Anomnomnomaly

I used to upgrade parts every few months back in the 2000's. Back then tech was moving really, really quickly... faster than it seems to these days. I'd add more ram, a video card, swap out the CPU and so forth... and probably replace the motherboard, case and so forth every 18 months. At one point I had at least 2 systems running side by side and a third as a backup. But in the later half of the 2000's I started spending my money on a sports car... doing up a mid 90's Mazda V6 coupe... that eats up a lot of money. So I ended up keeping one system for almost 5yrs and selling the rest... after that I got a more basic build and then from 2010 until 2019 I was building and upgrading incrementally as I could afford it (I gave up work to help care for my late father)... But from 2008 to 2013 I was on the AMD Phenom based platform and then on the AM3+ AMD FX platform, often using 2nd hand parts and amazon warehouse deals for upgrades... Until I finally built a brand new system from scratch in 2019... The first completely new build in around 10yrs. Since I built it in Jan 2019... I've upgraded the GPU, added a new 144hz 1440p gaming monitor a new corsair mouse and mechanical keyboard... as well as some other minor things like a 512GB portable SSD.

If I can interject a little sanity into this issue. I actually kind of agree with both of you... the market does tend to boil down to 2 major players that will dominate... but there will usually be other smaller competitors in the market too. It's very easy to look at those 2 dominant companies and imply that they're the only real choices you have. Sometimes it takes quite a bit of effort to find an alternative. Now I'm in the UK... so we have a few mobile carriers... Vodafone, EE, 3 and O2... Of those the first 2 are the biggest with EE being the combined companies of Orange and T-Mobile until a few years ago... We used to have 5, now we have 4... and of those 2 are very large, O2 comes next and 3 are the smallest. Then you've got dozens of smaller operators... GiffGaff, Sky, Tesco, Virgin and and so forth... these actually lease from those others. Now from my limited knowledge of US cities... I do know (from what friends have told me) that some have either a monopoly on certain services or are limited to just a couple of providers. One for example only has Comcast in their area and that company has gone to great lengths to shut out any other competitor... and they're paying through the nose for services that are half the price where ever there is more competition. So both of you have valid points... but neither of you are 100% right

I had the ASUS 280X... the one with 1500mhz memory being run at 1600mhz with out adequate cooling to all of the dimms resulting in graphical glitches. I had mine replaced twice until I realised I'd have to fix it myself. Two options... remove the cooler and fit some little copper sinks to the dims, or flash the firmware to clock the dimms back to 1500mhz. I did the latter... and it was fine after that. I was running that card in my mediaserver without issue until last summer when I got my 5700XT... and swapped my RX580 into the mediaserver... the old 280X is currently sat in my drawer along with loads of other spare PC parts.

Razer are the apple of the PC gaming market... overpriced, over rated and fanbois gush all over them whilst constantly complaining about how often they fail... Hint... I'm looking at you Linus.

A couple of years ago, I was sick of the shitty service I was getting from my ISP (Virgin) the 100mb service I was on was averaging less than 20mb... they refused to tell me why it was so bad. But tests I ran seemed to suggest that they were actively throttling my connection when connected to a VPN. Because they were so slow, and because they fell below the minimum guaranteed speeds advertised I was able to get some refunds and out of my contract early. I shopped around and went with Vodafone.... biggest mistake ever.... Within a few weeks I'd cancelled and made so many complaints regarding their lies and bullshit. They were supposed to transfer my number over from Virgin... a number that originated from BT before going to Virgin and 'CAN' be transferred back without any issues... Numbers 'issued' by virgin can be a problem some times, that wasn't the case here. They repeatedly lied to me about transferring my number over, not once did they even ask for it... confirmed by both Virgin and Openreach... I informed them of my cancellation within the 28 day window I legally have. I cancelled payments and had what money I'd already paid refunded. I ended up writing a strongly worded complaint to their CEO because of their lies and bullshit. They still managed to cause me problems afterwards though... they terminated my broadband within 12hrs of agreeing to the cancellation... took a further 2 weeks to cancel the landline. Meanwhile I've got to keep my virgin number/line going because if I cancel it they won't transfer the number. That number is linked to work stuff and would involve a lot of lost business, reprinting of materials and so forth... in short.. it would cost me a lot of money. Until they released the landline, I couldn't sign up with a new ISP... leaving me without internet for weeks. I had to buy a wireless dongle for my PC and use my phone as a mobile hotspot after buying a lot of extra data. When vodafony finally released the line, I was able to sign up with a company called Zen... who come highly recommended in the IT community... Been with them for almost 2yrs and aside from a few glitches with speeds dropping (faults on the lines between me and cabinet), I'm getting reasonable speeds. Can't wait for my area to be upgraded with fibre to the home though. tl:dr Vodafone can suck my balls... they're the worst company to deal with.

I downloaded and tried Youngblood... it was unistalled within a few minutes. Not what I thought it was and I'm glad I was able to... test it... first. I've already detailed my gripes with Ubosoft... but I do have the Far Cry series... although Like you I purchased everything on sale after they bought the franchise. FC3 was good... but FC4 was just a bland copy and was really FC3.5... FC Primal was just more stuff that should really have been DLC for FC4 and whilst FC5 was good... FC ND is just DLC content not a new game... I've bought every one of those on sale except ND which I have no intention of paying for at all. It's a kinda mediocre game anyway. I'm trying to play Fallen Order to see if it's worth it... can't even launch the game. Get to the game menu and it crashes my entire system forcing a hard reset.

See, I never knew that... back in 2016 I was still using my R9 280X and it wasn't until early 2017 that I got a RX580 and never had any problems with it outside of thermals that were cured with new thermal compound.

There isn't a company on this planet that isn't a few steps away from going out of business... all it takes are some shitty decisions, some shitty products... kill of your userbase, fail to adapt to a changing market... and you'll just be another statistic with your IP bought out and stripped for the profit making parts whilst the consumers are thrown away and screwed over again and again. There isn't a company that has ever existed that is too big to fail... so your misguided belief that it wouldn't happen is... well... misguided at best. It's interesting that you bring up 20 different beers from 20 different breweries... do you actually know 'who owns' all of those breweries? The probability of it being one or two companies is high... very, very high. Stores have deals and agreements in place to stock from certain suppliers, the bigger the franchise the bigger the deal and the more likely it is to consolidate it's buying into fewer places. This is an example... it's know as 'the illusion of choice' this is just a basic example regarding food... you could easily create one for games publishers that own 90% of all game studios... the same applies to movie studios... Disney owns Marvel, Pixar, Fox, Lucasfilm, ESPN. ABC.. and subsidiaries of some of those companies are Sky, Hulu, Star, Touchstone, Hyperion... the list goes on and on. I'll tell you what... go back to that store take pics of those 20 beers from 20 different companies and we'll see how valid that argument is.

Where exactly have I been 'blasting' epic? i think I've mentioned them once regarding the fact I don't want it on my system... I don't want origin on my system either and I don't like exclusives on any platform... Hardly 'blasting' or singling out only one company. In fact... I was 'blasting' ubisoft for selling me a game, taking my money and then never actually giving me the game and failing to resolve it so that I had to take action to get my money back. I've had to take issue with Steam in the past for selling games that won't run on more modern versions of windows... when the gog versions do and got a refund from Steam after far too long (this was before they implemented their refund policy). Consumer laws vary greatly from country to country... so when a US company defaults to the shitty anti consumer laws they seem to have there on a global basis... I'll take issue with it, because we do actually have some pretty good ones here. and on that note... off to bed, as I've got an early start tomorrow.

You can quite happily buy Ubisoft games on other platforms... I own several that I bought through steam and others through Uplay... EA 'tried' to force everyone onto their origin platform only... But have since back peddaled and you can buy their stuff elsewhere once more. Granted you still 'need' uplay installed and so forth... But they're still for sale on other platforms. I can buy games that are on steam... and also on say GOG... so where exactly is this 'walled' garden you say everything Steam/EA?Ubisoft has? I'm not saying that they're innocent... far from it... and exclusives are bad in general... So let's all agree that Rockstar are c**ts for their exclusives with GTA or RDR and so forth... I would actually support a ban on any DRM that makes life harder for the paying customer than it does those that download it DRM free... It's one of the reason I love GOG and if there's a choice of buying games there or anywhere else... GOG wins every time. Guess where I'll be buying Cyberpunk in a few months. I'd personally like to see all DRM eradicated and the world move to more open and secure systems.

Actually, it's because I don't like walled gardens. If you want X you must have Y and only Y is allowed to supply it. We used to have that problem in general retail here in the UK... Companies charging much higher prices for exactly the same product... and then trying to take legal action against other companies who dared to buy them cheaper and import them into this country, to sell them at a better price. Levi's did this about 20yrs ago...tried to sue the supermarket Tesco for importing their products at a lower price and block the sale/import of them altogether... they lost. Thankfully as online retailers grew bigger... this problem has all but gone away now... The downside is that the typical high street stores are dying as people do so much online now. I was in a store a few weeks ago, I was looking to buy something. I knew what I wanted... couldn't get anyone to help me... so whilst I was looking at them I was on my phone and found the same item cheaper. When a store drone finally came over and showed me the product (it wasn't charged, so needed to be plugged in so I could check it out)... I asked about price matching another big name store 2 miles up the road and he informed me they don't price match online deals. Whilst he went into his sales pitch... I let him finish, looked up and said... oh, I've just ordered it from them and it'll be ready for collection by the time I get there. That's one reason why stores are going out of business... because they refuse to adapt. if they'd have matched the price (only £20 difference) I'd have bought it.

Ah yes... upgrades for the sake of upgrades simply to push out a 'new' product that's the same as the old 2019 product... but this year we put 2020 on the box.

I have to respond to this because of the hypocrisy... You suggest that you'll need a new cooler with the AMD CPU as the stock one isn't enough... and I do agree that if overclocking. But... how many intel CPU's even COME with a cooler at all? It's a lot fewer than AMD does. Not trying to disparage what you say... just that you can't cherry pick a negative for one, when the other is actually worse. As for the whole integrated graphics side of things... I'd say that the 3400G offers a much better graphics experience than anything that intel currently has on offer... It's capable of doing 720p gaming just fine... Intels isn't good for gaming at all.

Every single youtube reviewer has stated that the 3600 is the best performing and value for money CPU around... Intel integrated GPU's are garbage for gaming so you'll need a GPU regardless. Your brother doesn't know what he's talking about and probably has only ever listened to intels marketing blurb or intel fanbois. You gain massive performance over anything similar from intel with the exception of a few areas that where intel has better single thread performance... So games that rely heavily on single thread workloads may still slightly favour intel CPU's... But overall, when you factor in all types of games and other work loads... the Ryzen 5 3600 wins out by a large margin. and always... ALWAYS go for dual channel ram, these Ryzen CPU's love it... the faster the better. If you can afford 3600mhz, get it unless you are sticking with a B450 board in which case you may struggle to run it at those speeds... It does vary from though... 3200mhz ram is still a good bet if you want to save a little extra towards a better GPU As for your brothers reasoning... is he utterly clueless, or deliberately trying to sabotage your build?

As a now EX IT guru... I was completely self taught and never took any exams or gained any major official qualifications and was able to find work without any major problems through the 2000's... each time getting a bit of a pay bump. Between 2005 and 2010 I more than doubled my salary. I then gave up work in 2010 to help out my mum, caring for my father who had parkinsons and had just been diagnosed with lewy body dementia until he passed in late summer 2016. I spent about 15 months or so trying to find work in my old field but everything had moved on so much that I no longer felt qualified... So I ended up doing more management/consulting type work on a semi part time basis. It doesn't pay quite as well as my last job did in 2010... But back then I was working 40hr weeks and now I'm doing 25hrs on average. I bring home twice what I need to pay the bills as I've become kinda frugal over all those years when I was struggling. 7yrs of budgeting every penny has made me far more careful about what I spend money on, and I will never get a loan or a credit card, instead I save up until I can afford something instead. I'm not sure that you could blag your way into jobs in the same way now... I'm very good at talking myself up and come across as having more knowledge that perhaps I did, I was also fully honest about questions I don't know. My standard answer to those was, I can't put my hands on the exact info you want this second, but I could find it out in a few minutes. I also had some great stories about fault finding bugs in software and some unusual fixes I had to figure out that were so unusual you couldn't just google and hope to find an answer (this was when working on proprietary software). There are guides written on some bugs that I discovered and figured out workarounds for in that company now.

All excessive fanbois/goils are a bad thing and I tend to instantly dismiss anything they say as irrelevant because those types are incapable of being objective or rational about whatever particular product/brand they are gushing over.

As you get older, you lose the ability to hear certain frequencies.... you've probably just started to notice it because you're considered OLD now.

All I can think to say to you is... chookity

When it comes to phones, I had a smart phone with a touchscreen way back in 2005... I had a couple in fact. Both Sony Ericssons... I forget the model numbers exactly, but the last one was the P990i I think. The main difference was the keyboard was physical on those, and the touch screen wasn't the same type... however, Samsung released a smartphone with capacitive touch screen and rounded corners at least 6 months before the iPhone launched. So as usual with Apple it's a case of stealing other peoples ideas, refining them in some way and then comes the marketing genius to convince the masses that it's their invention... You've be surprised at how many people who aren't as tech aware as the people on forums like these... swear blind that apple invented everything they've ever made... Because they've bought into the idea that apple is cool, it's fashionable, it makes you more likeable, it shows how successful you are... Now before anyone things I'm just bashing apple for the sake of it... I'm not... I'll happily sit here and slag of the 'idea of apple' all day long... and the fanbois/goils that buy in to the bullshit marketing (across any brand really). For those who enjoy the products because they offer a simpler approach to the user experience... No problem at all... I'm considering getting an iPod classic myself if I can find a decent second hand one because my current car has an ipod dock built in to it... but it only accepts the old style proprietary connection... But I've seen the prices people expect for stuff that's now over 10yrs old and all it does is reinforce my view that apple products and the fanbois/goils who worship them are insane. But again... that's kinda true for many brands. Just take a look at how Linus gushes over anything razor and has had several of their laptops and still gushes over them in spite of the fact he's openly stated in videos that the quality and durability of those he's had is kinda garbage.... until he gets given the next piece of razor shiny and he goes... ooooh... shiny... want.... So yeah... I kinda agree that they've popularised things... which is all down to the marketing.

I'd like to add something I often say regarding the video streaming market... because I think it also applies here. "You cannot continue to fragment the market and expect growth." Streaming services are now so many, that users are being forced into the position where after years of success shifting people from pirating media to paid services... they are once again convincing people that the only logical thing to do now... is return to the old habits. because subscribing to more than a couple of streaming services is no longer cost effective. I pay for the two largest ones already... I'm not adding more... I have a finite amount of money to dedicate to entertainment. I know what the solution is... I've been saying it every chance I get on which ever platform this conversation comes up... Either one universal streaming platform... or limited exclusives for a show/movie on the platform that produces it.. and after a set amount of time, it must be offered up for licensing to other platforms... and allow the other platforms to decide if they want it or not based on user demand for those types of shows on their service.

I've got a little one of these, it's bright orange with black accents... cost me about £10. It's fine for most jobs but access can be a little tricky in some corners of a PC case. So I stick to some magnetic tipped screw drivers I have there. But fan/rad installation is a doddle with one of these

Jobs was a genius... at marketing... a liar and a thief for almost everything else an unbelieveable narcissict and one of the most unpleasant people to work for apparantly. Apple haven't 'invented' anything that they currently get lauded for... First mp3 player... the iPod... nope... 3yrs earlier... The smart phone... nope... iPad... nope... airbuds... nope... laptops.... nope. if anyone can think of anything they have actually invented, and been the first to market with over the last 20yrs... Please let me know and don;t forget to provide source for the claim. I do enjoy being proven wrong.

Yup.. it's not going on my system.. all they're doing with the timed exclusives crap is making people look for.. erm.. alternative ways to acquire it.

I swore of HTC after I had the Desire HD back in around 2010... that was the flagship phone at the time... We were promised that the new version of Android was coming... the lower end phones go it... We never did, they simply lied about it and then pushed yet another version of their sense overlay... It's that reason why I sweat off phones with a manufacturer overlay and will only buy phones with as near to vanilla android as possible. I can cope with a few apps, but not anything more... That sense overlay baked in so many apps, on top of the built in baked versions of the same apps... so you were left with 2 versions of facebook/twitter that couldn't be removed along with other garbage. Got rid of that phone around 2012 and wouldn't touch them again... No wonder they've all but disappeared from the marketplace... treat customers like shit... people stop buying phones... HTC goes 'surprisedpikachu.gif'

So much this... There's a known defect in the bluetooth modules on the Honda Accord, it would start to fail and cause battery drain. To repair it via a 3rd party is around £350, or to replace from Honda is more like £550. So most people simply unplug them to stop the battery drain, and some then fit a parrot kit as a top of the range one of those with music streaming (which the Honda ones didn't have) can be bought/installed for around £200-220. But some of us are a little more creative... there were two main issues... occasionally one of the chips failed... which is a dead unit that can't be fixed. The most common cause was a dry/cracked solder joint. So we invented 'The Great British Bluetooth Bake Off'... stripped the units down, placed the PCB's in a 200ºC Oven raised up on each corner using some balled up greaseproof paper for about 20 mins. It reflowed the solder in the joints without damaging anything else, and a year later... they're still working.