The Blue Cryptid

The switch is a 2540 48g HP Aruba. Yeah I'm hoping that's not the case, but I'll probably end up redoing both ends just to bring it to standard anyways. The last IT guy here had nothing standardized so we've been scrambling to figure out how things work.

The switch is a 2540 48g HP Aruba. Yeah I'm hoping that's not the case, but I'll probably end up redoing both ends just to bring it to standard anyways. The last IT guy here had nothing standardized so we've been scrambling to figure out how things work.

fancy switch, which one do you use?

As for shorting, it's entirely possible, perhaps likely, that the short is on the outside end, you know, the one that is exposed to rain and snow and ice and wild swings in humidity, as opposed to the one that's in the nice, environmentally controlled building.

It could just be the color dye that was used in the cable. I've seen purple-ish "blue" conductors in off-brand Cat6.
 
It works, but that's sloppy. Just follow the standard; it's easier than making up the same thing on both ends.
 
There is a difference between the different color pairs. Because they carry balanced signals at specific frequencies, they have different numbers of twists per inch to reject as much noise as possible. Depending on the construction of your house and whether you're following line voltage cables (which you shouldn't be if you can avoid it), there might be a perceptible difference.

Fun fact, it doesn't *actually* matter what order your colors are, just that you terminate both ends in the same way. You might run into issues at the edges of spec (100m run really should have the correct ordering etc.) but by and large you'll be fine

It sounds like a normal network cable?  Not all cables have the colors exact. Just get the wires in the correct order. 
 
Also are you sure what you are calling "purple" isn't just a "blue" wire? Many people don't even realize they have color issues. Routinely I will say a color and the Mrs. will say you mean "________". 
 
A picture might also help? However my guess is still a regular network cable with off colors.

Run CMD as administrator and type this command:
sfc /scannow
windows will scan for corrupted files and will fix them for you

unfortunately this could be so many things, it's like going into a dr and saying your stomach hurts or you have nausea. My condolences as I've been dealing with massive pc issues myself lagging and stuttering in games despite good specs and even fresh windows installs locking up. I've swapped out every component besides the cpu so I guess that's the thing dying...
 
you can try a fresh windows install, that's a free thing to do, assuming you have a usb to throw it on. Check temps, check drive health in hdd sentinel, check ram, test stability of pc as a whole, run test on gpu. Swap out with known working hardware if possible. I got screwed since in my town there's little to no pc gamers, and, I didn't have a modern ddr4 secondary pc to be able to troubleshoot my ryzen 3700x pc
 
my best wishes in you fixing this.

Sounds like unstable memory, try reducing the frequency or turning off xmp.

This is a common problem usually relating to XMP overclocking of ram. First try turning off XMP in your bios then if the problem goes away its because your ram is clocked too high. What ram do you have and what do you have it set at in your BIOS?

OEM keys are usually loaded into the BIOS and detected automatically, if it is like dell or hp oem key for example.
If you purchased the key with your hardware from a computer store then you would have had to type it in at some point, so maybe the receipt or check the MB box?

where do you get the oem keys? i would contact the sellers, hopefully he would give back the keys.
if not just get another one.

I second this, although these cheap keys are usually gray market. Not sure if telling you where to get them is allowed on the forum, but a simple search should get you there.

Always link your key to your account... otherwise this can be bound to happen.

Worst case you buy a new one for $10-15. 

While I'm not a pro, I did just get my internship done last Summer by asking a local school if I could intern with their IT department. The one thing you should ask before taking an internship is what they plan to have you do, which was my mistake when I did mine. I ended up getting just gopher tasks, and learned nothing, resulting in the internship just being credits for me. No matter where you get your internship, just make sure they aren't using you for the busywork.

MMO's launched through steam, pretty much always launch the game's patcher/launcher anyway. The only difference is that STEAM does the actual patching of the game, and the launcher just sees a "already updated" install.
 
Sure, they're not "needed", but they exist entirely as a consequence of how Asian MMORPG's were developed. Star Trek Online included.  The Laucnher does exactly three things, and you can verify this yourself with every game from 10+ year old games to new ones:
 
1. It contacts the developer to see if it needs new files
2. It patches the files that are different, and removes "user installed" mods and other garbage that will break the game
3. It generates a session cookie from your entering a username and password, which it then passes to the game binary.
 
You can do this with pretty much every MMO game. Run the launcher once, launch the game, then go into task manager or any other tool that will let you see the "command line". Copy that to notepad. Now exit the game, and then copy that command line again. This will typically work until the next time the game needs to be patched, and this is in fact how "mods" for these games persist for so long in the first place. The patcher is the only thing updating the files. The game does not. It can not. Because a PS4 version of the game and a PC version of the game has different access permissions, and will have files in different places.
 

And that's why I don't run steam to launch STO.

I have a launcher for Star Trek: Online.  I sure as shit don't need to use ARC to launch the damn thing--even though that's what PWE wants me to use.  I'm calling Shiens on the need to have a proprietary, publisher-specific launcher.  All that's needed is a game launcher specific for that game.  And all THAT needs is your login info.
 
I could easily play Starcraft 2 without Battle.net.  If I were allowed to.

Now if only we could get rid of the rest of the BS launchers.
 
Or for that matter, if we could rid of 80% of the BS streaming services.

The person I originally replied to included epic game store, so when you said "it" I thought you meant them too, and when you say "EGS is the closest we have" I thought that meant they aren't competition, but close to being so. I get more what you mean now. Though, I think you are underestimating EGS a little bit though, it has certainly caused a noticeable disruption considering how new they are to the scene.

If you bothered to reply to my entire statement you would see that I already addressed EGS. Also, EGS is not a single-publisher store and is irrelevant to the part you were quoting. Try again.

That's nice. 
 
You know why launchers exist right? So they can update and patch the game (when it's a multiplayer game.) If it's not a multiplayer game, it doesn't need a launcher, but also you might be harassed a lot to update it if it can still talk to the internet. This is because a game might exist on more than one OS, so it can't compile in os-specific things on platforms where that functionality is different or non-existent.
 
We see this problem almost exclusively with non-game software, because no equivalent to steam exists. There are applications, yes, in steam, but all Steam operates as in those cases is a distribution point. If you launch an application through Steam, unless it was designed like a game (eg running on Unity), Steam doesn't actually provide any functionality. You can run those applications without Steam at all.
 
Many applications on Windows will check for updates before even giving you control over the program, resulting situations where it won't run without an update, or it checks for an update and due to the site being congested, or you being on expensive slow internet plans, is unusable. 
 
Many pre-2008 games that were digital downloads, you are hard pressed to find them working today. This includes a lot of games from EA that used predecessors to the EA-Origin launcher. Mass Effect, The Sims, Spore, etc. Sucks to be you if you want any of the DLC or play them with a friend, because those services are dead.
 

I primarily used it for Quake Champions but they made that game available on Steam for some time now already and made it a bit easier to update.
While it sucks to have all the launchers, just for that one game on each, if it's free yeah whatever.
Who knows how it will go over time with others, I can only wish that there's a not necessarily a single store, but a single buy, where ever, and that you can play anywhere.

Thank god.
 
Bethesda launcher is a useless travesty that uses up too many system resources for some reason while offering zero functionality. It's literally just a front-end window with some website links and game installation links. I'm pretty sure its whole purpose is to mine data from my computer or serve as an additional layer of DRM. I bought Doom Eternal on it because the key for it was 20e cheaper than the Steam version, and it's a mistake I regretted many times. 
 
Just about the only launcher that's worse than the Bethesda one is Rockstar launcher, as that garbage constantly forces me to do captchas whenever I make the mistake of trying to play one of their games. Even Microsoft launcher is better than those two, as it at least has some functionalities and doesn't constantly get in my way. 
 
BTW, the funniest thing here is that Bethesda isn't even giving players the option of transfering their games to the Microsoft launcher because they know absolutely nobody would do that. 😄