Recent content by Mercutio

The 5060Ti more than doubled my boot time versus either Intel or AMD. I'm talking about a 9950X with a Crucial PCIe 5 boot drive. This is not a computer that should take nearly an entire minute to get to a login prompt. I think it's all BIOS boot time given how long my system sits with no...

I got somewhere with a $15 voice command capable IR transmitter since the only thing I need is for the AVR and TV to toggle on, but it's a little janky and maybe 20% of the time it doesn't turn one or the other device on when I tell it to. My LG TV doesn't have a physical power button either...

I install ad blocking on everything I touch. I don't care. Advertising is a malware vector and must be treated as hostile.

They're very useful for people with lame mobile devices or who are too lazy to set up ad blocking on their devices. I've set them up before and I appreciate having them on devices I can't control. It's easy enough to set up special rules to prevent users from visiting problematic sites if for...

I had to make a trip to Micro Center this morning for a couple CPUs and as luck would have it, I was able to get a Gigabyte 16GB 5060Ti at MSRP. There were a half dozen 5070s and scads of 8GB 5060 Tis, but there was only one other 5060Ti 16GB, an Asus factory overclocked model for $130 more than...

The Fractal Define and Cooler Master Nwhatever have been my go-to options for modest builds, but it's hard for me to justify $150 for a case on a $700 PC. Mesh cases are alright for gamers, but they also make for computers that are louder than I'd care to deal with.

I did actually go digging around on the Silverstone web site, where I found this monster. I have a pair of Norco 3U 24 bay chassis and when I bought those, they were under $400 apiece. $1100 is a bit much. I do actually like the RM45-360 as a general purpose case, but 4U is a lot of chassis...

You know they're going to want $250 for that thing. There were some great looking beige cases back in the day but no, they went deliberately hideous.

I actually managed to use all 96GB + 96GB swap on my workstation today by accidentally calling ImageMagick on on about 20M files. Surprisingly enough, it's still running and responding over an RDP session. It just took a REAL long time to open another shell session so I could kill the script.

I appreciate having the differing failure models. Every once in a while I see an SSD switch over to read-only mode but most of the drives that die just stop being drives. At least hard drives usually give some warning before they completely crap out.

For future reference, if you ever need to delete and/or recreate your recovery partition on a Windows system, you have to work from diskpart.exe rather than Disk Management. You have to do the following: reagentc /disable (tells Windows to stop using the recovery partition) Diskpart List Disk...

I put a 3.5" drive in every bigger-than-ITX desktop I assemble. Usually it's just a little guy. It's easy enough to add $35 to the cost of a system for a 2TB spinny drive, just to keep backups on hand for an end user. Some people do have bulk storage needs aside from giant media collections; my...

I've been looking at Computex coverage of new chassis designs and dear god I hate everything I see. Seems like 90% of new designs are clear on at least two sides and either overblown full tower height or ITX only. Zero room for mechanical drives. I do like the trend of adding wood accents...

I can't tell if you're too young for your dad to be having these problems or if I've been too lucky to have never had them.

My quasi-partner's new place has 5Gbit synchronous fiber according to their bill but the ONT the ISP provided only has 1Gbit ports on it. Nobody else she's living with bothered to check. Has anyone else finished Andor yet? If not, budget some time to sit quietly in the dark with your thoughts...