cmdOptEscape

Hello, I am looking at buying a new laptop. I really like the look of the 2024 model of the HP Spectre X360 - though expensive, it's getting good reviews and seems to tick all the boxes for creature comforts I want (including a haptic trackpad )... BUT...then I think I have found a rather baffling issue...they all come with an American ANSI layout?! I have searched for images for any HP X360 laptop with a tall enter key and split left shift key like we have on our UK ISO keyboard layouts here, and I cannot for the life of me find one. I started looking at other laptops like the Asus Zenbook OLED line up - and while some of them seem to have the split left shift key, they all seem to be sticking with the single height longer enter key from the ANSI layout. I have even been searching on Ebay for images of X360's people are selling to see and they all seem to be the ANSI layout. I am beyond gutted. It looks like the perfect laptop for me - but I am a 40 year old who has spent 30 years using UK layouts and I really don't know whether I would be able to get used to the keyboard...and when spending that amount of money, I think I would want everything to be as close to perfect as possible... What gives? Are UK layouts on new laptops dead?! Edit: Said screw it. Ordered one. Have 30 day cool off period to return it if I don't like it.

Wow good lord did I underestimate how fiddly this was going to be. I decided to sack off the idea of using a female USB-C for the 15 key and simply cut and shorten the original cable. I cut it way longer than needed so I could attempt some tests and boy did I not really realise how thin the individual USB wires are. I quickly realised I needed some additional tools, a decent wire stripper being one. Anyway, after a a lot of arsing around and a couple of "duh" moments, I managed to get it working, albeit the connection was very poor. Whenever I would move the cable it would disconnect and reconnected. I tried reflowing the solder many times at the joins. I soon started thinking I should just shrink the heatshrink on the joins and then the heatshrink across the whole thing and firm up the entire cable and see whether it's any more stable - and it *seems* to be stable. Can move the cable round and it remains connected. Have defo learnt a some stuff...including that my soldering skills are pants

Hello, I have an original Stream Deck 15 key that has a cable that cannot be removed. I also have an XL that has a cable that can be removed. I sometimes go for periods where I don't need the stream decks I have on my desk so I'd like to be able to quickly unplug them and move them. With the XL, although it's a removable cable, it requires you to take the Deck out the stand. It's a step that would discourage me from quickly just disconnecting it to move it - so I plan on buying a short USB 3.0 cable that ends in a female USB C that I can leave permanently in place and then plug the normal cable into the female end of the short extendy cable without having to mess around with taking it out the stand. The OG stream deck though - for this to work I am going to have to do some cutting and soldering. I have a plan but wanted a sanity check on it and some guidance if possible. My plan would be simply to cut the USB-A male connector off of the end of the OG Stream Deck and replace the connector with a female USB-C connector. This would then (in theory) allow me to use a male to male USB cable into the computer, and it can be easily disconnected as the XL would be. I was going to simply use an existing USB-C 2.0 cable that has a female connector. My understanding of electrical stuff is not the best, but I am sure that so long as I connect the right wires to each other, it should work fine, right? Appreciate any advice.

Hey, I am considering upgrading my aging Intel 7700HQ Dell XPS 15. Does anyone have any suggestions? I don't game on laptops. Would be mainly for web, some media consumption, some video editing here and there, nothing major. Things that would be important to me would be: awesome trackpad decent keyboard (no numpad required) - backlight a plus screen: 1080p is fine, touch screen would be nice, fast refresh rate would be lovely memory: 16GB minimum but 32GB would be nice. If I can upgrade this later myself then 16 is fine. SSD: I have a 2TB NVME drive already I would want to put in it - so basically soldered storage is a no-go. size: 15 is fine it it's not bulky - but 14inch would be nice too. Nothing bigger than 15 though. GPU: as I said, I don't plan on gaming and I think light video editing can be done on iGPU's these days? Speaker quality is not important to me. I think that covers it. I'm basically after a nicely built laptop that doesn't have unnecessary BS that inflates the cost. Thank you!

Thank you. I am going to put a pin in this issue for now - but I am defo going to try the things you suggested. I actually booted my laptop up for the first time in a month or two to do something and thought I'd try the website on there and it too threw the same error up...and incidentally I formatted it 3-4 months back. Not sure what that means in the scheme of things but I am sure it's relevant some how lol Anyway thank you for taking the time to respond! Truly do appreciate it!

Ok, I have just used the "tcp.port == 443" filter and then tried to load the site and I have around 20 entries relating to it. I've gone through and like I say, I can see the reference to my ISP's "you can't view this site cause it's blocked" shiz...but I don't understand why it's doing it just on just my main PC. So, two part question, if I bundle the data for you to look at, would you A) be willing to look through it and B) is it safe for me to put this data on a public forum? Like there's no info in there would be best kept to myself? No worries at all if you don't want to look through it though! I totally get it. It's really a problem that I am more curious about rather than a dire need to fix it.

Hey there, Thank you for taking the time to reply. Yeah I always use the legacy networking control panel to change stuff. I've tried 2 different ethernet ports and onboard wifi and they all do the same. I also had tried dnsflush too before to no avail. I downloaded Wireshark and had a very quick look. I could tell immediately from the barrage of information that it was pretty much going to all go right over my head...HOWEVER...I did manage to see in one of the entries something about rerouting to my ISP's default "you can't access this site cause we blocked it" notifications....but that it's encrypted and could be harmful, hence the certain error I am getting. That makes the most sense...but what doesn't make sense is why it works fine on all my other computers. Even flushing the DNS on other computers, the site still works. Very strange behaviour. I think I am passed caring though cause I'll end up spending loads of time trying to fix something that is unfix-able EDIT: Good lord I thought just out of interest I'd fire up my Hyper-V Windows 11 VM I set up a few months back before I last formatted...the site loads fine on there too, on the same PC Thank you though!

Hi I'm having a weird issue with my PC and a specific website. The website is one that serves linux ISO's that I think for some reason, my ISP might be doing some tom-feckery with to block. Anyway...on all the other computers on the network I can load a browser up and load the website in question up without an issue, no VPN's needed. On my main rig, the website just will not load. If i connect my VPN, the site works fine. I am sure this is something to do with my ISP blocking access to them sites - cause the mirror URL's for that site have slowly been nuked to the point where I thought they were all dead - but then this particular one, which I thought had been nuked, started working again. I recently formatted my main PC and that's when it stopped working on that computer...but I have used a family members laptop, someone who has never visited that site on there, and the site loaded straight up. I have tried resetting the network settings in the command prompt (can't remember the exact commands but it made me reset all my network adapter stuff back up after a reboot) It does this on all browsers on my computer I have reset all the cookies for each of the browsers I have tried using 4.4.4.4/8.8.8.8 as DNS rather than my ISP DNS Anyone got any ideas what I can try? Thanks!

Hello, My word this is going to be a difficult post cause it's just a bit of a mess of things. It's a problem I thought I had already sorted and moved on from but it's reared its head again tonight and the evidence points to a different drive - it's gotten me a bit confused lol. I've posted about this a couple of times before on these forums (see the threads i've linked at the bottom) -- I will try and cover the basics. I built a new PC. Not long after, while playing Spider-man Remastered, I started getting system hangs. The system would grind to a halt and I would have to force reset. I was getting errors in event viewer pointing at a disk drive losing connection. I was never 100% able to determine which drive event viewer/the system was saying was the culprit as the drive numbering seemed to change often and I have 6 SATA drives connected - but after lots of messing around, I decided it must be the drive with Spider-man installed on it. This was later confirmed in my mind when I tried updating RDR2 which was on the same drive and the updater throwing a fit saying some data was unreadable. I also had a similar issue with files in the RDR2 folder when trying to copy any of the data I could from the drive, before retiring it. After I sorted a replacement drive, I formatted the defective disk and just left in my system connected. I've not used it or thought about it since. I carried on as if the problem was resolved. Fast forward to tonight and my PC takes ages to boot up - a symptom of when this happened originally. I opened event viewer and low and behold, the same errors. I thought it must be *that* drive - so I unplugged it and rebooted the computer, but the errors persisted! I began unplugging each SSD one by one and booting up to see where the errors would stop...and eventually, I think I have narrowed it down to another drive in the system...both have been part of the system the entire time so it is possible that this is and always was the defective drive all along. Or...could it be that I have actually had 2 SSD failures? This/these are the first SSD failures I've ever had. I've got ancient old 128GB Crucial drives from 10+ years still kicking...and I now to have 2 drives fail, both less than 3 years old - one Crucial and one Sandisk? That seems highly unlikely? So...more info: I connect my SATA drives using an LSI HBA adapter cause I don't have enough SATA ports on my motherboard. I have always been able to at least get the computer to boot with any of the possible defective drives connected. The usual course of action would be lots of errors in the event log, hangs, pauses and probable eventual complete system hang... now the drive will disappear entirely from system when booting into Windows with this error: The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur in VolumeId: E:, DeviceName: \Device\HarddiskVolume13. Failure status: {Drive Not Ready} The drive is not ready for use; its door may be open. Please check drive %hs and make sure that a disk is inserted and that the drive door is closed. Device GUID: {d8410685-da0d-ebed-6b2e-5833502a169e} Device manufacturer: ATA Device model: CT1000MX500SSD1 Device revision: 033 Device serial number: 2108E4FB438B Bus type: SAS Adapter serial number: The drive appears in Windows explorer on first boot, I can view the root folder structure, but cannot enter any of the directories...then the drive disappears ^^ with that entry. When rebooting the system, it appears that the drive is no longer detected by the LSI controller. It doesn't appear on the list of drives on in the POST text and it doesn't show up in Windows at all - it's as if the LSI controller has said "nah, the drive is a dud" and refuses to acknowledge it. If I pull the SATA power on the drive and replug it, it will then be detected but will go through the same process. This, from my testing appears now to be a predictable and repeatable situation. HOWEVER.... If I plug the drive into the motherboard SATA ports...well..that just seems to be fine. I managed to pull the data off that I wanted...though there is 250GB of data that I don't need (temp scratch data) - so there could be problems...but the data I did pull off, around 320GB seemed to come off fine. The SMART data all checks out for both drives, and I have run the tests using Crucial and Sandisks/Western Digitals relevant software and they all pass. I am kind of unsure how to proceed. This problem surfaced before I even bought the LSI HBA card. Infact it is what prompted me to move the LSI controller. I had bought an add-in SATA adapter and was using that - and I thought it was that that was problem. But the issue followed me from onboard SATA to using the LSI exclusively. I have tried different cables. Even a different power supply. Does anyone have any thoughts? My gut instinct right now is to consider both the drives as defective - there is that unease of trusting a drive that has even the slightest whiff of problematic that I am not sure whether I can get past. Any advice welcomed - and thank you for taking the time to read my EXTREMELY LONG post!

Yeah the seating in the room is about 2-3mtrs away depending which sofa you're sat on...it's more the space in which the TV lives - it's like an alcove area...but I've just measured and it only works out to 3 or 4 inches extra width so I think It'll be fine. Thank you!

I think I could just about make the 48inch work. Anything bigger and it would look silly in the room. It's not the smallest room but - it's a traditional 3 bedroom 1930s terrace UK house...the rooms ain't huge. Such a shame. Would love a yuge TV. I appreciate your advice. Many thanks!

Thank you for the fast response. It certainly does suck that smaller TV's that are on par with their bigger brothers are harder to come by...but I understand the economics of it and why it's something that's a thing. I've had a look here and yeh the C2 is out of stock everywhere (but even the places it's in stock it's £1000) - and the C3 is £1300 which is way out of my price range. https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/lg/a2-oled What do you think of this one? It's really hard for me to digest the information cause I don't know how *actually* bothered I am going to be about the things "cons" that people point out about TV's. Don't forget I am coming from a pretty basic-bitch tier TV - so most TV's at £800ish are going to be an incredible upgrade, right? I know for the TV/movie-philes it might not be the greatest - and I definitely don't want to buy something that is going to be crap in a couple of years - but I'm not seeking cinema-grade quality. Thank you again.

Hi, I currently have a pretty budget orientated 43" LG TV - 43UK6750PLD. At the time it was around £350-400 so not a crazy cheap, but the claims that it supports HDR are just that, claims. To me when I play HDR content on it, the colours just look more saturated and more contrasty - but overall the picture is darker cause it doesn't get that bright. I would like to upgrade the TV to something that can handle HDR content well and just in general make all forms of content look better/brighter. I would hope that these days, £800 would buy me something pretty banging...but I am unsure what would be best for me (QLED? OLED?). Resolution has never been an issue for me. I am not that much of a quality snob. I watch 1080p lower bitrate (~2mbit) x265 rips mostly and am perfectly fine with that - I've noticed over the last couple years more and more movies and TV shows becoming darker and darker as if they require a TV that can get brighter in order to look their best. I recently bought an NVIDIA Shield the interface on the LG TV was starting to become super laggy as well - annoyingly so. Plex takes ages to load and it's not very responsive...so I bought the Shield to speed things up - plus the current LG TV struggles playing certain encodes of x265 sometimes and it just outright won't work with PGS/VOBSUB subtitles without transcoding either. I assume a newer and better SOC equipped TV would probably be much more in line with the Shield performance? I've never had a problem with the layout of LG UI. I have not used another TV brand's smart TV's so I have no idea what their interfaces are like. So, any suggestions? Must be 43" as it's a small room! Thank you!

Just an update. The case I'm using (Corsair Carbide 275R) is the one where the front panel is just a solid piece of plastic and the air basically has to get sucked in through channels that run on the side from top to bottom. I thought weeks ago that this would be a problem and so I did a test for a while to see whether having the front panel off made a difference and I came away from that with the conclusion that it did not. I just took the front panel off again just to double check and I must have run my initial panel-off test before adding fans and trying to optimise airflow because with the front off, HDD temps have all dropped. The hottest drive was at 45oC just idling (it's a warm tonight) and it's dropped to 40oC in the space of 20 minutes. The other 2 drives have both also shaved 3 degrees off. Am glad I checked now. Luckily the case will work perfectly fine without the front panel on. There's a huge removable magnetic mesh over the front covering the fans and there no other big gaps other than small holes where the front panel attaches to that I can tape up. So aside from it cosmetically looking slightly odd (which I'm not arsed about)...it seems like a solid idea to run without the front panel on.

Thanks. Am always overly worried when setting something new up. Thanks for the reassurance