Maat Mons

Thanks for the replies! I’ll ask if she’s willing to slightly bump up the size to 14”, but she’s already said that 15” is too big, so it’s far from certain. Looking at that Best Buy link and filtering down to 13.5” and below leaves 2 options. Lenovo Yoga 6 13.3" with Ryzen 5 7530U Samsung Galaxy Book2 13.3" with Intel 12th Gen Core i5 That second one doesn’t have the HDMI port she wants, but the first one looks good.

My sister asked me what laptop she should buy. She said it should be faster than her old one, but almost anything would be. Her old one is so old it has a mechanical hard drive. It also has only 4 GB of RAM, which is soldered on, so no upgrading is possible, which was something she’d previously asked me about. I just kind of figured these forums would have a Laptop Buying Guide, and I could copy/paste the lower end of the thin and light section, but no dice, I guess. Performance-wise, she just uses it for word processing, emails, and browsing the web, so it doesn’t have to be high-end, but I’m not really sure how cheap she can expect to go before she’d risk getting something shoddy. She’s asked to keep it under $700 USD, but said cheaper would be better. The only things I think would be must-haves on the hardware side are things that I assume are standard in all laptops now, an SSD and 8 GB of RAM. Oh, and she’s not going Apple, she hates Apple products. She’s asked for it to be about the same size as her old one, which I think is about 12”. She prefers to have a touch screen and would also like if it can fold over to act as a tablet. Though she’s said she’s not married to those last two things. I tried asking her about other things, to see if she cares about them. About all she showed interest in is having a webcam, which must be on top of the screen, not below it, and having an HDMI out port. Without much to narrow things down, I considered just Googling lists of “10 Best Ultraportable Laptops,” but I’m worried any site I put my trust in might have some undisclosed financial relationship with a laptop manufacturer. Then again, I guess you guys could be undercover operatives too… Addendum: Her old one has kind of chonky bezels, so maybeup to a 13.5" display would be fine? Assuming slender bezels. Is there anything in particular wrong with this one? I forgot to mention, she specifically said "no Chromebook." Other than that, still open to any and all suggestions.

Thanks for the replies so far! I’ve spent a bit of time looking at cases since I first posted. I’m kind of digging the Cooler Master NR200P. But it only has 155mm of clearance for the CPU cooler, according to the specs. That would rule out the Noctua NH-D15. According to it’s specs, that requires 165mm of clearance. And according to some guy on the internet, messing with the fans only gets it down to 160mm. Would a Noctua NH-D12L be good enough for silent running? Alternately, does anyone know of a good SFF case that can fit the NH-D15? That The Sliger S620 is supposed to be able to fit it. Does anyone have any opinions on that case? I guess I could do a mid-tower if I had to. So, Alizera says an i3-12100, and 8tg says something T-series. Should I combine those suggestions and go for an i3-12100T? I don’t plan to put in an optical drive. The Fractal Pop Mini does say it’s big enough to hold the NH-D15. But even the Pop Mini Air is a little bigger than I was hoping for, with a little less ventilation than I was hoping for. The ASRock DeskMini x300 is really nice and small, but I’m leaning towards an over-sized cooler, so I think I can’t go quite that small. I was actually thinking of 16GB of RAM. I’ve encountered family members’ systems wanting more than 8GB even without all that much going on. My recollection of the room she keeps her computer in is a temperature range I would estimate to be in the 80s Fahrenheit during summer days. Asking for something that would stay quiet at 90+ was to leave myself plenty of margin for error, since I’m not very good at putting numbers to temperatures (or distances). If you want, I’ll ask her for her estimate of the room’s summer temperatures. If she says it doesn’t go above 90, I’ll feel much more comfortable with the estimate, and retract my request for something that will stay quiet into the 90s.

Budget (including currency): I don't know, less than $1,000 USD, probably? She'd likely prefer closer to $500 USD. Country: USA. (USA! USA!) Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Pretty much just internet, email, and word-processing. Other details: Her current computer is from 2014, and wasn't anywhere near top-of-the-line then. My mom hates being able to hear her computer. Actually, that’s not true. She thinks being able to hear her computer means something is terribly wrong. If she hears the fans running, she’ll turn it off, which she believes is protecting it from damaging itself. She keeps her computer on the third floor, which she deliberately doesn’t allow to be air-conditioned. She closes the vents in the room, and the door leading upstairs. It gets pretty warm up there. I’m not sure how warm exactly, but for the sake of argument, let’s imagine it gets into the 90s (Fahrenheit). How do I design a computer that can sit in a 90+ degree room and not need to run the fans at all, at least when not being pushed very hard? Oh, and I’m definitely not doing water-cooling. Thanks for any advice!

Odd, I only searched Newegg for drives our tier list said were TLC. I guess I wound up on pages for the wrong models in same cases, because the Team Group T-FORCE CARDEA Z44Q and Sabrent Rocket Q are both QLC. Maybe I should have picked up on that from the names. I can’t find where the MSI SPATIUM M470 says what kind of NAND it uses. It has 2 GB of DDR4 cache, and it supports PCIe Gen 4. $191 The Seagate Firecuda 520 uses TLC. I can’t find anything about its cache. It supports PCIe Gen 4. $180 The SAMSUNG 970 EVO PLUS uses TLC. It has 1 GB of DDR4 cache, and it supports PCIe Gen3. $190 I’ve discovered my laptop is only capable of handling PCIe Gen 3, so I guess Gen 4 is no longer a selling point. I’m not familiar with Newmaxx. I took a look at it. Mostly, all I managed to find there were links to reviews on other sites. Is that what I was looking for? Or is it something else?

I need it to be 80mm long, no more, no less. The laptop only has one spot for the standoff. I’m aiming for 2TB, since my current 1TB SSD is getting pretty full. I was hoping to keep it under 200 USD, but I could maybe go a little over that if it makes for a big jump in performance. I looked through the Newegg pricing of as many S- and A-tier entries from our list as I could find. These ones appealed to me. MSI SPATIUM M470 Seagate Firecuda 520 Team Group T-FORCE CARDEA Z44Q I also looked through the Newegg pricing for as many of the underlined B-tier entries as I could find. They didn’t seem all that much cheaper, but these are the ones that appealed to me. Sabrent Rocket Q SAMSUNG 970 EVO PLUS I’m leaning towards the Firecuda, just for being the cheapest thing on the A-tier list.

As I said before, I keep getting "Dump file creation failed due to error during dump creation." And I usually don't see any program cited by the blue screen itself. As I also said before, one time a blue screen did cite a program, and it was amdppm.sys. I didn't have the courage to try fiddling around in the registry like some internet site said I should. But the internet had lead me to believe this program was part of my onboard AMD graphics, so I tried just disabling those. This allowed me to play multiple levels of Creeper World without crashing, so I was starting to think my problem might be fixed. But then, during a particularly long level, the system blue-screened. Nevertheless, I decided to give things some time, and see if there was any effect on my non-gaming crashes. A few nights back, the system experienced an unexpected shutdown. And today, the screen went black while I was watching a YouTube video, and I couldn't do anything except restart. So I guess the problem's still there. Also, don't know if this is related, but for the last little while, videos have been tending to get out-of-sync with their audio, and I've occasionally gotten weird clicking/snapping noises in the audio. Looking around more, some things are saying amdppm.sys is for managing power states, not onboard graphics. I've also found some things suggesting IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL could be a power issue too. Is there anything I can do to follow up on that possibility? Would it help to put the system into a less power-hungry mode? Eluktronics pre-installed some software that switches between a few presets that it doesn't really explain. I've been running constantly on the highest one. Is it worth trying the second-highest one, to see if things are less crash-prone?

When I run File Signature Verification Tool, it says: But when I run Driver Verifier Manager, it says: Also, the first time I ran it, it said two of my drivers were for older versions of Windows. But when I ran it again to get the file names to post here, it said there were no drivers for older versions of Windows. Usually, the BSoD error doesn't cite any program as being what caused the problem. One time, it did list a program, and it was amdppm.sys. Advice I've found online for dealing with amdppm.sys says to tinker with the registry. Some people said it fixed things for them, but others said it made things worse. Should I try it?

Sorry for the delay in answering. I wasn't eager to deliberately blue-screen my computer to verify that the problem is still there. After I read your post, I updated my AMD drivers. Creeper World still crashes my computer at about the 15 minute mark. I can't say for sure that's the same problem as my YouTube-related crashes, but those aren't reliable enough that I can make them happen for a test. I haven't had YouTube blue-screen me in the last few days, but it's not unusual to go that long. I can't find any updated BIOS on the Eluktronics website. And the BIOS doesn't have a built-in update feature. If it's out of date, I'm not sure where else to find up-to-date versions. Edit: I got another crash while watching a YouTube video. So the updated AMD drivers didn't fix it.

Perfmon Report Minidumps Windows 10 Home (original OEM installation) AMD Ryzen 7 4800H with Radeon Graphics 2.90 GHz NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Eluktronics RP-15 Laptop I’ve updated all the drivers. I’ve run System File Checker. I can’t make heads or tails of the contents of Event Viewer. Most of the BSoDs come when I’m watching YouTube videos, but that might just be because I’m constantly watching YouTube videos. Most games aren’t a problem, but playing Creeper World Anniversary Edition or Creeper World 2 Anniversary Edition is a fast way to get a blue screen. When I originally got this laptop, it had a tendency to stop working when I took it anywhere. But I haven’t had that issue since I reseated the RAM and moved the NVMe SSD to the other slot. I don’t know which of those things is what fixed it. I did them both at the same time.

I'd never heard of vortex tubes before, but they're super cool. Now I kind of want to try feeding one with a wind funnel instead of an air compressor. See how much heating or cooling we can get from the wind. I mean, I know I could just power a heat pump with a wind turbine, but what fun would that be?

It's still happening. Dump Files.zip Perfmon Report.zip The laptop is an Eluktronics RP-15. But not the one you'll see if you go to their website. It's an older model with a 2060 instead of a 3060. There are some other differences between the models too. But that's the big one. Oh, and I didn't mention it before. But there are sometimes random-seeming bluescreens. Usually when playing a game or watching YouTube. One time it happened at the exact moment I connected it with a physical ethernet cable.

We were considering running the whole thing at 5 Volts. This was mostly because it needs a way to program various patterns of lights. And connecting it to a computer via USB seems a lot easier than add wifi or Bluetooth capability, or trying to put buttons/a screen on the thing and have people program it that way. So we were figuring on having a USB port, and making that also the way we charge the battery, and we said to ourselves "USB is 5 Volts, why not make all the internals 5 Volts too?" But sure, I guess we could be real engineers and build based on efficiency instead of convenience. Down-converting DC voltage isn't that hard anyway. I might suggest to the group that we keep the actual internal battery small, and allow it to be connected to external battery banks for extended life. The internal battery would keep it going when you're moving things around the lab, or when you're switching power banks. And then you could pick how chonky a battery pack you connect it to based on how long you're going to leave it. Or maybe just plug it into the wall with a good USB power adapter. Something that can do at least 3.25 Amps, because that's what I calculate all the LEDs and ICs together can pull in the worst case. Man, this project feels like a mess sometimes. This is an actual thing one of the professors wants built for the lab. I signed on for this project because I had to do something, and this sounded easy. Only after the decision was locked in did I find out that a team had tried to build this same thing last year, and failed. Also, I have it on good authority that none of the other groups have to work with anything nearly as tiny and fiddle as our stuff. On the subject of recovering light that doesn't get absorbed by the specimens, I'd rather try to reflect it back for another chance at absorption. I was figuring each of the depressions for the wells could be white, or maybe even shiny. But we're not supposed to let light bleed through from one to the next too much. Maybe a white coating over black plastic? I'm a little worried about making the lid bounce light back. There's going to be a bit of a gap, and we don't want light that bounces off the lid to wind up in a different well than it started in. Maybe the inside of the lid could be a retroreflector? Send that light right back where it came from.

Since we're talking about the power supply, I should probably mention, this thing has to run on batteries. Actually, it's supposed to run for 48 hours on batteries. But I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen. At least, not with all the lights continuously on for that whole time. Right now, we're running all the LEDs at 5 mA, except the UV LEDs, which run at 10 mA. Our current LEDs are: 150044M155260 (80mcd Red, 180mcd Green, 50mcd Blue @ 5mA) IN-S63AT5G (350mcd @ 5mA) SM1206UV-395-IL (0.65mW @ 20 mA) [but we'll be running it at 10mA, so 0.375mW?] Even though those lights strike me as feeble, if we actually have to run all of them continuously for 48 hours, that 128,240 mAhs. That's not a small battery.

I'll pull out my laptop, power it on, and be faced with the BIOS. Then, no matter what I do, reset and exit, load optimized defaults, save and exit, I just wind up back at this same screen again. This can go on for hours. But just as mysteriously as the problem arises, it also vanishes. For some reason, the issue almost never crops up when I'm at home. And it almost always crops up when I'm out of the house.