NightEule5

Assuming we don't ever find, or it isn't possible to find a material that can have a feature size lower than 3nm or 1nm without Quantum Tunneling that's the end of making the feature size smaller, but not the end of improvement. It might take longer, but there are proposed ways to increase efficiency and performance. Nano-tech looks promising. If we could mass produce chips based on carbon nanotube transistors those would be more efficient I think. Another proposal I've seen is micro-fluid cooling. Using very tiny pumps to push fluid through the circuit or using capillary forces to move it would improve thermal efficiency rather than having a large heatsink and fan sitting on top of it. The tiny streams of liquid flowing inside would be better for transferring heat. Only time will tell when manufacturers start using techniques like this, but I think they've been done in labs.

I'll give that a watch, looks interesting. I know that size isn't everything, as different processes have better efficiency than others despite being larger. The fact that we're making it so small that Quantum Mechanics actually messes with it is troublesome. Apparently using different materials decreases this further, but only to a point. It amazes me that we've gotten to the point where we're fighting an uphill battle with physics now.

Alright, but wouldn't that just be delaying the problem? Technologies like this are great but they seem even harder to attain. Another thing I just though about is maybe we could try to focus on improving efficiency yield-wise. It won't make them any faster but it will certainly make them more affordable. Most likely they're doing this already though.

The latest WAN show was one that I didn't watch live, but in it they do touch on an interesting topic. At around 59 minutes in Linus and Luke start talking about Intel skipping from a 14nm node to 7nm, skipping 10nm. It was an interesting discussion, albeit a short one, but what really stuck out to me was when they said something about the improvement of the technology slowing down and that we'll have change what we're doing in order to improve. The advancement of semiconductors is slowing down. Moore's Law is declining; no longer does it take 1 year to double component density, it's now believed to be around 18 months. I suspect it may reach 2 years, if it hasn't already. Feature size is getting so small that soon quantum mechanics may (and lost likely will) have an effect. Smaller than 7nm would experience quantum tunneling of electrons through the transistor (although some quote it as 5nm). Assuming Intel and/or AMD are able to reach 7nm, since it's generally agreed upon (I think) that 5nm would be a limit, we can't just make stuff smaller for higher performance. We're already seeing this. It's getting harder and harder to decrease the feature size and mass produce them (I believe a 3 atom wide transistor was invented, if I remember correctly, but not mass produced of course). While we will inevitably hit a wall with size, there are some architectural flaws we can fix to progress. The most obvious would be the bloat involved with x86 with all the tacked on instructions. RISC V has a lot of promise in this way (which Linus mentioned). I think that's a big reason why big players in the tech industry are supporting it (like NVIDIA) on top of it being an open platform. I can't say how long it would take, or if it will ever, take over. It would take a looooong time to port something as big as Windows from x86/x64, let alone for developers to port their programs. But what happens when even Reduced Instruction Set technology becomes as refined as we can make it? Sure software also has a lot of bloat that could be dealt with (ahem... looking at you Chrome!), but we can only go so far right? There are proposed solutions like carbon nano-tubes or microfluidic cooling. Quantum computing also accelerates many things and even has functions that classical cannot feasibly do. But the point at which we have to approach the problem differently is rapidly coming. Any thoughts? I find this subject interesting, thanks Linus and Luke for bringing it up. I look forward to discussion if any comes.

Ok, so I don't know what to do. His games have been working fine with TunnelBear going, but it still seems suspicious to me. Today, there around ten error messages for Dell SupportAssist saying something like, "Missing registry value". Do programs normally muck around in the registries or could the problem have all along been linked to Dell? Uninstalling SupportAssist didn't help his connection problem, but if SupportAssist messed with the registry it wouldn't, right? I think we'll reinstall Windows and see if that helps (would reset the registries if SupportAssist broke them). I don't mean to sound conspiratorial here, everything about this situation just sets off a bunch of red-flags...

Laptops, how I understand it, will heat up more than desktops because of how small their cooling system has to be and how crammed the components are. My laptop for example was made to be thin and light so once I start playing a game, even at relatively low settings, it ramps up it's fans to full power and feels hot. I don't think overheating is normal unless they designed it very badly, but heating up is normal. You've noticed some (actually a lot) of thermal throttling so ya, have it exchanged. Edit: How did you measure the temp?

Ok, how frustrating. Not because we haven't fixed it, but what ended up fixing it. After getting home from town, I called Microsoft support, not too hopeful. After getting redirected and troubleshooting for a bit, "update Windows" and what not, we finally narrowed it down to ports. Then we got disconnected from Microsoft support, and the link they gave us to reconnect didn't work. Figures. But I had some information to go off of. Network ports! The only thing I hadn't looked into. I've recently developed a habit for watching Linus and other tech YouTubers, and VPNs came to mind. So, of course the first one we downloaded was TunnelBear (thanks Linus! ) but I still wasn't too hopeful. But, what do you know? We connected to my brother's favorite Roblox game server and, it started up! Of course my brother let out the loudest happy outburst I've heard from him in a long time, but I can't help but wonder... Connections are forming in my head that I can't say are good: When we contacted Dell support they IMMEDIATELY said it wasn't covered under warranty (the first redflag) and wanted to charge us $250 for a top-up on the warranty that would cover it (the second redflag). They gave us a second option that we could return it and buy it again, this time with the higher tier warranty which would be cheaper since we would be buying it with the laptop instead of after we already bought it. But, we said we'd think about it and asked if we called back, would this refund offer still be valid? And the guy said no, because he was, "burning his company because our satisfaction was his priority". It was apparently against company policy. Then, after he said he would check into it further, he was off for a few minutes. When he came back, he got cut off in the middle of saying something, and the phone call disconnected (the third redflag). Can you see how that would be suspicious? But that could be explained under normal pretenses right? Well, here's where it gets more suspicious. While we were troubleshooting by ourselves, we noticed a weird program running in the background that didn't go away after restarting and wasn't in the startup program list. It's name was something along the lines of, "Dell Data Vault Data Collection Service". My first thought was the Lenovo Spyware scam I'd heard of a while back, and this was only increasing my suspicion. Today as I said above, we contacted Microsoft support and narrowed it down to ports before being disconnected. VPNs magically fixed it and it works as smooth as ever. What's the common denominator? Dell. In my mind the only thing that makes sense is Dell. My Asus Zenbook runs the same games smooth as butter. An iPad on the same games run as smooth as butter as they can run on mobile. It all points back to Dell! Now, I'm not going to accuse them of anything yet, but here's the suspicions forming in my mind: They could have (like I said, just a suspicion) installed a program to block multiplayer games, gather and sell data (maybe) so people will try to get their support and pay them $250 to turn off the blocking program. Again, I don't have any evidence, but is it possible? It would all make sense, but I don't know how I would even be able to tell if my suspicion is correct. Of course I abandoned Dell a long time ago for Asus, never looking back. But the rest of my family are still avid Dell customers. But for my family, this was the last straw. They will never buy from Dell ever again. This post got real long real fast, but if you read all of this, what should be my next course of action? Should we just continue with the VPN as if nothing happened? Or should we take this further up the chain...

I don't think so, three of us have played at the same time before with no slow downs. But would that still allow all other computers to play the game and his not to?

I'm new here, I'm sorry if this isn't the right place for this post. I've been trying to troubleshoot my little brother's new Dell G3 15 for a while now, with little luck so far. The first day he got it, it worked flawlessly. We set it up, installed some apps and games and all was good. Fortnite played really well, Roblox always plays well on everything, all the games we tried were working. The next day, Roblox and Minecraft (Windows 10 Edition) wenen't connecting to multiplayer servers but Fortnite was working just fine. I thought that was weird, two game servers would be unlikely to be down at the same time, right? Roblox in particular displayed the "joining game" screen only to throw a red "disconnected from server" message. And all the other devices in the house ran Roblox fine. So I started troubleshooting: We restarted the laptop We uninstalled Roblox and reinstalled it We tried using Ethernet instead of WiFi We let Roblox and Minecraft through the firewall Now, at this point we noticed that the internet connection was unstable. It would disconnect, Ethernet or WiFi, didn't matter, from the internet and say there were connections available but didn't display any. So I updated pretty much every driver including wireless, Ethernet, graphics, etc. This fixed the WiFi, but we tried Roblox again to no avail. We contacted Roblox's support but they suggested what we already tried. I even ended up opening the back cover to make sure the WiFi card was seated (doesn't void the warranty pretty sure), nothing out of the ordinary there. Then we contacted Dell's support they said it was a software issue and weren't going cover it in the warranty unless we payed them $250. So that's where we're at right now. I can usually fix my family's stuff but this is a tough one. No matter what we do nothing works. Any ideas? Why would two games fail to connect and the rest have no problem?