djdelarosa25

If you read my post, my device is the S20 FE. The ROM that you linked is for the S20/S20U. It's also discontinued and 3 years out of date, being still based on Android 10. There aren't any ROMs worth installing for my S20 FE. Community development is pretty much dead when it comes to Samsung phones.

Apologies for not making it clear in the original post, I'm only planning to install a custom ROM on the Poco. I really don't like MIUI. Late and infrequent updates only make it worse. As for Samsung, I'm not in love with One UI but it's still better than MIUI and at least Samsung provides timely updates and long support.

I'm looking to replace my Galaxy S20 FE by the end of the year as its software support comes to an end. I've managed to save up a decent amount of money thanks to a scholarship, and my new phone will be a graduation gift to myself of sorts before I go into med school. The 8/256 S23 costs ~1000 USD where I live (Philippines). Using my student discount, the price goes down to ~815 USD. I'm going to sell my old S20 FE to my cousin for 90 USD, so the effective cost would be ~720 USD. This could go down if I buy around December and Samsung holds a sale. On the other hand, the 12/256 Poco F5 can often be found for as low as ~320 USD. This goes down to ~230 USD once I sell my old phone. The 8/256 variant can be found even cheaper, but for a phone at this price point I might as well get the top spec one. The main selling point for the S23 for me is its size. Everything else is also going to be better of course, but most can be addressed in one way or another in the Poco F5. Better build quality? I'll be using a case. Better performance? I don't game on my phone and the 7+ Gen 2 is pretty close to the 8 Gen 2. Longer software support? I'll be installing a custom ROM anyway. Better cameras? As long as it's good, I'm fine. However, there's of course the little things which make the experience of using a truly premium device different from any sort of flagship killer. What do you guys think? Should I just save the cash and go with the Poco F5, or should I YOLO and get the S23?

I got my S20 FE pretty late already (December 2021), so the phone is only more than a year old with me. It's been a decent phone in the months that I owned it, but it also has its issues (crappy touchscreen, bad battery life, One UI quirks) and is now near EOL status in terms of updates. Because of this, I'm looking to buy a new phone in the coming months, but my budget is not that big. The max I'm willing to spend is around 30,000 PHP (~$550). I've been looking at three phones, namely the upcoming Pixel 7a, the upcoming A54 5G, and the Nothing Phone 1. I was dead set on the Pixel 7a until I found out that 5G, VoWifi, and VoLTE are software-locked as the phone isn't officially available where I live. The A54 5G would give me fast, long-term updates (which was something I liked about my S20 FE), but from leaks and rumors about its specs and pricing, it's shaping up to be a disappointment much like its predecessor, the A53. That leaves me with the Nothing Phone 1, which seems like a well-rounded phone. Great design with minimal and symmetrical bezels (IDGAF about the Glyph interface), upper-midrange chipset which is more than enough for a non-gamer like me, and close to stock Android. I can pick up a like new 8/256 variant for ~$400. What do you guys think? Is the Nothing Phone 1 a worthwhile replacement for my S20 FE, or are there better alternatives? Do you think I should hold on to it for longer and wait for the new crop of phones to come out? P.S. I forgot to mention Xiaomi. I can't stand MIUI, and while I flashed custom ROMs on all of my previous Xiaomi smartphones, I've come to the point where I just want something that works out of the box. Oh, and I've had a few friends that got their devices hardbricked because of an OTA update.

Just curious, do you prefer that the function row of your laptop keyboard act as function keys on a single press like on a desktop keyboard (accessing special functions using Fn+FX), or do you map it the other way around, where a single press activates the special function and you press Fn+FX to use the function keys themselves?

Anker and the like cost twice as much for similar port selections. Has anyone had any experience with UGREEN's USB-C hubs?

There's a guy selling his practically brand new Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Pro (this particular SKU) for ~950 USD, which is a good deal since these things go for ~1200 USD where I'm from. This model has pretty much everything that I'm looking for in a laptop: it looks great, has good build quality and performance, great cooling, a good keyboard, is thin and light, and best of all, dat 90 Hz 2.8K display. However, I'm not in a rush to buy a laptop and I can wait for the newer generation of Intel and Ryzen chips to come out. But that got me thinking, wouldn't the refreshed models with those specs be more expensive, especially with the Ryzen 6000 series now being DDR5 only? I'm afraid that I'd wait for months only to find out that the refreshed models of the laptops I've been eyeing have gone over my budget. Or, laptop manufacturers could release new models with the newer processors that would fit my budget, but it's likely other aspects would get sacrificed. What do you guys think?

Hi! My brother's laptop just died, and we need to buy him a new one. He'll be taking up civil engineering next semester, so he's gonna need a decently powerful one for CAD and all that stuff. Our budget is 50,000 PHP (approximately 1000 USD). As much as we would like to get him thin and light device, it seems like beefy hardware at this price range is only offered by gaming laptops (the Acer Swift X isn't officially available in my country). My mom doesn't wanna buy online and so I looked around at a local computer shop. They have Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 models, and two particular ones fit our budget. Here are their specs: Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 15ACH6 Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 15IHU6 They're mostly the same in terms of specs except for the processor, graphics, and screen. The cheaper model (by about 100 USD) has a 120 Hz 250 nit screen that is 45% NTSC (I don't know what that means but I'm sure it has poor sRGB coverage as well), a Ryzen 5 5600H, and a GTX 1650. The more expensive model has a 165 Hz 300 nit screen that is 100% sRGB compliant, a weaker(?) i5-11320H, and an RTX 3050. I don't know anything about engineering programs, but from what I've read, CAD relies more on CPU power, which the cheaper model has an advantage. However, I've also read that the Intel model has slightly better single-core performance, which is more suited for CAD stuff. But, the AMD CPU is more efficient it seems. Other than that, the display and GPU are a win for the more expensive model, though my brother doesn't play demanding games (only Genshin Impact and CS:GO) and he doesn't care about visual quality and all that. I also doubt he'll make use of the 100% sRGB screen since he doesn't do photo or video editing. It is a bit brighter, though. But for 100 USD more, they do seem worth it. What do you guys think?

I'm renewing my contract with my carrier and I wanna go back to Samsung since they seem to offer the best software support outside of the Pixels, which aren’t available here unfortunately. Anyway, the choice is between the S20 FE (4G) and the A52s 5G, the latter cheaper by only around 6 USD monthly. Here's the problem, I'm not sure if the S20 FE if they're offering is the Exynos 990 variant or the Snapdragon 865 one. On their website, it says Exynos 990, but I'm seeing people selling locked units from the same carrier we're on online and the model number is SM-G780G, which is the Snapdragon version. Maybe they did "upgrade" to the Snapdragon chipset and just forgot to update their website. I have to confirm this first. Anyway, the A52s 5G has three things going for it. The one that matters more to me is that I get an extra year of software updates. There's also the headphone jack, but I think I can live without it. Lastly, 5G. There's no 5G yet where I live. However, I study in our country's capital and 5G is already growing rapidly there (but I don't think physical classes will start anytime soon). I plan to keep this phone for 3+ years and the A52s 5G is more futureproof in the regard. Everything else, the S20 FE wins (except if we're talking about the processor in the Exynos variant, and apparently the digitizer is wack too on that). What I'm thinking now is S20 FE 4G Snapdragon > A52s 5G >> S20 FE 4G Exynos. What do you guys think?

Hi! I'm a bit of a networking noob so please bear with me. My dad upgraded our fiber connection to 100 Mbps, and today the two TP-Link Deco M4s that were part of the deal arrived. I managed to set them both up no problems with the Huawei combo modem/router provided to us by our ISP around 4 years ago when we first signed the contract. It's shit: it doesn't even support 5 GHz, and I don't know why they didn't bother upgrading it with a newer model. Anyway, I read about enabling bridge mode and how it's apparently better especially in my case where the original router is shit. Unfortunately, our ISP locked admin access for it, so I had to do some hacky stuff to gain access and enable bridge mode (I don't even know if it's "real" bridge mode). After that, I set the main Deco unit to run in router mode. So far, it's been working fine. However, I ran some tests and the speed between previous setup where the Decos were set up as APs versus the current bridged setup is the same, 100 Mbps download upstairs where it's closest and 50 Mbps downstairs. What do you guys think, should I keep bridge mode enabled, or just revert to the original configuration since I get the same speeds anyway? Also, is the hit in download speed normal? Thanks in advance!

Hi! I'm planning on buying a tablet for college once my scholarship money comes this semester. I live in the Philippines and the most I'm willing to spend is equivalent to around $500, give or take. I'll be using it for note-taking, light drawing work, and also media consumption (YouTube, movies). On the Android side, I've been considering the newly launched Xiaomi Pad 5. It made my list because of its nice looks, 120 Hz display, and unbeatable price. The 128 GB version of it costs $350 here plus I can get the Smart Pen and I'd still have plenty left. The two downsides are the lack of biometric unlocking, which is a minor thing, and MIUI, which I really can't bring myself to like. My current phone is a Xiaomi and I flashed a custom ROM on it as soon as I can. I can imagine third-party support for this device would be good since it's such a good deal and many devs will buy it, but only time will tell. Plus, I don't think many custom ROMs are even optimized for tablets so I would be missing out on some handy features. As much as I dislike Apple as a company, there's no denying they basically own the tablet market. I'm eyeing the regular 9th generation iPad but I can't understand why the hell there's no 128 GB option. I think 64 GB is enough for me but I want to keep the device for a while so I want just a bit more room for stuff, whereas 256 GB is simply overkill (my laptop has that much storage and I haven't used up half of it). While I habitually back up my files to the cloud and delete unneeded stuff on all my devices, buying a 64 GB workhorse in 2021 just feels wrong for me, and this is why I'm leaning more towards 256 GB despite costing close to $200 more. I also want to get the Apple Pencil as it looks like no alternative can match up to how good it is, so that's another $100. While I really like the new designs of the Air and Mini, the price difference compared to the regular iPad is just too much. By the way, I'm aware of Apple's discount for students and I plan on taking advantage of it. What do you guys think? I'm open to other recommendations as well. Thanks in advance!

Say I downloaded a 4k image that I wanted to set as my wallpaper for my 1080p screen. For the essence of quality, should I let Windows handle the downscaling by itself or would I be better off resizing it in say, Photoshop, for example?

I want to test how stable my laptop is after undervolting core and cache. I've read conflicting advice on what programs to use (some recommend Prime, others don't, some say to turn off AVX, others don't), how long I should run them, etc. What do you guys reckon? Also this I don't game so I can't use them as benchmarks.

Hi there! I got myself a used Dell Latitude E7470 (i5-6300U, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, 1080p, magnesium chassis) for around 400 USD from a reputable online seller here in my country (1000+ positive transactions; guy's business was selling secondhand laptops from suppliers). Everything is in good working order and the laptop is still in really good shape even if it's more than 3 years old now. As soon as I got it, I fired up HWiNFO and noticed that the battery health was at an amazing 97%. After two weeks of mixed usage though (battery power and plugged in), it deteriorated quickly to around 88%. I'm normally not a fan of "calibrating" lithium-ion/polymer batteries but I just said screw it and did so anyways by draining the battery to complete 0 in the BIOS and charging it to full uninterrupted. This brought my battery health down even more to around 84% and it's been at this for a few days now. My first question is, why did the battery health report itself as 97% when I got it only for it to deteriorate quickly over the span of two weeks? My theory is the battery readings got screwed or something and that my repeated usage of the laptop brought back the readings' accuracy over time (kind of like how AccuBattery works in Android where it shows more accurate battery health after multiple cycles of charging and discharging). What do you guys think? My second question is, after setting the battery to stop charging once it hits 80% in the BIOS, would be safe for me then to use it while plugged in for extended periods of time versus the normal behavior of the laptop stopping charging at 100% and leaving it plugged in while I use it? From my understanding, once it the battery hits my desired threshold, the system disconnects the battery and runs on AC power instead, but I'm not sure if this is the case with my system (well, it probably is since I noticed my battery % drop from 80 to 79 while I was using it while plugged in). Apologies if my post was a bit unorganized. Thanks in advance to those who will try to help me out

Interesting. The PSUs recommended in many budget ($500 and below) build guides (even those from LTT themselves) are almost always a tier or two below if we base off this list.

Didn't know how soft copper heatpipes are. I was in the process of repasting my laptop and while cleaning the old paste off the copper heatsink, I accidentally bent the heatpipe (only lightly, though). I bent it back and now it has a small kink. Temps seem to be the same as before, if not only a few degrees Celsius lower. Will this be bad in the long run?

I was pertaining to OEM graphics drivers like the one's on Dell's website vs the generic ones from the component manufacturer's website. But I get your point. Thanks.

Where do you download your laptop's drivers, from the OEM (Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc.) or the generic ones (NVIDIA, AMD, Intel)? Specifically audio, chipset, graphics, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, and Intel stuff such as Management Engine and Rapid Storage Technology,

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Dell Latitude E7470 user here. Just this day, as I played some music on my laptop, I noticed that my speakers experienced severe distortion and that the whole music track itself would slow down for some reason. This happened both on battery power and while plugged in. I spent hours troubleshooting which involved me uninstalling updates to the chipset drivers, reinstalling audio drivers, removing my undervolt, etc. It turns out, just setting the audio format within Dell Audio/Sound Manager from 24-bit/192 kHz to anything else fixed the problem. What's weird to me was I was running this setup fine for a few days and the issue only popped up today (I only got this laptop a week ago). I did my research and a guy who had an XPS 15 who faced the same issue as me also had the same solution as me. This leads me to wonder, is this a common problem among Dell laptops or laptops in general?

Does it have a noticeable effect on your battery life when constantly on?

So I finally got to repasting and cleaning my three year-old baseline "gaming" (for its time) laptop, a Dell Inspiron 7447 with an i5-4210H and GTX 850M. I used compressed air to clean out the fan and radiator fins while Arctic MX-4 was the thermal paste that I employed via the dot method. Many of the guides online said to use the size of a pea but I think I used like a half pea since the dies were surprising small (is that normal on laptops?), hence I think I applied too litlle. After doing the deed and running Prime95 small FFTs for one hour, the average CPU package temperature was 72°C while one hour on Furmark was 57°C on the GPU. Are these temps fine?

Looking to use a different DNS provider than my ISP because they block porn sites (lol). Firing up DNSBench, here are the results: Seems like Cloudflare is far and away the fastest for cached, though for uncached and DotCom, they're just around average. Ignoring UltraDNS and whatever NTT America is, Quad9 is the next well-known provider that provides average speeds for cached but is considerably better than Cloudflare for uncached and DotCom. Here's the tabular data for the two DNS providers. 1. 0. 0. 1 | Min | Avg | Max |Std.Dev|Reliab%| ----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+ - Cached Name | 0.010 | 0.010 | 0.011 | 0.000 | 100.0 | - Uncached Name | 0.010 | 0.112 | 0.244 | 0.071 | 100.0 | - DotCom Lookup | 0.032 | 0.036 | 0.041 | 0.002 | 100.0 | ---<-------->---+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+ one.one.one.one CLOUDFLARENET - Cloudflare, Inc., US 1. 1. 1. 1 | Min | Avg | Max |Std.Dev|Reliab%| ----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+ - Cached Name | 0.010 | 0.010 | 0.010 | 0.000 | 100.0 | - Uncached Name | 0.010 | 0.115 | 0.266 | 0.070 | 100.0 | - DotCom Lookup | 0.169 | 0.199 | 0.239 | 0.030 | 100.0 | ---<-------->---+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+ one.one.one.one CLOUDFLARENET - Cloudflare, Inc., US 9. 9. 9. 9 | Min | Avg | Max |Std.Dev|Reliab%| ----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+ + Cached Name | 0.037 | 0.037 | 0.044 | 0.001 | 100.0 | + Uncached Name | 0.038 | 0.095 | 0.391 | 0.082 | 100.0 | + DotCom Lookup | 0.042 | 0.064 | 0.108 | 0.030 | 100.0 | ---<-------->---+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+ dns.quad9.net QUAD9-AS-1 - Quad9, US 149.112.112.112 | Min | Avg | Max |Std.Dev|Reliab%| ----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+ + Cached Name | 0.046 | 0.047 | 0.059 | 0.002 | 100.0 | + Uncached Name | 0.048 | 0.117 | 0.398 | 0.099 | 100.0 | + DotCom Lookup | 0.051 | 0.071 | 0.119 | 0.022 | 100.0 | ---<-------->---+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+ rpz-public-resolver1.rrdns.pch.net QUAD9-AS-1 - Quad9, US Also, Quad9 has malware protection, which is a plus. What do you guys think, which of the two should I go for?

I was wondering, what drivers should I install, the OEM ones (from Dell, in my case) or the generic ones from, say, Intel and NVIDIA? The latest NVIDIA display driver that Dell provides for my laptop is version 391.25, while the latest NVIDIA generic one is 471.17. However, if you look at the driver history for my specific GPU (GTX 850M), 391.25 wasn't released by NVIDIA as a generic driver, so I'm assuming Dell does make changes to their drivers. How about for WiFi/Bluetooth drivers?

The SD Memory Card Formatter from this website1 states that: It is strongly recommended to use the SD Memory Card Formatter to format SD/SDHC/SDXC Cards rather than using formatting tools provided with individual operating systems. In general, formatting tools provided with operating systems can format various storage media including SD/SDHC/SDXC Cards, but it may not be optimized for SD/SDHC/SDXC Cards and it may result in lower performance. What do you guys think? I recently bought a 64 GB EVO Plus and was debating on whether I should format it this "official" way or via the phone itself. 1. https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/index.html