Silver

An update: We've done a memtest, which came up clean. For good measure, we tried each of the RAM sticks individually, in case one of them had a problem We've completely reset the BIOS, shorting the pins We've left the installer screen alone for a good half hour, and it's still stuck. At this point, I'm pretty much out of ideas. Think it's time to RMA the motherboard and see if a new one fixes the issue. If that doesn't work... Ho boy.

We have tried it on an older version of the BIOS, the one that came with the board, and we had the same issue. Thanks for the tip on the DRAM calculator though, we may have to give that a shot!

Woops, sorry. Forgot to mention that we had done that already.

Here's the quick version of the story: A friend is building their first computer, and everything has gone mostly okay... Until it comes to installing Windows. We're installing from a USB stick imaged with Microsoft's official Windows 10 instal media creation tool, and the installation goes totally fine... Until we go to boot the computer up for the first time. There, it gets past all the "Getting your devices ready" stages, until it's just the spinning dots... Which after maybe 15 seconds stop spinning, and the computer never moves past there. Strangely enough, the mouse cursor is available on this screen -- we just can't do anything. Making this harder to deal with, all my troubleshooting has been done remotely, as I live like 3,000 miles away, so I can't actually put my hands on the computer and try things out. When I looked online, plenty of people had had this problem, it was just after updating Windows, and the solutions were roll-back the update or re-install. Well, we've formatted the SSD and re-installed 4 times now, so a reinstall isn't helping. At this point, I'm kind of out of ideas. Does anyone have any? Things we've tried: all variations of Safe Mode, none of which make it past the spinning ball of doom Resetting the UEFI to default settings Reseating the RAM Booting to Ubuntu - though we didn't go super far down this road, the computer stopped recognizing the Ubuntu USB as a boot device Formatting and installing Windows again (4 times lol) Updating the BIOS If it helps, the specs of the computer are: Ryzen 5 3600 MSI B550M Pro-VDH Samsung 860 EVO 2 TB RTX 2060 TL;DR: Brand new PC build, Windows install goes fine until it tries to boot, then the spinning dots just freeze and it never moves past there.

Yeah, I might recommend Ryzen 5 as opposed to the 7400, especially since you could overclock an R5 1600. However, I don't know what the prices in Brazil are, so it's possible the 7400 is a lot cheaper. If not, the Ryzen 5 1600 would be a great idea, with a comparable B350 board

There are these pretty dope bluetooth headphones from Aukey. Might be a good gift, since all the new phones don't have headphone jacks. Also, things like the Google Home Mini or Amazon Echo Dot are fun things for people who don't have a smart speaker. You could grab some MicroSD cards for people with phones that can take them, or cameras, or Nintendo Switches. Speaking of Switches, there are a bunch of video games you could find for under $50, that could be good for the kids or gamers in your life. Controllers, such as the Dualshock 4 or XBox One controller can also be found for that price point in some places. If you know they have smart lightbulbs, you could get them another one or two, or if you really like them you could get a starter pack. One last thing! If they have a laptop with an old HDD, then hey, maybe consider getting them an SSD to upgrade to (as long as they don't need too much storage)!

It had Extra Credits and Odd1sOut in the credits though, which I thought was actually pretty neat. It was nice to see animators get recognized in it for once (especially ones as non-mainstream as EC). It's also cool to see people like MKBHD in the video, showing that they at least somewhat recognize that tech is a huge genre on YouTube. I don't think Linus or Level1 would ever be included in it, but hey, it's something. But also yeah. It sucked. Wait for Google's Year In Search video though, those are always excellent.

I think it's probably worth experimenting. I'd move the second monitor to the 1080 and see if that helps. If it does, you're good. Though, to be honest, I'm not really sure why you'd want to have the 560 in there. They're not running in SLI, so it's not adding any performance or anything. And if you want something for just super light usage (like being on the desktop), your iGPU has that handled. If you're really set on keeping the 560 in, I'm pretty sure the 1080 can handle Netflix and gaming at the same time, but I feel like all the 560 is doing at the moment is adding to your power bill.

When you plug it in to your computer, be sure to cover everything with paper towel or a rag, just to be sure. That way, if it leaks you won't ruin any hardware.

So it's that time again, I'm looking to build a new PC sometime this summer. And I've started looking for a case, watching the LTT reviews, and I'm noticing something: There aren't a lot of cases with USB C or USB 3.1 on the front. What's the deal? Does anyone know of cases that have front panel USB 3.1 (preferably) or at least USB 3 type C? If anyone finds one that has USB 3.1 Type C, that's the real winner right there. Also, it'd be nice to have a disk slot or two for a BD-R/W drive and SD card reader. Thanks in advance for anyone who knows anything!

It wasn't as bad as I thought it'd be... Though the voices in my head started screaming about halfway through, so that was annoying.

This just... Always gets me.

I would assume your BIOS would have to support this for it to be able to work. As for an operating system, I'd go with Ubuntu, but you haven't given me much information about what you need it for. Another option, which I would honestly say is better, is installing the Linux distro on a flash drive, running your thin client off that, and then SSHing into your server. Maybe throw Debian on the server. Or, again, Ubuntu.

If I have any hopes for Windows 10, they're that it's free. I also hope they fix the networking, I've had pretty major problems with that in 8 and 8.1. But I'm overall pretty excited for Windows 10. The new snap features are pretty great, and it'll make managing 4 windows on a monitor much, much easier. Not too big a fan of the snap prediction, but I'll just hope they'll let you turn that off. My only turn off for Windows 10 is the start menu. I've been using StartIsBack on Windows 8.1, and it's much nicer than the start menu in Windows 10, because you can actually edit the files (something that seems, shockingly, to be missing in Windows 10), and you can press WinKey, Right arrow, enter to quickly shut down or put the computer to sleep. No such luck in Windows 10, because of the way the shutdown menu works. It basically requires the use of the mouse. And I really couldn't care less about Cortana.

Yeah, I might have to try that. It's really weird, though I'm not sure the third (middle) wire does anything... It looks like it's just attached to the outside of the tube.