Ecthelion

Hi, I'm fairly new to home automation and I've been using connected lightbulb and amazon alexa to switch on and off my lights, it works but it is no ideal. Connected lightbulb are energy hungry due to the wifi it requires, plus the wifi causes a lot of issues/bug of disconnection. Do you know any way or tech that would enable me to connect my lights and devices without using connected ligthbulb and/or without wifi ? I would think that it be possible to have something connected to my electric board that could switch off an on my plugs and light but I don't know any.. I don't even need it to work with alexa or voice, an app on phone or a remote would be fine. Thanks for your help!

Hi guys, So my mother been using my old rig for quite a long time now but recently she's been experiencing some weird issues. The PC would work perfectly and nicely when on windows but if she turned it off it would take several reboot to boot again to windows. Sometimes she preferred never turning it off at night fearing it might not start again. What's weird was if you turned the PC off it would be hard to turning it on again but doing so using the restart button never failed (go figure... ?). When I finally got my hands on it I tried several things, cleared the PC, reinstalled a clean OS but the issue did not seemed to be the software since the starting problem was still happening. I then turned to hardware to try and troubleshoot. Having not much experience in this field I tried separatly each pieces (except for Mobo and CPU) and each worked fine (the 16go of ram, the GTX 660, HDDs and SSD was all working fine when installed in my own computer). I then cleaned the tower and all the fans (but there wasn't much dust at all tbh...) but the issue was still happening. I made some researched and found somewhere that this could be caused by a defecting cmos battery so I changed the cmos battery and there... problems intensifies. Before changing the cmos battery the pc would still eventualy start, even if it took sometimes minutes to post. But now, it is just stucked in a bootloop for some reason. When pressing the start button the motherboard lights up, the fans start and then after few seconds all just stops... and again... and again... and again. Since that I tried to reset the cmos with the jumper, same results. I tried with un plugging every drives and PCI card, using only a Single Ram stick and the CPU and Mobo, nothing changes. It's just stuck in that hell of a bootloop forever. The CPU phase led all lights up and then goes dark... Maybe you guys can help me, I've feel like I tried everything. Should I try with yet another cmos battery ? or is my Mobo or CPU broken and unfixable ? And is there a way to know if it's a motherboard or the CPU without testing with another CPU or mobo (cause I can't find anywhere near me some parts that old) ? Here is a video of my most recent test, outside the tower : Here Specs used in my latest test bench : - CPU : I5 3570 - Mobo : MSI Z77a-G45 - Ram : 8g of G.Skill (worked in other builds) - PSU : Some Bequiet 650w bronze (worked in other builds)

Hi guys, So I have two monitors : The main one for gaming is plugged into my GPU (GTX 970) and the secondary one (mainly for browsing internet and stuff while gaming) is plugged into my motherboard (so it uses my CPU graphic processor I suppose). I recently acquired a old GPU (GTX 660) from disassembling an old rig, and I don't know what to do with it. Since my CPU is getting pretty old (i7 4790k), it starts to struggle sometimes while in game and I was wondering if adding the GTX 660 into my rig and have it operating the second monitor would be beneficial for my CPU performance (since it won't have to deal with the monitor on it's own) ? Or is it totally irrelevant ?

For my work i'm going to use a software named Kleos, a lot of instance of the Office suit and a AXCrypt (crypting software) at the same time. For my video editing I'm using vegas pro 5 and Adobe premiere and Photoshop. In term of games I play mostly League of Legend, Starcraft, Overwatch, Quake, Fortnite and some indie platformer games

Thx for this build, but I still need to fit a monitor in the budget, so probably should cut on some others parts! This build looks fine, and into my budget! Only problem is that I can not get my hands on any intel ninth gen for less than 600 bucks where I'm living (France) so that would increased the cost. Also, why an intel rather than AMD Threadripper, wouldn't AMD be better for my use ?

Hi guys, I'm planning to build me a new desktop PC for home. The thing is that I'm trying to make the best polyvalent build for 2500 (monitor included). Indeed : I'm a gamer (until now gaming on a i7 4790K/GTX 970 combo) and want a little upgrade if possible on that part but I'm not aiming to play the most demanding titles, I'm more focused on e-sport types of game so I just want it to be very fluid. Right now I have a old 60hz 1080p monitor so my upgrade would be to play on a 1440p 120/144hz. I'm also a lawyer, working with software that rely very hard on CPU and RAM (my i7 4790K and 16go of 1600Mhz DDR3 RAM actually struggle to keep up when I open more than 5 client folder at the same time... which is not a lot...) Consequently I also have a ton of files transiting through my PC and my old HDD and SATA SSD are way too slow for the demand. Also, I deal in video editing and 3D modeling on my free time, nothing much demanding yet but it would be nice if rendering would be faster ^^ So here I am, I have 2500 dollars to build it. I don't really know what parts of my previous build I can keep (maybe the case and power supply which are not so bad). So right now I'm gonna start with 2 questions for you guy, and work it through there : What CPU would you recommand for this build ? Do you think I can keep my GTX 970 for 1440p 144HZ gaming ? Or should I invest on a new card ?

Ok Guys, I found the culprit! It was Kaspersky all along. I should have seen it before. Bought it and installed it not long ago and never tried to deactivate or remove it to see what happens. So I did get rid of it and all came back to normal ! Funny thing is that Kaspersky do not take a lot of RAM usage in % but seems to make every other internet related things (like game and chrome) increased their own RAM usage. So... Solved! Thx anyway for your help guys!

I have some strange new developpements. I used the Windows Systeme Assessment Tool to get my PC WEI score and obtained thoses results : Strangely enough, my RAM seems to be working fine in this : a 9.2 out of 10 score. But my Diskscore is only at 7.6 (which is not bad but for sure way less than the last time I ran this test (4 years ago when I built this rig). My windows is on a SSD, a fairly old one with not much space (those were freakin' expensive back then!), do you think this could be the SSD dying? (or at least slow down?)

I've been inclined to think that it was a virus too, but I ran full scan with Malwerbyte and Kaspersky and they found nothing. I also did a reg clean and disk clean with CCleaner, run a mem test (which showed no problem) and defrag all of my HDD. My system is on a SSD, that can't be defrag or anything right ? (or so I heard) I'll check for the win updates and settings, you might be onto something here!

Hi guys! So lately my gaming PC has been strugling with slowing performances. Losing a dozen FPS in games, issues when browsing on Chrome and sometimes just some slow-down in speed in general pc usage. What can causes those issues you might ask ? Yeah that's what I'm trying to understand! Right now I'm guessing it is RAM related because I noted some anomalies : I've been able to see that with the same system (I'll post the system resume at the end of the post) my RAM and CPU usage increased by 5 to 15% in games lately compare to some weeks ago. My browsing experience has gotten significantly worse (even without gaming at the same time) : Tabs become slow to load after 20 tabs, very slow to load after 40 tabs, nearly impossible to load after 50 tabs and crash around 70 tabs and I got this weird alert message saying that some tabs are not responding which never occured before. I know this is still a lot of tabs at the same time, but usually I could go up to 150 open tabs AND gaming at the same time without problems! The weird things is that my ram don't go to 100% usage most of the time before crashing (sometimes only 60% usage before my tabs are not responding anymore). Also when looking at RAM usage I've noticed something pretty strange : I have almost 6go of RAM in Memory Cache even when not running anything, isn't that weird ? And it can go up to 11go when running Chrome or games. Since I have 16go of RAM in total this is almost 33% of RAM in cache all the time, is it normal ? Can I delete memory cache ? If yes, How so ? So do you guys think it is RAM ? For me CPU and GPU performances looks fine and those anomalies makes me think it is RAM. If it is, how could it happened in just some weeks, working perfectly until now ? Do you think I've done something wrong that might explain this issue? Only think I could think of is that I removed a RAM stick for troubleshooting on another computer before putting it back in and I also tried, unsuccessfully, some overclocking on my CPU (tried going for 4.8ghz from my usual 4.4ghz turbo mode) but I then came back to original settings. Sorry if my English is not so good guys, I'm french :). Hope you can help me figure this thing out! Here is my build :

Hi guys ! So I'm planning to build a PC for my little sister for christmas. She's a lot into video editing and want to start some 2d and 3d animations. I'm used to build gaming PCs and I don't know where to start for this kind of build. I've watched the most recent linus video on the topic : But it's been like two years ago now and I know how fast hardware evolve. Also the build he showed was really expensive . I have a budget of 1000 Euros (1100 dollars at the moment), is it possible to build something interesting with that budget ? I could up to 1500 euros (1650 dollars) if that would represent a huge upgrade but not much more. Any advice is welcome and I have some questions on the topic : What's the difference between a GTX card and the Quadro series, is there a significant difference ? Because I've seen on the web a lot of "Video Editing Build" with GTXs cards but also a lot with Quadros and sometime with both ! So I'm a little confused here. Is a 6 cores or more CPU worth the price for this kind of build or would a 4 core be enought ? Software speaking, what would be the best video editing software to offer in a 100-150 dollars price range ? Hope you guys can help me Will be posting what I'm planning to buy progressively as it comes to get your feedback! P.S. : Sorry if my english is kind of bad, I'm french and didn't practice in a long time . Ecthelion