Harry Voyager

Are there ones that are just plug and play with current TVs? I've got headphones for the audiophile stuff I do. This is mostly going to be for small children and I just need enough audio functionality to keep my sanity. Like I said, the current speakers were fine, until they started sounding like the adults from Peanuts. The rest of the family hasn't noticed yet, but kind of where I draw the line. Even for Baby Shark Week, I have standards. They may be low standards, I have some.

We've got an LG 55 Nano 81, that the speakers are starting to get a bit dodgy on. (Apparently it's got about 5000h on it already, which sort of freaks me out a little). I'm wondering if anyone can tell me what I need to look for in a sound bar for this? We've currently got an Xbox Series X, a Switch, and a WII using component video and sound hooked into this thing, and we're running this using an Inteset Universal Remote. Do most sound bars just replace the TV speakers directly, or is it more complicated than that? I'm not really looking for audiophile grade performance; it will spend it's life playing variations of Baby Shark and the equivalent. I'm looking for ease of use and robustness. (It will probably be used as a baseball bat by a 2-year old at some point.) Thank you, Harry Voyager

I've gotten good use out of my Mayflower Arc Mk2, however it's probably overkill for your headset.

Already did that. Unchecking the "Hide protected operating system files" just reveals the $RECYCLE.BIN and System Volume Information, but that's all I can find. Both of those have 0 bytes, and I assume deleting the System Volume Info would cause Bad Things(tm).

Well, what I was really trying to do was set my Windows Games up so they would install on something other than my C drive, but it has apparently claimed about 200-300gb worth of invisible folders on my games library drive, and will not allow them to be made visible or removed, or any other windows programs be installed there. Steam doesn't care, and the GoG installers don't care, but Windows has got itself into a royal snit over it. Note: there were a WindowsApps folder, a Programs Folder, and a couple other Windows generated folders there that I was eventually able to claim ownership of and delete (around 100-200GB of stuff). It's just there's apparently even more junk it's hidden. At this point it's probably easier to get a drive just for the Windows Game installs, use that to temporarily hold my Steam library while I reformat the drive it's claimed, then quarantine any Windows software to just that one drive. Seems like anything MS touches, it turns into a giant tangled mess for no particular reason.

So it looks like the Windows Trusted Installer took control of several folders in my games drive. Catch is, this was from an earlier Windows install, so this one has no clue at all what they are. Is there a way to force an ownership change of those folders without having to reformat the entire drive? That's where my Steam installs are and I have no idea how much I'd lose from that. Thank you, Harry Voyager

I think that is part of what happened. Once I found out about the God Mode folder, I discovered that Windows 11 has additional level of hidden files that are not revealed by setting the folder view to show all files. My guess is it hid the MSFS directory as one of those, but I've already formatted the drive so can't prove it for sure.

That was what I was looking for. Thank you!

Discovering that a lot of the Windows 11 settings now seem to be hidden behind command line instructions. (Seriously, setting what the power buttons do require knowing the name of the power settings sub program now? WTH MS?) I'm wondering, does anyone know of a good replacement for the old control panel gui/folder? I'm mostly just looking for something that lets me navigate all of the system controls without having to already know what the exact program is called. Since they seem to be just links to OS programs, I suspect it could be as simple as a directory or directory structure that's just links to the relevant OS programs, but not sure how many all there are now. Thank you, Harry Voyager

@OhioYJ @cretsiah Just a followup on the installs. The Steam games do seem to have successfully migrated. However, MSFS seems to have hidden about 400-800Gb of files on the flight drive, so I ended up having to format it to recover the lost space. Oddly enough, the other Xbox games just left folders full of encrypted files behind. Have not tried reinstalling any of them yet, though.

Yeah, I do MSFS, so stuck with the store. Also, Gamepass is very nice with an Xbox. I've never actually used the GoG installer. I usually just download the install files and set the up fully stand-alone. That said, I mostly use GoG for the X-Wing series, so the Win95 versions are just a direct file transfer. Epic Game store, I only use for the free games really. And I still haven't actually played Control yet. Need to do that after this hardware upgrade.

@OhioYJ Do you know if that works with MS store games too? Or is that to much of an over embedded fluster cluck to work?

Wait, that works now? The last time I tried to migrate a Steam library or rather massively failed. I've got the whole thing sitting on a big, separate QVO drive, and if all I need to do is install Steam and point? That would be rather nice. There are some parts I'll need to fresh install: all the VR interface stuff, but that will massively reduce the re-downloading I need to do.

That's just to get basic functionality and DCS running. I'm not counting the steam drive, mostly, on the assumption I'll just redownload games as I feel like playing them. Yes, I need a checklist to turn DCS on... The prepared part is the bugbear. I think I've got everything listed that I need, but it always seems like there's some silly thing I've forgotten, or some obscure configuration parameter I've missed somewhere, and then it's ages and a half to refund whatever caused the original problem and get it fixed, again. That said, I did want to do some experimenting with AI, which I'm advised means I mead a Linux boot. I've got a spare SSD, and some spare SATA port, so nuclear option sounds like the best bet to get a stable dual boot going.

So, going to be replacing the GPU, and deciding it's probably time to get onboard with Windows 11, but really torn between doing a fresh install vs doing the upgrade vs putting it off for another couple of years while Windows 10 is still supported. I'm going to have to do it eventually, but I've got a list of something like 20+ programs and tools I'm going to need to reinstall to get everything back up to where it is now, and I'm just not looking forward to the process at all. On the otherhand, I'm given to understand the upgrade installs tend to be less stable and have not much guarantee of things working afterwards as is. I kind of just don't really want to deal with it, to be honest.

@RasmusDC From what I'm hearing, everything AM5 has about a 20% early adopter markup right now, but should be back down our of the stratosphere around January timeframe. Right now the 7950X is basically the king of everything, and the closest thing Intel has out is just going to be the mid/low range of the 13th gen series, so we are firmly in the milking phase of things. Plus we don't have the GPUs out to see what happens when too GPU performance nearly doubles. On the 5800X3D, if you're already in the AM4, and not up for a full upgrade, it's still the best option. There are games that the CPU is a limiting factor for, but they're niche. Basically simulators, so MSFS, DCS, Asseto Corsa, etc. Anything that was written to run on a PS4/Xbox One generation console will basically run on a toaster. Even the PS5/Xbox Series consoles are only packing 8 core Zen 2 CPUs, so nothing cross platform is going to stress a 3900. But a 5800X3D should get you better potential frame rate than the 3900 for the next couple of years.

So, just realized I can download lectures of Wondrium for listening to on the road. Catch is, when I'm listening to it in audio mode, the phone puts it to sleep after about 5-10 minutes. Not ideal on the freeway... I know YouTube and music apps will just keep the audio going while the phone is locked and screen off. I'm wondering if there is a setting that allows this for other apps too? Thank you, Harry Voyager

I see no-one has suggested VTOL VR: VTOL VR on Steam For when you want to float your head over to your pilot for the mandatory pre-flight "sup?" FLYING AN ATTACK HELICOPTER IS TERRIFYING - VTOL VR AH-94 Multi-Crew Gameplay - YouTube And of course, GoG has Daggerfall Unity with Mods up for free if you're up to decades of highly confusing old school gameplay: Daggerfall Unity - GOG Cut on GOG.com https://www.gog.com/game/daggerfall_unity_gog_cut

Was unaware that MacOs supported OneDrive. May shave to look into that. I'm using some obscure software for most of my writing and only using Word for proofing, but may be worth figuring out how to cut Word down to actually work. It's very 'helpful' when writing. Couple of questions though; did they ever fix the change that set everything to remote? With the active files, I try to have everything sync on save so they're all the same version even if I have to go offline for a while. Desyncing on a document is bad. Second is, how durable is the Mac M1 Air? Basically, if the riddle gets ahold of it, are we looking at a Mac M1 Origami edition now? I do remember their "folding edition" phones a few years back. I think it's the micro-usb connect that's the problem. It has a bevelled face which was never very secure and has gotten wigglier over the years.

Been using a Surface 3 as a wandering typing laptop, but it's getting long in the tooth and taking longer and longer to charge and load up word processing stuff. This is not going to be used for gaming at all. I've got a desktop that's built for that. It's probably going to get left in a hot car glove box than get used for gaming. I just need something I can write on and connect to OneDrive with, and don't have to organize around when I last plugged it in. USB-C charging would be nice, since we've got tons of USB-C chargers scattered around everywhere now. Cheaper is good too, so I don't have to be paranoid about things happening to it. Any thoughts? Harry Voyager

Probably #1. I had not even heard that Garmin did smartwatches until someone brought them up in a debate about fitness trackers. And I've still got a Garmin nav system in my car* and am very aware of Garmin's avionics (flight simmer, though I prefer steam gauges) *I've decided built-in infotainment systems suck. If they glitch you have to turn your car off and then on again to get them working. I like my electronics not to require me to turn off the heat/AC to fix bugs...

Thank you, I'll try one of the fiber cables. We actually did try the custom resolution, but the results are different from 4k, and not in a consistent way. Possibly something odd about the render chain, be we haven't figured out how to solve that yet. I'm ok spending $60 or so to test this stuff. You should see how much I've already sunk into my hotas and VR setup. Cheaper than a real plane, but still...

Doing some bench marking for a niche game I play, and one of the things we're always trying to test is performance at 4k. I've got a 1440p monitor because I don't need 4k myself, but we did finally get a 4k TV in the living room. Catch is, it's 50+ feet away from my desktop. My desktop is sort of in the back of my officenest, weights an absolute ton, and has its own small forest of peripherals. Moving it is officially not fun. The TV is a 4k TV. Moving it is officially not fun. Also the spouse would highly not approve. I'm wondering, are there good ways to run an HDMI signal a stupidly long way so I could just plug Goliath into the TV, and run stuff through there? We did look at ways of emulating a 4k screen, but all of them ended up being inconsistent. For reference, the whole testing crazy is this thread: SYN_Vander BENCHMARK v6 to measure IL-2 performance in monitor & VR - Page 21 - Hardware, Software and Controllers - IL-2 Sturmovik Forum https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/66924-syn_vander-benchmark-v6-to-measure-il-2-performance-in-monitor-vr/ Yes, flight simmers are crazy. No I am not sorry

Cool. I've also discovered that a group in England call Pexon will make custom replacement cables as well for about 20 gbp: https://pexonpcs.co.uk/products/filco-cables-1?_pos=1&_sid=e7ac815c5&_ss=r Definitely would be simpler to grab one of these, but debating if I want to give making my own a go.

Got an old Filco Majestouch 2 that's got a flaky USB cable. I'm trying to find or figure out how make a replacement cable for it. What it looks like is a 5 pin cable with a tiny connector for the 5-pin side. Sort of a small version of the normal USB 1.0 header cable. Any idea if this is a standard type cable connector and what it could be called? Or am I more likely going to need to get a standard USB 2.0 cable and just cut, splice and solder?