Tarun10

Like the other posts say, it's a beta so it'll be unstable. Considering you need MS Teams, you're probably using it for work or school, so I'd recommend not installing it.

Yes, get a Blue or a Barracuda, probably whichever is cheaper or is on sale, and make backups. Drives will fail, sometimes when you least expect them to, so it's good to have at least one backup that you update frequently.

Yeah but it has a lot of bugs right now so hopefully they get fixed soon. Thanks anyways!

I completely second this, Thunderbolt is a really important feature if you think you'll need it and Intel's 11th gen processors aren't too bad. I'd also look on notebookcheck.net for detailed reviews that cover battery life, cooling, upgradeability, etc.

Yeah, you might be better off getting an iPad and saving for a better laptop that's not a 2 in 1. Most of the cheaper ones have terrible cooling, and the Envy in particular might give you problems with the hinge after a year or two particularly if you switch modes frequently. Plus, they're not really that portable so tablet mode is not so ergonomic. And hopefully, we'll get even more efficient Mobile Chips from AMD soon so you don't need to compromise on battery life.

I've already tried an Ubuntu dual boot on my laptop and while it was very easy to install and clean, it was a bit of a hassle booting back and forth because I use MS Teams for school. However, I'd still like to mess around with distros for fun. Any recommendations for a more advanced distro that is more customizable or involves more terminal commands? Anything that will fit on a 50GB partition should be fine.

Hmm thanks for that info. I'm stuck with a 500 GB one for now and I might just try to mess around with distros for the fun of it but I switch between school and other stuff way too often for dual boot to make sense.

Ah, I use a laptop and I was trying out different Linux distros and they were so much better than Windows but my school uses Teams now so I'm stuck with Windows.

It's very simple. You can go to this link and click on Download tool now. Then you just need a 8GB or larger USB Drive to boot your new computer from. Just follow the instructions on the tool and you will have the USB ready. When your PC is built, you just need to connect the USB, boot from it, then follow setup instructions. Download Windows 10 (microsoft.com)

There are a few specific B series motherboards that have great power delivery and features. I'm not quite sure which model is currently the best value. Probably, a good idea to make a separate post in the motherboards section. Oh, also you can run Windows 10 for free, completely legally, with a download from Microsoft's own website. You just can't do any personalization.

Yes AMD is undoubtedly the best value right now. You save money on the motherboard and get most of the performance for gaming and better performance in other workloads. You can either go 3600 and later upload to Zen 3 down the line without a new motherboard. Or you can wait for 5600 to come back in stock. Also websites like versus.com only compare the specs directly and score the chip based on that. While these numbers can be compared to get an idea of the performance it's not direct apples to apples comparison in most cases. You're better sticking to extensive benchmarks and gamin

By upgrade path, he/she means that you can get a newer Ryzen CPU and it'll still be supported on the same motherboard. You might need to do a BIOS update but that's about it.

2R indicates these are dual rank memory.

As @DarkEnergysaid Windows will take care of optimization. Just make sure you don't have a lot of startup apps or background processes running when you don't need them.

This is a folder with some music. I changed some metadata (added tags) but then the name of the song was not showing up right in VLC so I undid my changes. Now, if I try to open that folder in any program the program slows down massively utilizing 90% of my CPU. I have tried deleting the folder but it's stuck at deleting the first file. I have tried this in command prompt as well. Anytime I open File Explorer, I think it tries to load the folder or something in the background so it comes to a halt. I think deleting this files by brute force might solve this issue. Any suggestions?