Pandora

Hi, Let me preface this by saying i'm not a total noob with things like this. I have never done anything other than low power components with my experience capping out at replacing smd components on laptops. I have a dead gpu and after some testing i am 99% sure that there are 2 bad caps right next to each other. I bought another dead GPU to steal caps from test de soldering with lead-free solder. I have been unable to remove any caps so far. Heck I can't even get the lead-free solder to properly tin the end of my soldering iron (hakko 888d at 790c). I know lead-free stuff sucks to work with and i know the these caps are going to have a large grounding trace that will be sucking away a good bit of the heat but i feel like i'm running into a fundamental issue or missing a key piece of knowledge. Thank you for your help

oh dam im dumb. i legit just forgot that i could partition off part of the drive

i am looking to clone an existing windows install on a sata hdd (1tb) to a NVME ssd (Toshiba BG4 256gb). i normally i would use software like macrum reflect or similar or just use a standard drive cloner. unfortunately from my understanding the target drive has to be equal to or larger than the source drive in order for this to work and be bootable. i was wondering if anyone had low cost software or hardware solutions to this issue.

i recently acquired an old xps 12 from a friend and so far its been a really comfortable travel laptop. only problem is that its display has 2 major issues. severe image persistence, which i can deal with, and these little black dots all over the screen. they are under the glass and not super visible from a distance but they make every picture, ever web page and most experiences just look bad. at first i assumed they were dead pixels until i noticed they weren't perfectly aligned in the grid. i put the display under my microscope and found this. i have no idea what to make of it. its almost like dust under the glass but i cant seem to move any of them. i was wondering if any of you guys had experience with something like this

what i found was that plugins wreck this game. and while performance in game stayed consistent and CPU usage never rose we found that with lower power processors with more people online weird bugs would occur more frequently. things like body bags not appearing, dino bodies not appearing, mobs not spawning, player owned dinos disappearing/despawning. currently im running this game in an i5 4460 with 16 gigs of ddr3 at 2133mhz and my problems have somewhat disappeared. the other thing i changed was i moved to a raid 10 ssd setup.

because i am quite tired of windows having an update every 6 months that requires me to either boot from a backup or nerfs my performance. also i hate the telemetry

im a student i can get these keys for free or nearly. i will take a look at the 2016 LSTB

I am planning on a clean reinstall for my main Pc pretty soon but i am pretty fed up with windows 10's seemingly inane update scheme and its awful user tracking. I want to migrate to windows 2016 but im not sure how well it will support a lot of edge programs i use. i really heavily into VR and i like messing around with drivers and such. i was wondering if anyone had any experience using windows 2016 as a main OS. programs that i use that are a little odd are emulators such as dolphin, hacked games such as CM3D2 and some tools to grab 3d models. but what i really need it to work with is VR.

this laptop checks almost every box. its not that money isnt the problem its that i can afford to drop 50$ on an nvme ssd especially since i budgeted to buy one for this laptop anyway.

eh, nvme ssd's arent expensive anymore. i think i am just going to try it out.

i get that. traditionally when data was requested from the pagefile it would/could cause a pretty intense system lockup.

so i recently picked up a hauwei matebook D for 440$. i love the laptop so far but it has a major draw back. ONLY 8 GIGS OF RAM! i mean come on. okay i can deal with 8 gigs if 1.1 gigs wasn't reserved solely for the gpu and windows didn't default use 1.5 gigs. unfortunately its not upgrade-able but this laptop does support an nvme drive. i was wondering how much a performance hit i would notice if i used the fastest nvme drive i could as ram overflow. im sure there would be a performance hit but most of my ram usage goes to my browser and the games i play don't use much ram. my question is "if i used an nvme drive for ram spillover would i notice a dramatic performance hit while browsing/having multiple tabs open"?

its definitely a strong candidate but my god does it look like trash. and a CD drive? what is this 2008?

i am also looking at https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834324036 and https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16834850877

So im on a pretty tight budget right now and i need to replace my current laptop although i love it. simply put it's bulky and its battery life is too poor to be my daily driver. i am looking at https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834235072&Description=asus mx150&cm_re=asus_mx150-_-34-235-072-_-Product its my budget maybe even a little high. what i need this laptop to do is light gaming WOWS WOW warthunder and other light games and im pretty sure the mx150 is up to the challenge. my main problem is the poor reviews on this laptop when it comes to battery life, trackpad usability and keyboard flex. i was wondering anyone here had any recommendations in the 500$ price range for a similar laptop. i don't mind buying used.

on 15 inch most of the time i want that space to either be used for upward facing speakers or centering the keyboard and track pad. but i do like a numpad as well. i think the t420 did it best with the integrated number pad

no idea what imesh is but powerline adapters consistently provide lower latency connections compared to wireless.

for laptops? no, not for that form factor, even then that laptop isnt worth 50$ so its likely not worth the ssd.

the t23 if its the one im thinking of has a pen 3. i dont think it can take an ssd because its original hdd is ide.

this could make a really nice retro gaming box.

More photos

A few weeks ago i decided to make myself a dedicated vr pc with some parts I had on hand. To make it a little challenging I decided to give myself a theme. I decided to go with shadow priest because that's what I mained in wow. Anyway my budget was 350ish $ I already had the cpu, storage and raman I7 3930k a 120 gig ssd and a 2 tb hdd, lastly the ram was some genaric green and blue hynix crap. Off to eBay! I picked up a corsair 850w psu for 40$ (wasn't really Comfortable with the 500w psu I already had for the hardware) I grabbed an R9 290 that was used for bitcoin mining but still had the stock bios and then flashed it to an R9 290x (I replaced the thermal pads and paste) 120$. Deep cool cpu cooler for 20$ new off ebay. Cm masterbox td500 case for 76$ (comes with 3 rgb fans and an awesome cut acrylic side pannel) My hardest choice was the motherboard, even now x79 motherboards are expensive ranging from 230$ to 450$ and most of them wouldn't have fit the color scheme of purple and black So I bough a Runing (yes Runing) x79 generic motherboard. It's some sort of hunan clone. 150$ Everything arrives and i go about testing the components to find the motherboard is dead. A chat with the ebay seller and a new one arrives working perfectly although the box is soaking wet. As I dink around with the system on a test bench I realize that I can't overclock the processor. Some googling tells me I need to flash it with a Russian bois so I do that. Now I got the cpu at a nice 4.3 ghz stable. Next it's time for painting. Anything that can be removed gets painted a nice purple. I bend aluminum flashing and cut it to size to make heat sinks for the ram and secure it with some thermal tape. I paint the cable cover in the case, the pcie slot covers, the motherboard heatsinks, the top plate of the cpu cooler, replace its 2 blue fans with a white one and set it all to dry. Today I went to install the system, f me the motherboard is longer then standard atx! It's okay no problem, I have a dremel. It's a masterbox, everything is secured via screws right? Nope rivets everywhere. After removing like 12 rivets I cut a slot for the bottom quarter inch of the motherboard to fit in the psu cover. I reattached the psu cover with gel super glue. This case has alot less cable management then i thought with all those rgb wires and redundant molex cables from the psu. Once the motherboard and psu cover are in everything goes smoothly and i have to say I'm in love with the thing. I wish I was better at photography so I could have shared better pictures and i wish I took in progress pictures. Anyway

The more I think about it the more I think you're correct, my Xpsc raystorm and Barrow fittings didn't have any gunk on them. Oh well now my loop is super clean. Sorry about the confusion. Anyway i used distilled water. What do you guys think about primochill true while pastel? I was thinking about going with that.

Found an empty bottle