Inception9269

As someone that has been building PCs for over a decade now, I don't really know jack s**t about laptops, and was needing help with finding one. The backstory being that this is something a relative of mine wants to get for their 13yo, that's capable of playing games on as well as programming. The programming part can be done on pretty much any PC, but for the gaming part I'm not sure what can be had there, especially without spending a ton of money. This person wants to keep it at less than $1000 (USD), and I don't really know what to look for. I'm familiar with desktop components (though recent generation Intel CPUs & GPUs I don't know much about), but laptops have their own components. I saw this laptop here on best buy, which has an i7-1355U CPU, and a Intel Iris Xe Graphics GPU (which I don't really know much about). I don't know if this laptop would be considered a good option, or if there's better. Also with this being for someone else, and not for myself, I would prefer to stick with something from Best Buy, Micro Center, or some other reputable online site, and not something secondhand from ebay or whatever, that way if there's something wrong with it they can just turn to them for troubleshooting or a replacement.

Am about halfway through copying all the contents of my drive to a new one, with ddrescue being the one that worked out.

ddrescue isn't exactly something that can easily be run inside of windows, and my Linux install of Arch was borked due to some bs I was dealing with the other day. Am running a fresh install of Garuda linux now, and am running ddrescue as we speak, but there's still around 3.5 hours to go.

Just finished running photorec, and it says it's done but I only got about 200gb of the roughly 2tb of data, also it's split across hundreds of folders named "recup_dir.1" through "recup_dir.938"

Am running photorec now. The drives is a 2tb one so it'll be awhile, so will post an update when it's done.

So I have an SSD that's end of life and is now read only and can't be written to. On Windows Disk management it's shown as RAW, and is inaccessible. I'm trying to find software that'll let me recover the data and move it to a new drive. I've tried EaseUS Data Recovery but it won't let me recover it for free, same for Minitool Power Data Recovery. I also tried something called Recuva, but it only scratched the surface of the drive. I really am hoping there's a free option out there, cause I only got a couple hundred bucks, and am like 4 grand in debt, and really don't want to spend the money unless I have to.

Was able to get help from ChatGPT, since nothing anyone here recommended seemed to help. ChatGPT gave me a list of things to try, with these being the ones I tried out which worked for me. 3. Disable Hardware Acceleration Hardware acceleration can sometimes cause issues with video playback. Disable Hardware Acceleration: Go to Menu > Settings > General > Performance, uncheck "Use recommended performance settings," and then uncheck "Use hardware acceleration when available." 4. Adjust Firefox Settings Tweaking some advanced settings in Firefox can improve performance. About Tweaks: Type about:config in the address bar, accept the risk, and change the following settings: media.mediasource.enabled: Ensure this is set to true. media.mediasource.webm.enabled: Set to true if you prefer WebM over MP4. media.webm.enabled: Set to true. 5. Disable Experimental Features Firefox may have experimental features enabled that could interfere with performance. Disable Experimental Features: Type about:config in the address bar and set media.av1.enabled to false. 6. Use the h264ify Extension This extension forces YouTube to use the H.264 codec instead of VP8/VP9, which can be less performance-intensive. h264ify Extension: Install h264ify. 7. Check Network and DNS Settings Ensure your network connection is stable and try changing DNS settings to see if it improves performance. Change DNS Settings: Use a DNS service like Google Public DNS or Cloudflare. Google Public DNS: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 Cloudflare DNS: 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 (Note, Cloudflare's is the one I used for this step, since I don't think Google's DNS would assist me in a case where they're the ones responsible for this problem. I also set the IPv6 DNS to theirs as well, 2606:4700:4700::1111 and 2606:4700:4700::1001)

I even tried clearing cache on Firefox, but still videos are so damn choppy, laggy, and won't fully buffer.

I was using one specifically for Youtube called "Enhancer for Youtube" but I disabled it, and am still getting the same problems.

Fk that, I ain't using Edge.

Just tried a couple of videos on Edge. Even tried a mixture of videos from multi-million sub/view channels and some from obscure people with hardly any views (to see if perhaps there's some bias going on behind the scenes) and they loaded perfectly fine on Edge.

Is soooo fking laggy and slow right now. I'm fully aware of the fiasco that went on this past year or whenever, but it's something I never had much of an issue with aside from a little trouble loading every now and then, but today the site as a whole is loading like ass. I know it's not my download speed cause I'm currently getting well over 500mbps with 30ms ping. When it came to the drama surrounding the YT and Firefox issue I could have sworn people said that it's only an issue if YT detects that you're using certain adblockers, though I heard that it doesn't run into that issue if you're using ublock. Regardless of that, I've had YT premium for years now, and also have ublock disabled on YT, but I'm still having videos struggle to load, and when they do play it seems like they only play for a short amount of time before having to buffer. Reloading the video or opening it in a new tab alleviates the problem, but only for a minute or two. Hoping there's some kind of fix that doesn't involve switching to a different browser. I've been using Firefox since 2011, and I absolutely refuse to install Chrome; same goes for Chromium, Brave, and anything else that has anything to do with Google.

You're unlikely to get any helpful responses here. You're better off going to the forums or discord of whatever distro you're using. You're much more likely to find people that can help you.

As someone that's never liked the game for most of its history, I very recently decided to give it a go. I did play and mod the original version, but found it to be a really buggy experience, with it being very hit or miss on whether my mods will work or not. One positive about getting into the game this late in its life is I haven't had any notable issues with the game or installing mods, with it being more stable now than back when I tried to get into it so long ago. The biggest annoyance I have though is just how restrictive the combat system is. With you by default being limited to whatever you assign to your left and right hands, and as far as magic/shouts/etc you get just a single hotkey to use whichever ones you assign to it. I was really hoping that someone knows of a mod to improve this. I do have SkyUI installed, so I have been able to get by by just favoriting spells, weapons, whatever and then using the Q button to open a list of favorites, but I would like the ability to register more things to hotkeys. I prefer fighting with melee weapons, and would like the ability to use various spells or shouts without having to reassign anything or remove my weapons. Also on the topic of hotkeys, the keyboard I'm using (Corsair K95 I believe) has 6 macro keys along the left side of it (the buttons are G1 through G6) and I was wondering if anyone knew how I could use those keys when playing games like Skyrim. By default the game doesn't detect them when I try setting something to those keys.

Not sure where this should be posted, since part of it could be considered troubleshooting, but idk. As for the matter at hand, I'm trying to figure out how I can remote access my main PC that I game on from elsewhere in my house. Preferably on an Xbox Series X that I recently got. With my setup, I want to remote access a PC that I have in one of my rooms from my bedroom, but I'm having trouble doing so. I don't want to have to go out and spend a lot of money on additional hardware, since my living space is already cluttered as all hell. I'd like to be able to use the devices that I already have, and not have to go out and buy or build another PC. As for the solutions that I know of, the first being GeForce Now, which can be accessed through the Edge browser on the Xbox. Imma pass on that, cause the free tier is kind of ass, especially with that one hour time limit. The first paid tier is better, but I'd be limited to 1080p @ 60 fps, and I want to properly take advantage of my 4K TV for the sake of getting my money's worth. As for the second paid tier, that ones neat and all but I don't want to pay that much, especially since I won't use it nearly enough to justify paying for it (I'm talking only an hour or so each night, maybe more on the weekends). The second solution I found that I did my best at was by using Parsec to remotely access my main PC. I know LTT did a video on it back during Covid time, though they didn't really cover the ins and outs of it. But as for the service itself, I installed it on my gaming PC, for it to be used as the host, but I struggled to get things working. Whenever I would connect to it on the browser on the Xbox I would only get a black screen, though I would receive audio through it (I'm using a wired connection on both systems). I messed around with Parsec so much, but no matter what I did I couldn't get things to work right. I do think I have an idea on what the problem is, I just got no clue about any solutions for it. I think the issue comes down entirely to the resolution of my displays. The monitor on my main PC is an ultrawide 3440 x 1440p monitor that uses the 21:9 aspect ratio, whereas the TV I'm using with my Xbox is 4K, 3840 x 2160 16:9. With Parsec you can select various options for resolutions, like keep host resolution or keep guest resolution, and neither one works. I think the problem is obviously the TV can't do the ultrawide resolution or aspect ratio, and my monitor isn't capable of doing the 4K resolution. The only time I'd ever get a video output was when my PC's monitor would switch all the way down to 720p after the higher resolutions fail to work. One thing I tried in order to get around this was using the paid Parsec service (me using the trial), since that allows you to create virtual desktops through Parsec. As for the virtual desktop I still struggled to make it work, I think because of the way Windows utilizes additional displays. Windows presenting me with four options for the extra monitor, that being to extend the first display, duplicate it, or display only one or the other. None of those options worked in my case. I was able to get video output to the Parsec guest system with the extend option, but the problem is that functionality only really works if the displays are side by side, with me being unable to see anything that's open on the first monitor. What would have been ideal is to have the first monitor duplicated onto the 2nd monitor, but that didn't want to work, with it changing the 4k resolution of the virtual display, upping it to 3440 x 1440 which results in a black screen on the guest system. Hypothetically the last two options, only displaying one at a time would probably work, but that'd be a horrible option since if I want to go and mess with my PC I'd manually have to go through my Xbox to change the setting through the browser. So I don't suppose anyone knows of any tricks or software that would resolve that problem. Cause the only solution for me to use Parsec as is would be to replace the monitor on my main PC with a 4k monitor, so that I'm matching resolutions. I really do not want to do that, cause I just bought my ultra wide in the last couple of months, and I love that thing. It being an OLED (from Alienware, can't remember the model name but I know LTT did a video on it) and the image quality is absolutely gorgeous, especially with HDR. I spent a lot of money on it, and don't want that to go to waste. I did try using the Steam Link. I've had that thing for many years now with it not being until just recently that I tried using it (only bought the thing cause Valve was selling them off many years ago for incredibly cheap). It's actually kind of interesting cause the Steam Link actually did display my entire ultrawide desktop, with it simply scaling the output to fit the TV screen. The problem i faced with this though was the screen was very faded, likely cause I don't think the Link supports HDR, also it would seem I'd be limited to 1080p @ 60. Also for whatever reason I was having a lot of latency with the Steam Link. If I had to guess why, maybe trying to cram that resolution onto the screen while also having my main PC displaying things in HDR.