BobVonBob

Star Wars Battlefront 2 is probably using the microphones in your earbuds. Bluetooth audio on Windows tends to go crunchy when the microphone is activated. Try disabling the microphone portion of your earbuds in your sound devices in Windows or disabling voice chat in Star Wars Battlefront.

It looks like you think NAND flash (SSDs) and SDRAM (DDR4/5 RAM) are the same thing. They aren't. Perhaps you confused PCIe Gen 4/5 SSDs with DDR4/5 RAM? Either way, while the two manufacturing processes aren't totally separate (same companies, same materials, SDRAM sometimes used in SSDs for cache, etc.) resulting in their prices often trending the same direction, not all memory is interchangeable. A DDR4 chip will lose all its data when it doesn't have power, and a NAND flash chip is (relatively) slow. Neither makes a good substitute for the other.

You could try getting the Bluetooth connection to use AptX Low Latency, but the easier and probably more prudent answer is to return this speaker and get one that isn't wireless.

As you add more RAM Windows will use more RAM. Don't be surprised if usage goes up even more when you upgrade to 32 GB. It's a good thing, more things are being stored in RAM for fast access.

Windows caches stuff like frequently accessed files to RAM in the background to make things run faster. It probably started doing that more aggressively lately for one reason or another. RAM is made to be used, and Windows is good at shifting things in and out depending on how much RAM processes need. Unless you're getting issues like programs crashing with out-of-memory errors I wouldn't worry about the usage.

Your user account is only one of a few "users" launching things on the system. Open the "Details" tab and you'll see there are other users like SYSTEM and LOCAL SERVICE used by Windows to launch system processes. Your memory usage is totally normal and not an indication of a virus.

The first settings I look at are usually antialiasing and shadows. The highest levels of those settings tend to need massive amounts of graphics power for not much benefit. One setting I definitely wouldn't change is texture filtering. It's so cheap on any barely modern GPU (and by "barely modern" I mean like GTX 500/Radeon HD 6000) and it makes a huge difference in visual quality. There are games released within the last year with settings presets that will turn down texture filtering on presets other than low. Why? What were the devs thinking? The GPU set as the minimum requirement for your game would laugh off 16x anisotropic filtering, so why does it drop when going from ultra to high? \rant Other than that I think it's pretty difficult to make general statements about which settings to change. Games will often name things slightly differently, and the same setting might have a larger performance or visual impact in some games compared to others. In some cases a setting with the same name might control entirely different things in different games (especially generically named settings, "effects quality" is a pretty common setting that can mean a whole lot of different things). You can try changing settings and looking for yourself at what you notice most and what has the biggest framerate impacts, or you can look at settings repositories like GeForce Experience or the many settings websites out there for guidance.

Both the HyperX Cloud 2 and the Logitech Pro X headsets come with a USB DAC. Have you been using the USB DACs that came with those headsets? If not, I'd suggest trying it and seeing if the static goes away. If you are, failure of two different USB DACs in a relatively short time is pretty concerning, there might be a larger issue with your computer. What parts (if any) have stayed the same since the upgrade you mentioned?

Really depends on the item. For a tool I'm going to keep in the case I wouldn't mind paying a bit extra for one that isn't a blow molded pile of garbage, but I wouldn't pay extra for one of Intel's fancy reviewer CPU cases.

Just get earplugs. Never mind my doubts about the effectiveness of those Sennheiser earbuds, other people aren't going to have the advantage of speech boosting earbuds, so unless you're very confident in your voice projection they won't be able to hear you just as much as you can't hear them. The best way to have conversations in a club is to move farther away from the sound system. Etymotic makes some great earplugs for pretty cheap that still make music sound great. I've gone through 5 or 6 pairs of their earplugs in the last 10 years for various music listening and performing purposes. The Etyplug and ER20XS models both block about 20 dB. Personally I prefer the ER20XS. If you really like standing right next to the speakers those won't be enough, get foam ear plugs. They'll distort the sound, but nothing comes close to their sound blocking ability.

Image quality maybe, but usually no. As long as it's still keeping the same settings the image quality should be fine, but some screens can only reach higher refresh rates with the color depth turned down or chroma subsampling, which can cause small quality regressions. Even then the quality difference might be worth it for the higher refresh rate, that's for the user to decide. Ghosting is also a maybe, but I think it's more likely than quality issues. This really depends on the panel. I haven't seen it personally, but multiple friends have had major ghosting with overclocked screens. If neither of those issues appear, it's probably fine.

I unfortunately can't provide any help, but I can explain why you can't find this dongle. The audio output is itself a USB device, so the USB data connection is already "used up" by that. In order for a dongle to do what you want the manufacturer would have to turn the dongle into a USB hub behind the scenes, which would add a lot of cost and bulk. I'm not sure if a single dongle exists that does what you want, but you could instead get a two port hub and a separate USB audio dongle.

Unless there's a change to newer Android versions preventing My Files from knowing the true size of system files this whole fiasco was exacerbated by Samsung's design decisions with newer versions of My Files. I've got a Note 9, and its old My Files app shows app storage usage under "Other" instead of "System" when it doesn't have permission to see app usage. If that's still possible it would be much clearer that there's more to the picture and it's just a large OS instead of a humongous one. Samsung is sleeping in the bed they made here. It was totally within their power to not misrepresent their storage, but they did it anyway. The discrepancy between GB and GiB is a well known phenomenon. Just showing the true storage capacity might be confusing to some, but people in the know expect it. Instead Samsung decided to have their app lie about the capacity of the phone, and people gave Samsung too much credit by believing what the app was telling them, leading to this whole situation. I don't know if the other point is Samsung's fault, it might be Android, but this definitely is.

Really? My mistake. I didn't realize Epson's prices had come down so quickly. I would have sworn their 4K UST models were $3500 USD just mid last year.

Consider the power squid. If that doesn't work there are extension cords out there that look basically just like your drawing. The key words are "evenly spaced" extension cords, they tend to be advertised as being for outdoor/Christmas lights, although that does mean they tend to be pretty long.

I'd suggest waiting for a larger budget or changing your plans. Your budget will stretch much farther if you can use a mountable projector, otherwise ultra short throw projectors tend to be around $3000 to $5000 USD. Samsung, LG, and Hisense make some great projectors. Look for models that meet your needs regarding inputs, format support, etc. and find some reviews. As for sound, even the most expensive projectors are pretty mediocre. If you want good sound get speakers or a decent soundbar.

For 99.9% of the human race there is no audible difference between 320 kbps MP3, 256 kbps AAC (Apple Music non-lossless, Spotify web), 320 kbps Vorbis (Spotify apps), 256 kbps Opus (YouTube Music), and lossless audio (Tidal/Deezer/Apple Music lossless/Amazon Music/etc.). What you might be hearing are different masterings of the recording, although it's pretty uncommon for tracks to be mastered differently between services. At the end of the day, listen to what you like best. There's no tangible difference, but if you prefer it then who cares?

Yes, you'll be capped to 1 gigabit if you buy gigabit internet. Your modem, router, switch, wiring, and network adapter (one or more of these may be the same device, ISPs usually give you a modem/router/switch combo unit) all probably cap out at 1 Gbps, so you won't get any faster than that. But, if you are going to take advantage of the gigabit networking, it's certainly not bad even if you don't sometimes get 110% of the advertised speed. Keep an eye out for other benefits gigabit might bring too. For instance I have gigabit internet from my ISP because the gigabit plan doesn't have a data cap. I don't really take full advantage of the higher speed, but in an average month I will easily double the data cap of the lower speed plans. The upcharge to remove the data cap on the lower speed plans makes them the same price as gigabit, so why not?

There's no reason not to try emulation. Most emulators are free to use, and if you're satisfied you save yourself a significant amount of money. If it doesn't work out you can still buy the console.

I love the Loxjie A30 for speakers, I've got one running my TV audio, but the headphone output is really bad. It's absolutely anemic and not at all a replacement for a proper headphone amplifier.

I find there's something strangely reassuring about the control panel compared to the new settings menu. The less polished design and operation makes it feel like it's definitely doing something. Like a circuit breaker compared to a light switch (ignore that they don't actually do quite the same thing).

Definitely not going to work. Maybe if you had two diagonal standoffs it would be bad but possible, but there's absolutely no way the cooler is going to work properly with two standoffs on the same side. The uneven force will probably lever the cooler off the CPU instead of pushing it down, you'd be better off using zip ties. Get an adapter or a new cooler.

Steam supports releasing games at any time but they aren't actually scheduled, you have to click a button (documentation of this: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/releasing#5). My guess is either nobody with the power to click the button is available until then or they're staggering the release to keep the launch spike down. Probably the latter since they're also staggering console release times to be midnight local time in each time zone.

Don't worry about it. Unless you happen to leave Earth's magnetic field the chance of bit flips is astronomically (Ha!) small. Totally stock iPads are some of the most common computers on the International Space Station, and they don't have trouble with cosmic bit flips despite literally flying through auroras on a fairly regular basis.

5 meters (16.4 ft) is technically the maximum the USB spec recommends, but most low draw USB 2.0 devices will easily operate up to 15 meters (49.2 ft), and active cables can increase that to roughly 50 meters (164 ft). The thing I'd be worried about is displays, since all the solutions for connecting displays over that distance have problems like latency or cost. If you've got that figured out then no worries about the USB peripherals.