TristanD79

You can always double-check the drive's health with a tool like Kingston SSD Manager or CrystalDiskInfo to make sure it's okay. (Assuming you're running Windows.)

While rendering in Blender to one of my drives it stopped after a while, and I noticed that it was due to the drive vanishing. So I restarted my PC and now it's back, and appears to be fine, and lets me render to it still.
 
There is now a beeping noise coming from my pc whenever a render completes a frame (I've stopped rendering to the drive currently as to not cause any unwanted damage), not sure if this was there before, but I certainly didn't notice it. It could be a drive sound? I'm unsure.
 
I have read that drives can disconnect due to a bad cable, and that they can beep due to insufficient power as they get older. Unsure if that is the problem mind
 
Any advice would be appreciated
 
And the drive in question is Kingston SA400S37240G that I think was bought in 2018
 
Update: I've resunk the cables into the SSD and now it appears to be not beeping, so I assume all this was caused by a cable coming lose
Update 2: Lost connection to the drive again

for blender etc consider AMD. for gaming, intel leads a bit

Essentially what maintenance should I be doing with my PC?

IMGs are no more harmful than an executable, you're basically downloading a virtual CD.
 
Download official Office installers from https://setup.office.com/?ms.officeurl=setup.

Yea you can just upgrade in the os and it will work. It offically ended, but it still works, I Have been doing this dozens of times recently without issue.

For Basic and Home versions of windows 7 you upgrade to Windows 10 Home, for Professional and Ultimate versions you get Windows 10 Pro.

-- Thread Moved to Windows --

You should get the same version you had before upgrading. Ideally use an app like Macrium Free to image your Win7 disk, then upgrade your current Win7 install to Windows 10, once the upgraded install has activated you will then have a digital license for Win10 on that PC. You can then clean install Win10 if you want.

Yes, you would upgrade to Win 10 Pro.

Issue solved by disabling HDR mode

Thinking in buying in about 2 to 3 years from now for a future build that might do (thinking too far ahead I know) but it was a question that was keeping me up all night ahah

what are you still using that is firewire.

I'd recommend 16 GB of RAM and the lastest Ryzen 7 CPU. I have a HP laptop with a i5 7200U CPU and 8 GB and it doesn't take much to bog this dual core/4t down. If it is working on another task in the background, my mouse starts becoming laggy because the CPU is maxed out.

I got mine at retailer in Germany. I had troubles finding it on the official pages as well as HP doesn't really show you all the available configurations on their main page.

my mother and father use it. BEst windows laptop so far. bright. great collor accuracy. touchscreen. etc. it just perfect.

The HP x360 envy (https://store.hp.com/us/en/pdp/hp-envy-laptop-13t-ba000-18j46av-1) is a really good laptop as an suggestion, it includes a 10th gen i7 processor with a Ge-force mx 250 for any GPU uses. The price is €900 which is high above your limit but if you found it in any Computer store I'm pretty sure you'll get it for around €800. Of-course don't forget, It does have 16gb ram
 

Don't get an HP Spectre X360 at least. The model I had was a bl112dx with a i7-8550U and 16GB RAM. I've had a bad experience with mine and recently had to return it after barely using it for 2 years.
Ever since I had it for 2 years, the fans run loud, there was a coil whine coming from the CPU, ran hot. Screen had a flickering issue and got it replaced by Best Buy Geek Squad as the warranty was expiring soon. Got it back a month after repair and 3" side of the screen was dark and screen blacked out like crazy, went back for another month out of using it, there was another defect with the screen (white spot). Went back with it the next day and they gave me my money back as store credit. I'll never buy another HP product again as it seems their QC has gone down for years. 

the HP x360 Envy with the ryzen 7 4700U with 16gb of ram works like a charm for me.
The build quality is nice, it has a touch display and I got it for less than 900€ with a small discount.  

Hey there. Haven't played Shinobido: Way of the Ninja, but got the impression that it's a combat-oriented game with stealth mechanics from some screenshots.
 
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice has already been mentioned.
 
Would also suggest Aragami. Protagonist is a ninja-like assassin with shadowy powers. Gameplay is stealth-based, with a heavy emphasis on quiet assassinations. Art style is dramatically different than Shinobido and Sekiro, if that matters to you. I believe it uses cel shading? Solid game, IMO. Have a look-see at some trailers and see if it interests you?

Probably better playing it on your PS2 then. PCSX2 is a mess. It's nowhere near as good as even the CEMU Wii-U emulator was three years ago when I first played Zelda Breath of the Wild on it, much less where CEMU is now.  And it's nowhere close to the gold standard emulator, Dolphin for Wii and Gamecube.
 
If you're looking for a killer ninja game on PC, check Sekiro Shadows Die Twice. It's pretty easy to run too, anything RX 570 or better on the gpu side can run 1080p60.
 
 
Nioh is pretty good too, though I think Sekiro is better. Nioh is a little harder to run. I couldn't get a locked 60 fps on my GTX 970 back when that was what I was running, and that's pretty much on par with the RX 570. Haven't tried it since replacing the 970 with a GTX 1660 Super though.
 
 

Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun

Well I've got my 1060 6GB and I've swapped it back in and its been a month of smooth sailing, as opposed to the week of carnage with the 5700 XT so I assume that correlation and causation are one and the same in this case.

How do you know this? A quick google search suggest strongly otherwise. 
https://www.digitaltrends.com/dtdeals/best-amazon-prime-day-deals/#:~:text=Once expected to run from,that it could happen as
 
However to answer your question:
It depends on the retailer. I dont know if UK retailers will do that, but the large US companies have done so in the past. 

Prime Day rarely has good hardware deals. We'll probably see something like a $150 R5 3600 or a $100 1TB MX500, but that's usually the extent of it.