Daniel Fernandes

Thank you all for your helpful advice and perspectives! I searched a bit more and ended up going for the Magegee MK Star TKL Keyboard. I've been using it for almost a week now and I love it! Miles better than the various membrane keyboards I had been using for all these years. This one has linear yellow switches (which I learnt are just slightly heavier than reds). They took me a couple of days to get used to, but they never get in my way when I type. I use Vim motions for editing code, and this keyboard has made it a lot of fun for me! It was money well spent indeed!

There are a lot of game jams listed on itch.io https://itch.io/jams They all seem to have different ways of joining them. Some of them seem to let you find team members as well, which is really nice! Have fun if you're participating in one!!

Thanks for the input @TatamiMatt and @MiszS! It's good to know that the typing experience lasts for long, that was one of my main concerns. I think I'm gonna go for reds, I had heard the sound of blue switches on Cherry MX's site and they are definitely not for me! I will be sure to see some reviews, thanks for the advice!

Hey all, So I'm looking for a new keyboard, and I'm wondering if it is worth going for a mechanical one with my $30-35 USD budget. Or if I'll be better off saving some money and getting a decent Logitech membrane keyboard instead. I hear very nice things about mechanical keyboards all over, but I know that a lot of these keyboards cost upwards of $100 USD, and one of the huge benefits is that they are very customizable if you've got the time and money to do that. Of course, budget mechanical keyboards sold by brands like Redragon and MageGee are not going to be as premium, some corners will need to be cut, and quality will have to suffer at least in some areas. I want to hear form people who've used budget keyboards like these. Do you think that they cut the right corners? Are they still a good typing experience compared to a good membrane one? Do they last? One of the reasons I want to switch from membrane is that the keys of many models become soft or sluggish after a couple of years, making it difficult to type on. The keyboards I'm looking at are like these: - https://www.amazon.in/Portable-Mechanical-Keyboard-MageGee-Backlit/dp/B09KLGRBCH - https://www.amazon.in/Redragon-K617-Keyboard-Mechanical-Supported/dp/B09BVCVTBC Any input is appreciated!

I did a network reset a few days ago as my laptop would disconnect from my WiFi randomly, so I thought this would fix it. However, it made things a lot worse. Not only was the laptop unable to connect to my WiFi ever again, but I also could not connect to any internet device at all. This includes using a USB dongle, and Bluetooth/wired tethering from my phone. Opening Network Connections (Win+X >> Network Connections) shows me a device called "Ethernet 3" with the description "Network cable unplugged, TAP-Windows Adapter V9". I never see any other device in Network Connections any more. I do not have an ethernet connection, nor an ethernet cable, so I can't make use of that one device. Network Resets seem to set everything to a "Default Setting". I wonder if there's some setting that I need to change to make it work again. Or if there's some essential service that is meant to recognize internet devices that isn't starting or something. If I open the Settings app and open "Network Properties", I do find a list of all network adapters, however, the "Status" is shown as "Not Present". In Device Manager, I can see my WiFi Adapter, and if I open it's properties, it says that the device is working properly. I also have a Linux installation on this laptop, and when I use that, my WiFi works fine. So it's likely not a problem with the hardware. I looked up for this problem on Google, and on this forum as well. It seems as if I'm not the only one who has had this issue, but the only solution seems to be to reinstall Windows, which is the last thing I'd want to do. Although I am considering it as I have been putting off installing an SSD that I bought a few months ago. Do you know what could cause this problem and if there is anything I can try to fix it?

Ummm so yesterday that start button started working 100% of the time again. The funny part is that it fixed itself without me doing anything. Upon a closer look it seemed like the problem was actually that the start button got super slow, if I clicked it a few times and waited for a minute or two, it would show up. Not sure what caused that to happen though. But I'm glad it's working now!

I'm actually using version 1607 (yeah I haven't updated my system for more than a year). So it's probably not the update that's causing it. This version has served me well so far, so I never bothered updating it (I messed around with the system to make it think that it is up to date, so Windows Update doesn't even bother me with any annoying notifications BTW). It's very difficult for me to download updates because they take a lot of time and my internet connection isn't stable, so they mostly fail when I try to update my system. Does Microsoft offer something like offline updates that I can download with a download manager and install manually?

A few minutes ago, I wanted to launch a program from the start menu, but after I clicked it, the start menu didn't show up. I can notice the Windows logo darkening a little when I click it with my mouse, so I know it's detecting my clicks. I restarted my PC and then the start menu started working fine again. A few seconds later though, it stopped working again! I tried restarting Windows Explorer, and the start menu was back to life, but only for a few seconds again. I later noticed that even the action center doesn't show up (the thing on the right that shows notifications). The rest of my computer seems to be fine. Task Manager works, Windows Defender quick scan says there are no threats. Running a threat scan on Malwarebytes now, but I don't expect any malware. I think this has something to so with Windows Explorer, because I got the start menu to work if I restarted it. I just have no clue how to trace down the exact cause or at least how to get it to work again. My problem is also a bit weird, Google (actually, DuckDuckGo) mostly gives results to posts by people who's start menu wasn't work at all. If you have any idea about what might be happening, or have encountered this before and know how to fix it, let me know. Any kind of help is appreciated. Feel free to ask for more information if I left anything unclear or so. Thank you!

I think I didn't pay attention to that, I'll try installing it again while making sure I installed the boot loader on my USB drive. Thanks for telling me! Zorin does support installing the boot loader to a specific device but if it still doesn't work, I'll give Ubuntu a try...

Yes, that's right. I did exactly that, the only thing is that GRUB gets installed on my laptop hard drive because of which I can't use my installation on any other computer. Were you able to use your installation anywhere else? Also is this dependent on the distro I'm using?

Yep, exactly!

Thanks for your reply! I've tried UUI, but the ISO I have is an "Installer" ISO. That means, when I boot a USB flashed in this way, it'll show the "Try Zorin OS" and "Install Zorin OS" thing, I don't want that. And the persistence feature didn't work for me, maybe because I was using Zorin OS 11's settings in UUI, but I believe they will be similar (Zorin OS 15 is not supported yet). I don't know how to add persistence using Rufus, is there a way to do that?

I've seen Anthony do this so I'm sure it's possible, but I need some guidance because I don't know how Linux works (I want to learn more about it!). Here's some background info so you have a clearer picture of what I've done: I downloaded the ISO for Zorin OS 15 (based on Ubuntu), flashed it to one of my USB drives using Balena Etcher. Then I booted from it, and installed Zorin on a different USB drive. It was a 32 GB USB drive of which I formatted 16 GB as ext4 for the Linux installation and 16 GB as FAT32 so that I can use it as a normal USB drive too. After finishing the installation, I tested it and it worked! When I turn on my laptop, the BIOS loads up, followed by Zorin's boot options thing (The thing that allows you to choose Windows or Zorin etc., a GUI GRUB?) and I was able to boot from the Zorin OS I installed on my USB drive. However, if I plug the USB drive out and then turn on the laptop, it opens the Linux GRUB again but this time it's like a console. I could get rid of this thing by changing the boot priority in my UEFI/BIOS, increasing the priority of Windows Boot Manager. But this means that something was installed on my laptop and not on my USB drive! And when I tried to boot from the USB drive on my other older laptop (it has no UEFI, by the way), it just displayed a message like "No operating system found" and booted from the hard drive then. That means that my USB drive would not boot on any computer I plug it to except for the one I installed it from. So is it possible for me to somehow install GRUB (which I believe is the missing component) on my USB drive so that it gets detected as an OS? How can I do that? Do I just copy-paste some files? Any help would be appreciated, thank you!

@paulmohrthanks for the tip! I thought smaller coolers would be less noisy lol, thanks for clearing that misconception!

@Tom H that's interesting! I also wanted my PC to be as quite as possible so thanks for the suggestion!