ixi_your_face

That's a lot of effort for a scam. Maybe some sort of unintentional sale of what should have been a display model? Who did you buy 'em from?

The problem you're facing is the Windows path char limit. iirc explorer.exe has a hardcoded limit of 255 chars as you've noted. As soon as you cross this value, it will start to complain. Enabling "long-paths" won't work as it's only turning on the ability for them to be used which explorer.exe doesn't respect. The only real solution is to consense your directories or split them somehow. Do you have a full path example which you know is triggering the issue?

It's been years since i was last on the market, but sites like WASDKeyboards (rip) used to do little test kits where you'd get a few different switches for pretty cheap. You could look for those. A quick google of "mechanical switch tester" gave me https://www.keycrox.co.uk/bundle/customizable-switch-tester. I'm assuming you're in the NA though since you mention BB and Micro Center so maybe Amazon has something?

I've also been on several flights around Europe with my backpack on Ryanair, Eurowings, etc. Nobody has once asked me about it and I've never had an issue getting it under the seat, though it does cause issues sometimes around legroom. My SO, who also has an LTT backpack regularly is on flights (~10-16 flights in the last year) with Ryanair, Eurowings, Easyjet, Iberian, etc and has also never had an issue. I got the LTT Backpack expressly for this purpose too, and was also nervous about the fit. It fits great. I generally travel relatively light Laptop for work/chilling - will generally leave if i'm not going for a long time Steam Deck for play during travel - small enough that i can hang it off the bag/carry it if required Associated cables, chargers, dongles, etc Clothes fresh pair of underwear for each day + 1 just in case shirts and trousers can be less and just aim to reuse each no more than once Mid last year, My SO and I did a trip to Germany and decided to use only our LTT backpacks for our 5 day trip. Laptops, Steam Decks, Chargers, HDMI cables, controllers, and enough clothes for each of us for 5 days all comfortably fit in with no bulging or stress. (One LTT Backpack each - 2 peoples stuff in 1 backpack would be unrealistic unless you're not taking all that much) Both of us used it as our personal item.

Honestly? I've not seen that much of an improvment. Little things here and there like being able to scrub through AE timelines smoothly and extract things slightly faster are pretty great. I reckon most of my noticable gains have come from moving from an a mixed sata2 and 3 board to pure NVME. I can run Minecraft at 60fps now with shaders, which is pretty great. The ram boost has been quite nice, 24 was getting a little restrictive; 64 opens up some room to grow. I do enjoy watching the CPU cores tick away in Task Manager tho.

Up until last month; the 1366 masterrace was (and is) going strong for me. Got myself one of them fancy pants new Ryzens now tho.

In that case, the Taichi would work great for you; but if the feature set of the Aorus board is a better fit, it is also a very neutral coloured board, and if it's anything like mine, it'll have an ARGB strip on the underside of the board, so you can throw in some of them blue gamer lights too

At that point it really does come down to an Aesthetics/Feature showdown. Do you have a particular colour scheme either in place, or in mind that would benefit from one over the other? What features do you want? What features don't you care about? Are you concerned about warrenty? What are the reliability of the boards? I agree with you that the ROG board is pretty ugly. All this being said, I literally just bought a new Aorus board for my next build which is currently sitting next to me, so I guess i'd have to throw my hand in with them, purely because it's essentually the ATX version of the board that I got, so feature wise, it's probably the best fit for me. The Aorus board has more rear USB, which is real nice, but the Asrock board has a combo PS/2 port; which is also pretty nice. So it's a real pick-your-poison decision that all really comes down to a combination of personal preferance and if you really have a specific use case that requires something. Personally i'd lean towards more relevant features over aesthetics; but that's mainly because I plan my builds around the mobo i choose and not the other way around.

If you're able and there's no wierd IT-related rubberstamping or red tape, OpenVPN would definetley be your best bet if you had to set one up yourself. I would look into if your orginisation already has a vpn service available to other users within the municipality and hook into that. Added benifit of if something goes wrong, it's not your fault. Example: my old work was for local government; we used their VPN solution (Cisco AnyConnect) when working from home to allow us to hook into our support infrastructure on-site.