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Meowster

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Everything posted by Meowster

  1. I recently got an Asus ZenBook Duo 14 and its been great so far. But a few days ago, I plugged in my laptop to my monitor (Samsung M5 smart monitor 27'') and went to change the resolution settings, the HDR option was not available because "the display doesn't have a HDR certificate" or something along those lines. Does anyone know what this is? I also tried the laptop with my TV (Samsung QN85A 55'') and it said the same thing. I know definitely that both displays are compatible with HDR becuase I use them with a PS5 and a gaming PC and both allow HDR.
  2. Just treated myself to a new daily machine. Its an Asus ZenBook Duo 14. This thing is awesome! Managed to get a special deal for it because it was Christmas, payed the same price of a lower configuration. I managed to get the high end, i7-1195G7 version with a 1TB SSD, but no dedicated GPU sadly, but the Iris Xe graphics are surprisingly good and powerful, which was a pleasant surprise. My only complaint is that there is no palmrest, this isn't annoying when using the device on desk, but is quite annoying when using it on your lap as my hands are so used to a palmrest that they just automatically try and rest on the keyboard. Overall, this is an excellent device which I am glad to finally own and hope it serves me for many years.

    1. Bombastinator

      Bombastinator

      1 hour ago, Meowster said:

      Just treated myself to a new daily machine. Its an Asus ZenBook Duo 14. This thing is awesome! Managed to get a special deal for it because it was Christmas, payed the same price of a lower configuration. I managed to get the high end, i7-1195G7 version with a 1TB SSD, but no dedicated GPU sadly, but the Iris Xe graphics are surprisingly good and powerful, which was a pleasant surprise. My only complaint is that there is no palmrest, this isn't annoying when using the device on desk, but is quite annoying when using it on your lap as my hands are so used to a palmrest that they just automatically try and rest on the keyboard. Overall, this is an excellent device which I am glad to finally own and hope it serves me for many years.

      Apparently Xe is a pretty decent 720p gamer and if there’s any kind of super resolution that works you can push it to 1080p.  I don’t know if there is though.

  3. Update on my "retreived" Galaxy S8. So, I got in contact with the eBay seller and asked him a few questions about how he got the device. His response was the following "I purchased a job lot of devices on ebay in around march 2018 and this was inside of it. The original description of the job lot was in chinese because this lot came from china, however it was quite poorly written but the description about this phone was that it apparently worked but had accounts linked to it." I further asked him if he tried to do anything with the device and the seller said he was going to swap the motherboard in the phone but he didn't because the frame and display was in such bad condition. I suppose the seller didn't know about the IMEI blacklist but I assume he tried to set it up but couldn't because of the google lock. I did tell him that this device actually belonged to me and was stolen from me and he had no idea and was sorry. So, my phone was on quite a journey around the world, UK to China, and back from China to the UK. Apparently this is a very common trick that locked mobile phones find their way to China where they can be reused. I'm still curious to find out if my phone had any more owners in its journey. But I guess that information is long gone. 

  4. This might sound a bit like a story so sorry for that. In 2017 I preordered the Galaxy S8 from Carphone Warehouse (if you don't know what that is its basically a store that sells phones and contracts from other network providers.) I loved my S8 for a few months. Very unfortunately it had been stolen from me near christmas time 2017, only a few months after the phone's release. Looks like someone needed that phone more than me. Anyways, I reported it the next day as stolen to the carrier and they locked it. I was very sad, especially since I didn't even setup google backup on the phone yet (I don't know why I didn't set it up from the beginning) and the thief could access all my info so I had to wipe it remotely through google. This is a lesson to ALWAYS check your bags, purses, pockets or whatever before you leave and come back from a public place. But the best part is now. Nearly 5 years later I saw my phone on eBay for sale for £20. It appears it has been severely cracked on the front, back and the sides look like they have been melted? Anyways, the listing picture was quite blurry and I had very little hope for the phone working. Turns out I was wrong, I plugged it into the charger and very surprisingly the damn thing started charging after 15 minutes or so! What was really curious is that the thief didn't even try to do anything with the phone, it was still on the Samsung welcome screen as if the phone was reset, which it was. And now I have my S8 back with me and I am proud to own a rarer device, still on Android 7 with Samsung Experience 8.1 (and bootloader version U1!!) . There is absolutely no way this device will ever be "un-blacklisted" by the carrier, so its quite useless but might be worth something given that its still on Android 7. I suppose I could use it as a mobile router in a different country if I go travelling abroad, since apparently the blacklist only applies to the UK

  5. First time posting in this thread, hope this fits under the right category. At work, we had these ViewSonic CDE5520 55 inch 4K displays and long story short in around December 2021 the display panels were damaged due to a water sprinkler malfunction. I have now got 2 of these motherboards (see the picture) which still work even though water got inside the display. Unfortunately, the place I work had to throw these alright, but before we did I took out the boards to maybe find a use for them. Is it possible to do anything with this motherboard? I looked at the specs and it looks like it has a 1.4GHz quad core ARM processor with a Mali G51-MP2 graphics core (I'm just assuming here but it sounds like it might be a Mediatek or Amlogic chip). This display apparently runs on Android 8, which I can confirm when the display was last used. I sadly didn't take note of the panel, but I hope someone can help me out here and help me hook up a display to this thing? On the right side, I've taken a photo of what I assume is the power connector, which is labelled POWER and has some voltages written near it on the silkscreen. Would I be able to hook up a few power supplies here aswell? It would be nice to repurpose these boards from going to landfill. On the pictures, I've shown all the usable connectors, I also assume L+ L- and R+ R- must be the left and right speaker channels
  6. I recently picked up myself a Samsung Galaxy S6 in gold which lookes very nice. When I picked it up from the seller on facebook marketplace, I noticed the back glass was bulging because the battery had expanded. No big deal, got a new battery for £7.50, installed it and moved on. The main issue is that it has no AMOLED panel or digitizer. I am confident the device works, as it reports as "Fast charging" on my power bank and the phone gets hot whilst charging, and I can even feel it warming up after a while after holding down the power button. My only main concern is that there may be a fault. Look, I'm no expert on older Samsung phones but my S6 isnt vibrating, showing the blue/teal LED upon startup and the capacitive home/back buttons aren't lighting up either. Is this all happening due to the missing display? And also, I have flashed the latest official Android 7 ROM for it and it appeared to pass according to odin. So my question is, can I somehow test this device without a screen before I make an expensive purchase of an official AMOLED for nearly £70? I do believe the phone should be at the "Welcome" screen where you select the languages and all that stuff, but can't be 100% sure
  7. This response is kinda late but thank you. In the end I purchased a Sony branded card which was supposed to go in some Vaio notebook but it ended up working just fine, had some troubles as the drivers from the manufacturer (which were actually on some german FTP) were all in Chinese but eventually got there.
  8. I hope this fits under the right category, technically its still networking? Anyways, I have this rugged tablet thing that runs Windows Embedded 7 standard made by a company which apparently no longer exists. It works fine and I have upgraded it a few times now. However, I would like WWAN to work, since it says it supports it. I got a brochure for it online, and it says that the device will support a WWAN card with a Qualcomm Gobi 3000 chipset. I have fond various models online, and the connector is the same but they are all branded eg. HP, Sony, Dell etc. Will a branded card work with my tablet? Or do I need to find a non branded one, such as a Sierra one perhaps?
  9. Welp, this was a weird adventure

    Was just copying files from a flash drive to my computer, and suddenly it said that "The source drive could not be found" or something like that, I didn't think much of it so I clicked cancel and a few seconds later another message showed up which was also saying "The destination drive could not be found". That kinda worried me since the "destination drive" is my main system boot SSD. All of a sudden both my HDDs and 1 SSD (which aren't the boot drives) disappeared from This PC. I couldn't even find them in device manager. 

    I noticed that there was an exclamation mark near the AMD SMBus. I clicked on it and it gave me an error 49 (can't remember it, you will find out shortly why I can't remember it). Then, the system locked up and I couldn't get any input into the PC, and the USB drive light turned off, indicating no power was being provided. 

    Sadly, that must have been the end of my system as now I can't even turn it on. Its bricked now. None of the USB ports work, heck I can't even enter the BIOS as all USB ports (and the SATA ports too) have somehow become dead. 

    It will get up to the Asus logo and just hang there. Even tried a USB volt meter, absolutely nothing shows up, zero volts

     

  10. The other day I found my old Google Pixel XL 32GB. One time a few years ago, a system update was installing, and the phone rebooted and never came back to life. I can still "feel" the device working as it gets warm when plugging into a charger and once the battery charges, the little light on my USB phone charger thing turns off indicating the battery is charged, so its not completwly dead. But there are no lights or display activity when "turned on". I plugged it into my computer and found it does actually technically show up in device manager under the name Qualcomm HSLOADER or something like that, can't remember exactly. Is there any hope I can maybe reflash the operating system on it from the beginning? Have had a look on other forums but none of them are actually well written and unclear instructions are given. Is there still any hope for my Pixel XL? It would be nice to have it working again...
  11. Just found my first ever CD-ROM drive today. Got this for my birthday some time in the early to mid 2000s (can't remember exactly) This drive was installed into a custom built 486 DX2 machine which later got upgraded to some sort of 100MHz Pentium. Weird thing about this drive is that it only read store bought CDs and music CDs, it simply refused to read home burned CDs

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  12. My uncle had given me his old Surface RT whilst he was clearing out. Its still quite useful to me, I only use it for checking emails and typing a few lines of text in Word. However, the battery is starting to expand a little bit, I noticed this when I opened it up when I was replacing the charging port. Is it possible to buy a replacement for this device? I looked extensively but I couldn't find any replacements for it, at least from the UK. Could anyone possibly let me know if one is available? I'd love to continue using this device if a replacement battery is out there
  13. Thanks for that, it really helped me out a bit to decide on a price. Mine is in almost perfect condition, it stands straight and the feet don't seem bent anywhere. I'd say there might be a shortage of these in the UK at this moment, since coming across any vintage Macs or in general any old computers can seem quite difficult here, most the stuff I buy for my collection is either imported from other countries, most coming from the US but some are from Sweden, Australia etc. I think I might set up an eBay auction on it since these machines, like I said are quite uncommon in the UK since the sad truth is, many companies and individuals throw away or dump their old computers/tech. It makes me sad how these poor old machines are being thrown away more commonly
  14. Indeed the joblot was a great find! If I can remember correctly, my machine is equipped with 2 250GB hard drives, a GeForce 6600, 4.5GB of RAM (weird configuration I know) and I've given the whole chassis an inside to out clean by stripping nearly everything down. If you're curious about the iMac Pro specifications, I think it was the base model 2017 one, with no additional changes to the hardware. EDIT: Oops, forgot the CPU. Its the dual CPU 2.5GHz variant, resulting in a total of 4 usable cores
  15. I might be able to add some photos of it to the post later, but can't do that now as still at work and don't have the pictures on hand haha
  16. I have opened up the LCS one time, and to my surprise there was no leaks or crystals forming yet. Its quiet too so that aspect of the Mac is fine in my opinion
  17. In mid 2020, I managed to purchase a HUGE Apple device joblot, which contained many older model MacBooks, iBooks, PowerMacs and a few iMacs (One iMac Pro!) and a couple of iPads. This was an excellent purchase, especially for £250, I'm not joking. The owner was nice and all and agreed to take down the price to £200. This was the best deal of the year for me. Anyways, in the joblot was a PowerMac G5. Now, I'm no expert on PowerMacs but I had a suspicion that this may have been the liquid cooled variant due to the odd power connector shape. Turns out, I was right and it turned out to be the PowerMac G5 Quad 2.5GHz. I've had quite a bit of fun with it throughout the 2 years, and even took it to a local retro tech nerdy meetup thing. But now, my time with it has ended and I'd like to let someone else mess around with this cool machine. Can anyone suggest a price for this lovely beast? I did extensive eBay searching and sadly didn't find a single one on the UK eBay page.
  18. That is something I did consider, and I definitely will try that out at some point, but I'll first enjoy the ChromeOS experience without google play for now. I can seem to live without it now that I customised it to my liking some more
  19. The title pretty much sums up my question. I had recently acquired a free Acer C720 Chromebook, which has now been updated to the latest OS it can handle: Chrome OS 76.0.3809.136. I am wondering, is it possible to get the play store running on this little thing? Not a big deal if I can't, but this machine is just so nice and compact and I have kind of become attached to it throughout my short ownership of it.
  20. Welp... I sold my car. Farewell my trusty 2014 Volvo V40. A colleague from work was looking for a car, but I hadn't used mine in quite a few months, so I told him he can buy mine off me if he wants, and he did. Well now I have a few extra pound to spend on something (idk what yet)

     

    And also picked up a Acer Chromebook C720 for free on Facebook Marketplace a few days ago. Everything works fine and well, apart from the display panel which has been shattered. It has a US keyboard, but I can get used to that, and a brand new display panel is on its way! 

  21. I've found an Android 8 build which was the last 8 build before 9 rolled out for the device. Unfortunately, it didn't work. I got an error on the phone which said: sw rev check fail bootloader device 10 binary 1. Has the bootloader updated itself? And also, would a custom recovery like TWRP make a difference?
  22. I've accquired a Samsung J2 Pure from a friend which permanently moved from the US to the UK and gave me his old phone which wasn't needed here. When I looked at the specs this phone looks identical to the J2 Core, however the J2 Pure can upgrade up to Android 9 and has Knox. Is it possible to downgrade Android 9 with OneUI 1.5 to Android 8 with Samsung Experience? This phone feels really slugish on 9 and I always loved the Samsung Experience UI. The phone is currently running Android 9 (J260AZTUSBBUA1) and has the January 1 2021 security patch. Any help is appreciated, I am responsible for any damages that may occur to the damage, and I don't really care much about it since all it will do is be my backup phone (Yes, its unlocked from Cricket)
  23. I purchased 10 "2GB" memory sticks from my local hardware shop. I installed ChipGenius on my computer and it says the actual NAND chip is a "Micron - 1CE/Single Channel [MLC] 4GB" but Windows only reads the USB stick as 2GB. Is there a way to make it use the full 4GB? (I know it wont be exactly 4GB but anything would be better than only ~1.87GB)
  24. Okay, so I downloaded the ISO and it booted. But it is stuck at 800x600 on the PC but it works perfectly on my ThinkPad. Is this some driver issue perhaps? And I'm connected via DVI on the PC
  25. I used Rufus, then I also tried your suggestion. But still nothing
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