s read and 1700 write.  600MB/s is SATA level. 

hmm ... does it ever go above 600?  You may want to check the BIOS, to make sure the M.2 slot is configured for an NVMe drive and not a SATA one.  It wouldn't be the first time that an NVMe drive under-performs because of a bad BIOS setting.

I have no experience with that case and how it handles thermals and airflow, but even Gamers Nexus calls it "acceptable" so it must be okay. Take off the side panel and blow air onto the drive (using a desk fan or holding an extra PC fan that you plug into a spare header on the motherboard).  See if that reduces the temps.

Those temps are pretty much in line with what my Samsung NVMe drives run at. (both 52°C at idle and 62 under load).

NVMe drives like to idle at around 50°C.  If they get too hot under load, the controller will throttle down which will affect read and write speeds. 

Heat does affect the lifespan of the device, but most people will be replacing their SSDs with larger ones long before they wear out.

As for the heatsink, I tested mine with and without the EKWB heatsinks and found no difference in terms of sustained idle and load temps. 

The heatsinks do slow down the temperature change, which theoretically would help with longer file transfers.  But I never actually measured just how much of a difference it makes. 

A friendly reminder :

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6579739/Amazons-Ring-let-employees-watch-live-footage-customers-cameras-report-claims.html

• All footage from all video doorbells is/was stored unencrypted and Ring's engineers and employees have access to all of it.  Some even have access to live feeds if they want.
• All footage can be linked to the owner of that particular Ring security system, which provides a treasure trove of personally identifiable information.
• Footage can be manually reviewed by employees (to improve the algorithms, like they do with Siri, Alexa, and Google Home) but owners were never informed of that because it isn't mentioned in the ToS. 
  Then again if the employees have access for any purpose anyway, I'd think that a manual review for proper reasons should be the least of the owners' concerns.

• By the way, that ToS gives Ring Inc an ...

  Quote

  unlimited, irrevocable, fully paid and royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide right to re-use, distribute, store, delete, translate, copy, modify, display, sell, create derivative works from and otherwise exploit such Shared Content for any purpose and in any media formats in any media channels without compensation to you

  ... which basically means they can do whatever.  If you share anything with your community through Ring's "Neighbors" app, or if you provide footage to a law enforcement agency that asks for said footage, Ring Inc. can use that camera footage, including your own voice or face (or that of any of your visitors, who certainly didn't consent to any of that), in their ads if they want.  In fact they did use actual footage in their ads already.

• Ring uses law enforcement to push their hardware.  The deal sounds shady at best.

  Quote

  Amazon's home security company Ring has enlisted local police departments around the country to advertise its surveillance cameras in exchange for free Ring products and a “portal” that allows police to request footage from these cameras, a secret agreement obtained by Motherboard shows. The agreement also requires police to “keep the terms of this program confidential.”

   

  Dozens of police departments around the country have partnered with Ring, but until now, the exact terms of these partnerships have remained unknown. A signed memorandum of understanding between Ring and the police department of Lakeland, Florida, and emails obtained via a public records request, show that Ring is using local police as a de facto advertising firm. Police are contractually required to "Engage the Lakeland community with outreach efforts on the platform to encourage adoption of the platform/app.”

  (source : https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mb88za/amazon-requires-police-to-shill-surveillance-cameras-in-secret-agreement )

• Even the EFF called them out for creating a climate of fear to sell their products and calls Ring a "perfect storm of privacy threats".

  Quote

  By sending photos and alerts every time the camera detects motion or someone rings the doorbell, the app can create an illusion of a household under siege. It turns what seems like a perfectly safe neighborhood into a source of anxiety and fear.

  This raises the question: do you really need Ring, or have Amazon and the police misled you into thinking that you do?

  (source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/amazons-ring-perfect-storm-privacy-threats )

As for abuses from law enforcement, there were reports of law enforcement having unlimited access whenever they want, without the need for a warrant. 

To my knowledge those haven't been verified so I'll not get into that too much.  I'd be surprised if they are doing that stuff by the book though. 

The EFF article does mention instances of possible abuse.  It also contains a lot of links to other troubling reports by other tech outlets.

EDIT : I came across this little gem buried in the ToS :

Quote

in addition to the license granted above, you give Ring the right, without any compensation or obligation to you, to access and use your Shared Content and related location information for the purposes of publicly sharing such recordings and information with current and future users and allowing those users to comment on the Shared Content. You also expressly consent and agree that Ring may share your Shared Content and related location information with any law enforcement agency that requests access to such Shared Content and related location information.
 

In addition to the rights granted above, you also acknowledge and agree that Ring may access, use, preserve and/or disclose your User Recordings and Shared Content to law enforcement authorities, government officials, and/or third parties, if legally required to do so or if we have a good faith belief that such access, use, preservation or disclosure is reasonably necessary to:

(a) comply with applicable law, regulation, legal process or reasonable governmental request;
(b) enforce these Terms, including investigation of any potential violation thereof;
(c) detect, prevent or otherwise address security, fraud or technical issues; or
(d) protect the rights, property or safety of Ring, its users, a third party, or the public as required or permitted by law.

Point (c) looks like a loophole so they can hand the data/footage over to law enforcement without the need for a warrant.    

Far be it from me to say who LMG should and should not partner with, but this is one company (Amazon in general, not just Ring) I try to avoid like the plague, just because of the amount of shadiness involved with almost everything they do.

I just hope that nobody here uses Ring products, and especially not as a result of sponsor spots in LTT videos.