atxcyclist

The SSD upgrade makes a huge difference in the PS4, I was upgrading my desktop hardware and moved to a platform that supported NVMe drives, so my 1TB Crucial MX500 SATA became my PS4 drive. The difference in performance between what is essentially a laptop spinning drive and an SSD dropped load times to nearly instant in many games.

I bought a Series X when Best Buy was running them for $339 US, I couldn't be happier. Being able to play many original, 360, and basically every One game is a huge selling point as I have a collection of them from before my final spare 360 hard drive bit the dust. GamePass is pretty great if you're going to play a lot of games, which I am trying my best to get my money's worth out of it. Also I'm a Bethesda game doofus and wanted to play Starfield, and the Series X at the price I paid is much less than putting a GPU in my desktop that would even come close in performance.

I had thought of that, it would be very much acceptable for her needs. If I didn’t have both of these video cards and a Ryzen 2600 sitting around, I would have probably sourced a 4600g or 5600g, if a 3400g has Windows 11 support even that would be enough.

Thankfully, these are both cards I have sitting in anti-static bags in my pile of parts, so neither will cost me anything. Most of this machine is either parts from the last build I put-together for her, I needed a new motherboard and managed to get one with some ram bundled (outgoing B450 chipset), and I had a Ryzen 2600 sitting around. The only other new part will be an NVMe drive.

I am building a Windows 11 machine for my mother, and while her needs are low-performance, I want to slot-in whichever will likely have driver support for longer. Both are 2GB, she will at most watch YouTube on her 1080p monitor. I know no one here is clairvoyant (probably), but in general which manufacturer has longer support?

What? How do you afford a car if there’s double its value in environmental fees? So a Corolla or similar costs 50k euros or something when it’s all done? Does everyone just drive a half-century-old Peugeot? It’s been like 25 years since I’ve visited France, I wasn’t very car-aware at that time either, but I don’t remember everyone driving a Citroen 2CV.

Here in Texas everything is a long drive, several of our metropolitan areas are hours across during heavy traffic. There are also huge parts of this state with no fast-charging available either. It’s six hours at least of driving at 120+ km/h roads to leave the state, that would be several stops in a current EV just do get down the road. The issue is that if you only have room or can afford one vehicle, and if you do go out on longer drives semi-regularly and an EV will be inconvenient or hinder that, then you’ll probably not buy one. My car is a basic hatchback I bought new in 2005, the only real complaint I have currently is that I have a deteriorating left knee issue from a much prior injury, and I’m tired of driving a stick shift in the traffic here. This hasn’t been a showstopper since I can easily ride my motorcycle and usually do, unless the weather is not conducive for it and I have to drive. If my next job doesn’t take me somewhere else I’ll likely be wanting to upgrade my car, but unless EVs get into price-parity with current cheap cars, I can get a much more feature-laden internal combustion vehicle or hybrid for a much more reasonable cost. As far as the right to repair, I personally work on my own vehicles, and want the option to do routine-ish things if necessary. Regardless if EVs need minimal maintenance, I want the option to do what still needs to be done without being dependent on a brand dealer network. I’d feel like a stooge having a shop do something like brake rotors/pads, that’s well within my capabilities.

'If you cannot spend $40k on a new EV you'd better just walk' Actual delusional mindset on your part. Not only does it ignore the financial position of a significant portion of people, but it ignores the huge list of other reasons people don't buy a EV: Not everyone lives in a house where they have a garage and overnight charging available to them Not everyone lives in an area brimmed with charging stations (most of the land area in North America for sure) Legitimate range anxiety for people without penciled-in-to-the mile driving routines The United States has convoluted rules about the tax credit incentive, not all EVs qualify Many US states have annual registration penalties for EVs, to offset the road tax loss normally paid at pumps Electricity costs are volatile in some areas, and very expensive in others Cold weather can significantly reduce range and adds to range anxiety EV manufacturers like Tesla have software and other trickery to force you to get service/repairs at dealers Many EVs rely on software updates and some features get locked-out for future buyers, limiting resale-ability Beyond that, someone needing a new vehicle that's mostly hassle-free, can still buy a sub-$20k USD Kia Rio with a 10-year warranty, and it would take many miles of driving to offset the extra cost of an EV in fuel savings. TLDR: You don't have any business calling people, "out of their minds" for making financial decisions that work for them.

I don’t really support ‘sailing the seas’ because a bunch of good, well-meaning game studios lose money to it and that is always a shame; Someone just being a cheap-o and not supporting an industry they enjoy, sucks. That said, any time a studio implements aggressive, unreasonable DRM like this I am happy when some group finds a way to disable it.

I just heat cycle new thermal paste a few times with regular usage, I wouldn't worry about a specific 'curing' period for newer pastes, it's good enough out of the tube and Haswell i5s are not very rambunctious chips in the heat department. I ran a 4790k at stock speeds with a downdraft slim cooler for years, even running 3D renders for 30+ hours straight, and never had an issue with that dinky cooler on that chip.

And the author of this thread is building a 1440p machine, stated directly in the first post; The current 4070 will game at 1440p perfectly well.

We would need to know the exact manufacturer and model of your motherboard to be able to help.

Here in Texas with my car parked out in the sun, if I get 3 years out of a battery I consider myself lucky. Also, most batteries are made with reclaimed components so my expectations are low, and I always buy the cheapest option because of those two reasons; I have gotten longer life out of more expensive batteries, but they were so much more expensive that the $ per month of service was way more.

If changing the refresh rate made the issue go away, and drivers didn't help it, that's likely to be a failing monitor. The only other options would be to somehow get your computer hooked-up to another high-refresh monitor and see if the problem persists, or connect another device with a displayport and a high refresh rate to that monitor and see if it persists.

Good to know. Both systems do have SSDs, although the older one is SATA II, so even a SATA SSD is choked by that interface. NVMe support is another reason I’d like to upgrade them.

Maybe these count as retro parts? The Altec Lansing 2.1 system I’ve been using since about 2009 suffered an amplifier failure the other day, leaving me speaker-less on my main machine. So after looking around on Amazon and whatnot for something OK, I remembered this system was sitting in a box at work. Now I work for family, and know these were purchased by a family member in 1995, and with a little cleaning of the adjustment potentiometers, and cleaning the connectors, they’re back up and going. It’s too late at night to really crank them, but they are truly exceptional for computer speakers. They do pick-up a slight bit of interference, not nearly as many high-frequency transmissions back then, but I think I can solve that with shielding the input cable with sleeving.

The new Series X|S consoles are awesome, and though I thought nothing of this when I purchased a Series X last month, beyond gaming it has replaced all of the smart TV functionality in my display; It’s so much better than the versions of players/apps natively in my TV.

Things to keep in mind: Torque converters in modern vehicles have a ‘lockup’ at higher engine RPM, so the driveline losses are as little as possible on the highway and at cruising speeds. 2002 vehicles are getting old, so there’s likely other wear in your clutch packs, possibly buildup in the valve body, or pressure drop through your filter. I’ve driven a few Ford Rangers, both 4-cylinder and V6, automatic and manual, and the 4-cyl automatic ones are really being asked to do a lot; The torque converter is going to be really ‘loose’ because it has to leave enough driveline cushion in low revs to not load the engine too much.

A lot of old systems are plenty good, it’s just the security requirements for Windows 11 that will be an issue. The good news is that’s still nearly two years away, and the oldest compatible platforms will be even cheaper by then. None of the people that will need builds are gamers, as long as their hardware will be supported for a while it’s all good.

Almost had something to post pictures of, but I foolishly let a good deal on some 7.65x53 surplus pass me by, totally forgot to set a reminder to check the auction before it ended. Hopefully I can procure some more brass, I think Privi Partisan in Serbia is the last company that makes it and it’s only in smallish batches.

The market here in the U.S. is similar, though for most of the foreseeable builds, an 8th or 9th gen Intel or say a 3400g would be good enough; Most of these people do very basic computing tasks, but they’re also less savvy and so the need for a modern OS with protections is the most important thing rather than the newest platform. For reference, one of the builds has a triple-core Phenom II chip in it, and another has a 4th gen Xeon, something like a 3400g or 8400 would be a good upgrade in performance too, especially since NVMe storage even good DRAM drives are relatively cheap, same with reasonably-quick DDR4 2x8gb kits.

Best bet is to get a hairdryer and gradually warm everything up, the drain line will be difficult unless you have access to all of the frozen parts.

I have crammed a bunch of newer hardware into an old Dell case, and it has a top-mount PSU which I've replaced with a newer EVGA unit. This seems to work fine, thankfully there was a decent period of time when Dell was shipping 100% standard-compatible mATX cases including the power supply and panel connectors, but the fan arrangement it not great with a 92mm exhaust and nothing else, so the power supply fan is very welcome.

I need to start getting some 2000-series Ryzen, motherboards, and ram. 8th gen and newer Intel stuff is still a bit expensive and also weaker, though getting an Intel chip with integrated graphics is much cheaper than a cheap Ryzen and a discrete Windows 11-compatible GPU.

I was somewhat considering buying an Apple Watch, I don't need this O2 feature but if they're not going to be importing them... I guess their availability is going to be quite poor.