thewelshbrummie

I'm planning out my next build, an HTPC for media viewing on my TV. No GPU required, purely a media streaming build. I'll be using the Streacom DB4 because... I want to. It's a completely silent build, with no fans of any kind and it uses heatpipes only to transfer heat to the case sides, which are themselves the heatsink. Basically the heatpipes are limited to a 105W max-TDP with the extra heatsink kit. I intend on using the iGPU and at most a Core i5 -T or Ryzen APU with some BIOS based power limiting. What I need though is some good quality thermal paste and in a decent quantity, probably 10x what you'd normally use since there's at least 4 places where I'll need it. Over the years I've used Arctic Silver 5 but was thinking of using MX4 for this build... but I'm open to other suggestions. The last few I've done have used stock coolers or had paste or a thermal pad pre-applied so it's been years since I've last used any. Thoughts on alternatives?

Naturally it applies to me, I thought that was clear. But I can answer, in general terms from experience, specifically regarding eBay and resellers. In 2016 I worked for a company that provided 3rd party customer support for a global TV OEM in the UK. eBay sales weren't covered in the same way as sales from an approved retailer. To my knowledge warranties did not transfer at all. That might have been different if a resold TV came with the original proof of purchase from the original retailer but it wasn't something we ever encountered. And that directive came from the OEMs UK Head Office. Basically if a customer wanted an exchange on an eBay purchase and was within the statutory 28 days from purchase, their only option was the eBay reseller, not the OEM as original date of purchase was required - without that, we had no legal obligation to provide help. Had the original purchase been from an approved retailer and within 28 days, then we were obligated to do an exchange for pretty much any reason. But only for primary sales through a retailer, not 3rd party resellers (from memory the OEM didn't sell directly at the time and only provided links to retailers - sales via those retailers were covered). Where it gets complicated is eBay sales via accounts managed by authorised retailers, which very much exist in the UK. But those would most than likely had a proper receipt to provide proof of purchase YMMV with Asus, I can't answer for them. My original point though was to provide context as to why this story isn't necessarily a catch-all for everyone who has bought an affected phone.

It's not clear that this actually was a settlement - the source link doesn't provide enough information to actually determine that. All it says is that they've seen proof that Asus settled. That could simply be that Asus paid money, not anything else... and that's not the same thing as a settlement, that could be a default judgement that Asus have paid to make the whole thing go away without making any submissions or any kind. There's also some misunderstanding about how the UK Small Claims Court works both above and in the original article - being British and having used it once (for an undelivered laptop), I have a solid idea. Small Claims cases are for fixed amounts only - so they're ideal if you're after a refund for a product or service that wasn't delivered nor as described, as is the case here. Basically if you win, you get paid the amount you've requested and a refund of the filing fee, to be paid by the losing party (so if you're claim isn't successful, you're liable to pay the filing fee, in this case £70, and the defendant doesn't have to pay anything). (I think this is correct but is from memory and I may be wrong so I've spoiler tagged this paragraph): Also, as a former employer found to their cost, if a defendant fails to respond, a default judgement is automatically made in the plaintiff's favour. I suspect that's what actually happened as that would be far easier for Asus, it's essentially the only way around making things go away without admitting liability in the UK (and avoid going to a full court). That and Asus are probably happy enough to pay the cost of one phone just to make the situation go away. The TLDR - evidence that Asus settled hasn't really been provided, so if anyone else attempts to go this route Asus may just decide to fight further cases - precedent doesn't necessarily work in small claims cases (and for reference, small claims are always for a fixed amount - you can't use it for damages for suffering or the like, it has to be a fixed amount such as a refund for goods not delivered). Doesn't matter if they're sold via a proper 3rd party retailer (e.g. Currys in the UK) and the issue is with the the manufacturer not providing accurate information, then you can go this route and claim from the manufacturer, not the retailer. Obviously eBay sales would more than likely not be covered, though in theory there's nothing stopping you from filing a claim against eBay itself (though that probably wouldn't succeed).

Context of the time matters - keep in mind that at the time people were looking for a suitable upgrade from the Q6600, the first popular quad core (which was really 2 dual core CPUs in the same package i.e. 2 CPU dies, the L2 cache was 2 pools that couldn't be shared across all 4 cores). The Q9650 wasn't really that sensible an upgrade - I have one and it was great for the time but it wasn't the game changer from the GO stepping of the Q6600 when overclocked beyond 3.6GHz. Enter x58 - which was really the OG HEDT platform, with native quad core support (i.e. combined pools of cache for all 4 cores and a single die) while also offering triple channel memory support. Features that simply haven't appeared in any non-HEDT Intel platform (while also forcing DDR3 upgrades on people with older LGA775 DDR2 based boards, DDR3 LGA775 was very late in the socket lifespan). People who jumped onto the i7-920 probably waited for another similar platform and decided that later HEDT platforms were too expensive, so stuck it out until Skylake or later. That and there wasn't a real 2nd gen LGA1366 set of CPUs to choose from, you had the 9xx range only with a very minor mid-cycle refresh.

Not too difficult, (Intel stock cooler on LGA775) though it wasn't until I went to upgrade it that I realised that one of the pins wasn't actually pushing in fully. Thankfully it didn't do any damage & it wouldn't have mattered as I was using a placeholder Pentium CPU until what became the final LGA775 chips launched. Toyed with going the Q6600 route but I'm happy I waited for the Q9650 that I still have. That said neither of the 2 coolers I got after were great to install. I got a Tuniq Tower that was a pain (with a manual fan controller mounted to a PCI bracket rather than a PWM fan) and the Scythe Kama Angle cooler I got to replace it, which required extreme finger gymnastics for installing in the Antec P182 I bought.

I'm asking because I was sent one by mistake and haven't been asked to return it. It's a 1TB m.2 Samsung 980 Pro. I built a new PC for my mother-in-law back in late January. However instead of the RAM I ordered, one of the 2 packages I received contained a 1TB 980 Pro. Annoyingly the RAM didn't arrive until 2 hours after I left my apartment for a 5 week holiday (though since my gaming rig wasn't being used and I have 4 sticks, I took 2 out and used them for the month so that I could at least provide a working computer). As I'm now home again I've got the replacement memory and installed that (and reclaimed my own) but I still have the SSD and haven't had any contact about returning it, so I'm assuming that it's mine to keep. It's a little small for my gaming PC (I'll be reinstalling Windows in the not too distant future on a 2TB m.2 drive which is as small as I'd go, with the intention of using a 4TB drive in the other slot) but would be ideal for the HTPC I'm planning on putting together later this year. Having seen recent news on Samsung SSDs not being what they were, is there any way of knowing if this drive is any good?

Companies are trying to keep this as the status quo but the FTC is at least trying to block that from continuing. Unsurprisingly it's cable companies mouthing off with the loudest voices to attempt to keep the rules as they are. Sirius XM comes to mind - we signed up for a cheap trial and got both app and car radio access. Cancelled online and after a few months discovered that while the app stopped working and the price dropped a little, we still had car service and were paying for it. Phone cancellation only despite being an online signup. Basically told them we were cancelling and weren't coming back until they allowed online cancellation. With any luck the FTC will force them into making that change.

More to the point that makes him an adult, so age arguments are pretty academic however you may want to interpret them (in terms of whether the police are being too harsh or not harsh enough, excuses like this aren't an option vs if he was 10). European countries rarely try minors as adults but that's irrelevant here - as an adult, he'll be charged as one. @SpottyThat's wrong, it's the original ~3 hours you posted. Which makes the response more impressive but also more important as it would have been a direct flight. You're looking at currently available flights in the Northern Hemisphere winter to get the 4-6 hour timeframe which all include a change of plane somewhere in Spain (or maybe Paris) and total 3 hours of flight time, i.e. not including layovers. I see only 6 flights yesterday for Menorca airport (Sunday) and none today or tomorrow, so I assume flights only operate at weekends in the European winter. I noticed that you're from Down Under, so that might make this less obvious if you don't travel regularly in the northern hemisphere on short-haul flights to tourist destinations - I guess the equivalent would be there being extra flights to Bali or Fiji from Australia at this time of year before the schools start again. Referring to the source link, this incident happened in July 2022 when there obviously were direct flights to Menorca from Gatwick with Easyjet, the airline who carried the passenger in question. Wikipedia's article on the airport implies that Easyjet flights from Gatwick continue to operate on a seasonal basis - so no flights as of typing this in late January.

I was talking about the Vivobook - the Intel Ark listing for the CPU. It clearly lists GPU specs. It is dual core and I was using a 10700K so the CPU performance isn't comparable. My point is that the iGPUs appear to be of similar performance and definitely age so you may get good results from games of 2010 and earlier as the CPU in my rig wasn't being pushed at all in those games. I suppose YMMV in terms of the Core i3 in the Vivobook but unless you're on a data cap of some kind it's worth trying some games out as I suspect you'll be surprised by what is actually playable. As for Supreme Commander:FA it's definitely worth a look - but wait until it's on sale. It's usually $12.99 but there were 5 sales last year where it dropped to $2.59 (and another 5 in 2022) so I'd obviously wait for one of those. Also can't recommend the game without suggesting Forged Alliance Forever. It's the biggest community project to keep online multiplayer available and is free to use.

You're barely above the recommended specs: Memory: 4 GB Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GT 730 or Radeon R7 240 CPU: Intel Core i3-4150 or Ryzen 3 1200 File Size: 23 GB OS: Windows 10 64-bit The 1030 is in theory faster than a 730 but that's such a low starting point that it's still on the weak side. And an 8100 is a 4 core 4 thread CPU vs a 2 core 4 thread CPU - neither of which are very fast for modern games. Ideally you need to start over with a complete rebuild but so long as your power supply can provide enough power, upgrading the GPU makes the most sense here and go from there. You could upgrade the CPU but if that makes little difference then you'd need to replace CPU, motherboard and RAM for any meaningful upgrade so it's a huge gamble to upgrade your CPU as it may make little difference.

My desktop is coming up to 3 years old. I went without a GPU for the 1st year as they were basically impossible to find at the time. I found that dialling back to medium settings on 1080p or sometimes 720p would make most games from 2012 or earlier work on the iGPU in my 10700K - which has higher boost clocks but it looks comparable to what you have at the moment. Old F1 games were fine and if Real Time Strategy is of interest then I can't recommend Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance enough. I now run it on a 3060 - and because it remains CPU heavy there's little difference in the GPU side of things so you may get reasonable performance if you want to try something a bit different. Naturally YMMV - some games just didn't work on the iGPU at all despite not being that heavy on my 3060 - I assume because they weren't designed for Intel GPUs.

Only just realised that the reason my HDD isn't parking/idling as it should (& is regularly making noise when I'm not expecting it) is that at some point since I installed it last summer, my Windows installation has moved the pagefile to it. Currently running my PC from a 500GB SSD but I'll be starting over in March once I'm back from a holiday with a new and empty 2TB m.2 drive that's already installed in the PC... ...but am I right in thinking that the pagefile is fine to go on an SSD? Back when I built my first rig I put the pagefile on a 2nd drive to help performance but that was back when HDDs were the only option. I can't say I've thought about it but the constant sounds of my lone HDD constantly spinning are grating, especially when the drive is intended for archival data storage only and not for running the system in any way. Going back 10 or so years I remember a fair discussion about it being better for the pagefile to remain on an HDD even with an SSD installed... but that's 10 years ago on what were very small SSDs and even then it wasn't clear cut on which was better (from memory it was the idea that constant rewrites to an SSD would massively reduce useful life but I'm sure that's changed in the 10 years of technology improvements). Pretty sure I'm good to manually move it for the short term but would appreciate any 2nd opinions. Thoughts?

It's just occurred to me that this is likely caused by updating the Nvidia driver back on 23rd December - the timing certainly fits. I also noticed that Windows itself had a notification stating: Windows helpfully didn't dismiss it despite rebooting. Since I update Nvidia drivers manually I've gone back to the last version I had installed (536.something rather than 546.something). Hopefully that will fix the issue as it's the only thing I can think of that I've changed.

Something new that's been happening with my desktop. Since I built it 3 years ago I've been able to regularly put it to sleep overnight and wake it without issue for weeks on end. Twice in the last 2 weeks though, waking it comes up with a Displayport error, saying that "an incorrect DisplayPort version setting will cause th screen to be blank. If this occurs, make sure the Display port version setting of your monitors matches the device its connected to." If I change the version to 1.1 or 1.2 on the monitor the message changes to a simple "No Signal" message. I can't remote in via TeamViewer and it's simply not usable. Specs for my US gaming PC are in my signature (it's an LG monitor running at 2560x1440 connected to a RTX 3060). Switching to a HDMI cable doesn't work. Hitting the reset button fixes the problem immediately. But I'd rather not do that when have something open on my desktop (though nothing that won't be missed if I lose it). It's just an annoying issue that's only recently started happening that I'd like to fix. The only thing I can think of is that my computer has decided to output Display port version 2 but it doesn't make sense when resetting the computer fixes the issue. Any suggestions on what might be causing this?

Not guaranteed. Wifi can work without an antenna depending on how strong the signal is from a router. Signal is likely to be terrible without the antenna with plenty of drop outs but I've had built-in wifi on a desktop motherboard work perfectly without the antenna plugged in. The best option, as Windows simply won't know wifi is available if you disable it in the BIOS Windows may or may not automatically install wifi drivers if you don't disable Wifi in the BIOS. Newer versions of Windows tend to be able to find a working driver but it also depends on the wifi chipset used. And the moment you attach an ethernet cable Windows Update will probably take a look for and install a working driver if you don't manually install one yourself. So to answer the question: No guarantee Guaranteed No guarantee if you connect the computer to the Internet via ethernet. That said, you're reasoning doesn't make sense. Simply connecting a PC to the Internet puts it at some risk and the limited wifi-specific hacks I know of still require some proximity to a wifi router. I seriously doubt that you'd be at any big risk. Also, most newer wifi enabled boards have bluetooth built in too. That's obviously useful for wireless headphones but the antenna are still useful for bluetooth connections. Usually you can enable Bluetooth and disable wifi in the BIOS - but I think I've seen at least one BIOS that doesn't separate the on/off for both features.