mkessler9

That’s a great choice, I went with CF on anything with an old hard drive. I’d love to do a floppy emulator, but they’re a bit pricey for the goals I have (fix/restore old systems for little to no expense)

The other issue with old floppy drives like that is they almost always had external power supplies that you had to be really careful about matching up with the correct drive. Sometimes you’ll run into the issue where you’ve got the right part, but can’t find a compatible power supply for any amount of money.
 
-edit- Keep in mind that floppies and floppy drives were very very very premium on these systems. There’s no real comparable piece of equipment in the consumer space these days. Most everyone was using cassettes for storage in this era.
 
Having done late 80s to mid 90s retro computing (when it wasn’t retro) and having restored a few systems more recently: late 70s retro computing is a whole different ballgame. 

Starting to understand what you mean... At some point I remember hearing about the really old floppy drives having there own cpus...figures I buy a computer that uses one of those. 
 
Thanks for the lead on the emulator. I put in an order for it after seeing a number of good reviews. It says in stock on the product page, but when I went to checkout it shows as backordered?. So we'll see if I end up receiving it. Hah!

The Ironwolfs idk... I'd say the reds sound like a normal early 2000s loud HDD's. Doesn't sound like Anythings wrong, just way louder than my other modern hard drives. 

Lol old enough? Just got these from a friend.

Well I wasn't able to call at the moment so I decided in the meantime I'd DM Dell Support on Twitter. According to my rep there was a parts shortage, and that my laptop is apparently now in the final stages of packaging before being shipped. So, to me, that means it's not nearly as bad of a delay as it seemed at first. I'll let you know what happens, though. 

Some of them will most likely be out, HP has just added a few business laptops with 8th gen H series CPUs.
 
Quadro or a AMD GPU would be neat.
 
Tbh if you already have a okay laptop, then use that for the first semester.
 
And good luck with the education.

The screen started blacking out after about a month, would only work in one specific position and if you moved it just barely the screen went black again. Troubleshot it and went as far as taking it apart and making sure the display cable was properly connected to the mobo. Didn't really help. It was(I still have it, although never use it) a Asus N550J. 
 
I can agree with not rushing to get a laptop now, I have no need for one this summer, so at a minimum I can wait till the beginning of August. I don't really expect any new laptops to come out by then, but hey maybe they'll be a little cheaper then, plus no point in buying a laptop and just having it sit in my room till college starts. Interesting to know that the GTX lineup isn't good for CAD, I'll try to focus more on laptops with quadros and obviously more processing power. 

I wouldn't buy a workstation laptop right now, we are looking at a period where we are going from a 4 core CPU to a 6 core CPU and further more Pascal quadros (based on 1000 series GTX architecture), instead of the old maxwell quadros (based on 900 series GTX architecture). So it would be a ton of extra performance you could gain from just waiting a bit. Ofc these workstation laptops might not be in your price range, but at least then you can probably get a pretty great deal on a last gen workstation laptops.
 
Also I am doing mech engineering and I can tell you right now, even a old 2nd gen Intel laptop can do the work you are going to do in the first 2-3 semesters. Ofc in "big" 3D models with a lot of parts it lags, but it isn't really a problem and it isn't like you are going to render things for classes. I have done a couple 3D models with over 120 parts on a T420s with a i7 2640m and a NVS 4200m, it lagged a bit sometime, but it was useable and I would TBH be suprised if you are going to go beyond 50-60 parts for the first 2 semesters. So don't think that you absolutely NEED a extremely powerful laptop.
 
One thing I would say is a must is 16gb of ram, 8gb is not really enough for those project days where you have a few calculation programs open and a 3D model with a lot of parts. Also get more than a 250gb SSD, it fills up so quickly.
 
The XPS 15 2in1 has some heat issues, but the Intel Vega chip would be a pretty amazing chip to get, since you can actually use the Vega graphics in CAD, unlike if you just got a normal gaming laptop with a GTX. like a GTX is worthless for CAD, Nvidia fucked the GTX line up so much that a RX 580 can beat a 1080 in CAD... I am actually personally waiting for more of those laptops with a Intel Vega chip in them to drop, just the 100W versions instead of 65W.
 
To sum it up, wait as long as you can and then see if the new laptops have dropped, if they have, then you are in for a huge performance boost, but if you can't afford them, then the old models have probably dropped quite a bit and if they haven't released the new laptops then there is a chance that the current models have dropped a bit.

Unfortunately I have no idea, probably 1 or 2 more months (they are announced, but not yet available)

If you're looking for purely engineering laptops, a Precision 7520 would be your best bet. 7700HQ, 16GB of RAM, and Quadro M1200 - for $1582 (or M2200 for $145 more)
 
Here's an Engineering Laptops google sheet (however, It's pretty messy).
 
 

I have a amd cpu

Alright, so long story short, after this huge waste of time, I have fixed the issue. For whatever reason, this hard drive that is completely new to this computer, was decided to have some tasks performed on it by my computer. So I took the HDD, plugged it into one of the external usb devices and connected it to my working laptop and edited the partitions in disk manager. Now it works. I'll never get those 3 hours back...
 
P.S. Thank you to the people that suggested trying it on another computer.

I have a rig with a Radeon 6950 flashed with a 6970 firmware. It is a bit lacking in things such as cores and VRAM and is abundant in things such as heat generation. 

Yea, it sucks how its like that. Back in 2014 when I had a website running for a few months port 80 was open. Then they closed it abruptly. I don't know if the website triggered them to do that, or if their system was updated to not allow port 80 for regular customers in my area. 

a tip,never delete your internet cache.

I wouldn't try to run a 4k monitor with a 670.  That being said I also would not buy that monitor.  Get a nice 27 in 1440p monitor instead.  Or one of the LG ultra wides.

Cue a sea of nerds folding companies with inquiries about upcoming products in hopes of getting free samples.
 
"Hi Corsair, I was wondering when you're gonna release the next Obsidian case?"
---
"CorsairGeorge: We're so happy you contacted us. Here's our new Obsidian 1000D as a present"
 

 
Real talk tough, it's nice to see companies interacting like this with customers. 

Now that's a company worth buying from!

So the other night I sent them(Phantom Glass) a quick email asking if and when they would release a screen protector for the LG G3. Not expecting a solid response I continued on with my day. So this morning my phone goes off and I look at the preview of the email and from what it said I almost didn't even read the whole thing (not realizing who it's from). I ended up deciding to read it and and to my surprise. They were happy that I reached forward to contact them to inquired about it. In return they offered to send me a free sample!!!

Sorry for large image size but can't do anything on mobile and G3s 1440pness doesn't help

That's like, the entirety of Australia's bandwidth to the rest of the world.

You didn't tell him how at first. You told him:
Now, that's one smartass remark right there. It took you a smartass remark to actually get to trying to answer his question, in which he responded:
So, it ended up not solving his problem for the most part. Then, you go on with another smartass remark to try to close it off:
  He doesn't have to tell you why if he doesn't want to. But now you know he is using it to fold.

No issue with curious people, just one with people who won't give answers and instead begin with their own questions on threads which have a somewhat clear solution.

Not really, everyone treated him like he was stupid when he just wanted to know the answer to a simple question.
 
The only disappointment with this thread is the people who wouldn't answer his question and instead decided to ask why.