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I have a spare PC, a Ryzen 5900 that shipped with one of those Wraith coolers, set up in my dining room. Main roommate and emergency backup couch roommate both appreciate having a big boy computer around. Most of my house has Hue color LEDs or other app controlled lighting of some sort or other...

It looks like I'm not going to get my R7 until December. We're using a 12MP Lumix as a second body right now. It's like stepping back to the stone age with that thing.

I use Intel P4500s for continuous backup and database dumps. They are TLC drives that top out at around 3GB/sec writes but they're affordable and use a convenient 2.5" form factor. I'm sure I have at least a few dozen in service. They've all been extremely well behaved.

I have a 3700X that has an actual bad physical core, something I've never seen before. I've been messaging AMD back and forth about it for a little while now. It's the second one of that CPU in particular I've had go bad somehow, where I've historically found bad CPUs to be a once every five...

Many of my friends have two phones. One for their actual, real lives and a second one for a more visible and public persona. The thing I will say is this: If there are aspects of your life that need to be segregated, it is helpful that your devices be distinct from one another. You may also...

My Element had a defect that my mechanic had never seen before. A tiny sheath that sits along the axel of my car apparently traps water and, given that I live in the midwest, road salt. My axel actually rusted clean through at that point and broke while I was at speed. I had no idea what had...

Here's an article from the MIT Technology Review about the transperson who is most directly responsible for the adoption of nonbinary-representative emoji.

You can remove the encryption if you'd like. It only takes a few minutes to decrypt a whole SSD. Whole drive encryption used to be a feature only in the more expensive versions of Windows, so I was surprised to see it on machines running Windows Home edition. The question of what happens with...

There's an issue now with Windows 11 that can prevent systems from booting under some circumstances. When installed on a new PC, Windows 11, even Home edition, now encrypts drives by default. Assuming the user can remember their Microsoft Account info, they can sign in to their account on...

Final observation on the X1 Extreme? An RTX 3050TI mobile is the fastest mobile graphics I've had in a laptop but it does almost nothing for any of my content creation software; I think Topaz Denoise and Sharpen are faster on the CPU than the GPU, or else they aren't using the GPU even when I...

At home on my big computer I have one Dell Ultrasharp 4k display, one QHD (2560x1440), both 32", and one AOC 32" QHD screen. AOC and Asus usually offer very good value for the money, and most of the other monitors around my place are 22" Asus FHD IPS panels. I probably have six or seven of them...

Shady Amazon reseller seems to have done me right. The warranty from Lenovo started July 29th 2022. This system wasn't sitting around in a warehouse anywhere, apparently. I wish I'd done this instead of waiting six entire months for Lenovo to not ship me one. Six screws get the bottom off an X1...

Warp definitely worked with standard SCSI and ATAPI drives. I can't speak to what you're using right now, but I IIRC OS/2 was the first OS I installed off a CD-ROM. Maybe your could copy your OS install media to a secondary drive and try installing from that?

If I have to work on a spreadsheet (note: this is not something I do), it can wait for a computer with a full keyboard. I'd RATHER have a 14" screen than 15", but I the thing I just bought is actually closer to 16", just to get the rest of the specs I need. I will say that I have USB3 to...

Also, my order for an extremely backordered Thinkpad X1 Extreme was canceled on July 1, which Lenovo didn't bother to tell me. I only just took the time to look today after seeing the post I made about it in February. It also didn't put me on a list to get an X1 Gen 5 model, and at this point I...

It's not unusual for me to be working simultaneously in DaVinci Resolve and editing photos. Resolve uses a GPU more or less continuously. Capture One by itself doesn't do THAT much with a GPU, but if I turn things over to Topaz for denoise or sharpening, it's ~4 seconds to process an image with...

OS/2 4.0 wasn't terrible. I liked it at the time but I actually got my first Microsoft certification on NT 3.51 and I can just tell you that yes, it was kind of terrible and crashy. Early NT was extremely picky about what drivers would work since it supporting it often wasn't considered a...

I want to see where the 4060 lands in the overall ranking, but I'm pretty sure it'll wind up being one or the other. I'm still thinking I might do better with two less expensive cards rather than one big one.

It's exactly the thing LM was describing and actually almost exactly the reasoning as well. New Apple stuff in particular just doesn't consider storage at all. I set up a NextCloud system and run that for people I know just to give them a place to dump their "work" photos. Turns out not many...

Numpads on laptop keyboards are an abomination. If my hands are off-center from the screen, that's going to do nothing but piss me off. I also hate absolutely enormous touchpads, but they just keep getting bigger and bigger on everything for no reason I can excuse. Acer has ALWAYS sold poorly...

I've spent about a week with some Acer Aspire 5s. These are 12th gen i7s with 8GB of soldered in RAM but also a DIMM slot and both 2.5" and nVME. The 15.6" screen is nice and bright and that's the only positive thing I can say about this system. What's wrong? The AC adapter just... falls out...

Long, boring CSB: My big fancy going-away-to-college PC was a dual 486/50 workstation system. It had come from my father's office, but he made me buy it off him. I remember that it had a Zeos motherboard (about like getting a Supermicro board in the current day; exotic but available) and it'd...

An acquaintance of mine has one of the 500 most popular accounts on Onlyfans. She's making low seven figures per year from adult modeling. The library of work she's done in the last three year is actually her personal fortune. I got involved in her operation because she was doing all her...

Possibly. I'm sure I've heard Metallica a bunch of times but the reason I know who they are is that they're the dipshits that killed music sharing. I didn't even actually get to do any of it at the time. They just started the vortex of suck that led to $1/track downloads and $15/month streaming...

Drobo devices are slow but some of the storage setups I've seen from content creator types really make me shake my head.

Gaming is an expensive hobby, but very often the kids the grew up on Playstations and Xboxes move to PCs for their gaming because there have always been options available for PCs that the consoles never had, like full mod support, cheats or community support for titles that got dropped by a...

On a toes-related note: My roommate secured a Media pass for me at Chicago's Lollapalooza festival, which happened over the past weekend. She officially knows the right people. I have another pass for the Smokeout (Country Music) festival this weekend. Neither of these things are really up my...

That is because hardware companies do marketing and make people think they need the bestest ever new thing, but we've been through this cycle now for at least a couple generations. At this point, all PC gaming is limited by what consoles can do, and consoles expect to be hooked up to less than...

We shoot very different sorts of subjects. Manually metering for constantly changing lights at an event isn't an option, but denoising and masking regions for better exposure, lifting shadows etc certainly are. The last time I was able to go out and really shoot, before my toes were broken, I...

When you say M.2 without specifying, I am assuming you're talking about B-keyed drives, in which case they are 100% just SATA drives, whether they're in an M.2 port or a SATA one. If you have M-keyed drives, those are the PCIe ones that have vastly higher read speeds. In practical terms, the...

You have to understand that init scripts have been around for a LONG time, and actual replacements for low-level stuff in the UNIX world happen very, very seldom. The last absolutely huge change I remember was the switch from a.out binaries (which didn't deal well with new-in-the-mid-90s systems...

The thing that I emphasize to people who talk to me about getting a new PC is that almost no one really needs a computer with top-end parts. CPUs and GPUs that cost over $300 new will almost certainly be wasted on someone who is going to play games at 1080P. Even someone with 4k screens who...

Usually I'm on board for whatever the current desktop Windows version might be. I lived with Vista and 8. My current policy on Windows 11 is that it needs too many little fixes to make it tolerable on any computer I care about. Yes, I can fix the taskbar with a third party version, or fix the...

I definitely remember ME as a crashy POS. Everything based on 9x was bad enough that the standard practice was just to copy the OS files to the PC so the user could painlessly reinstall. I also vaguely remember supplying a boot floppy for ME users just in case they needed more DOS than they...

I can't think of a single thing that ME did better than 98SE. I think it was the OS that moved a lot of people to Windows 2000. 2000 itself is still shockingly functional other than no longer having access to an up to date web browser. I'm using a native Linux desktop today for the first time...

Here's a funny new one for me: Windows 11 Pro client keeps invoking a UAC prompt for no reason I can find. It's a trusted .EXE with a valid hash. The "Run this program as Administrator" bit isn't set anywhere I can find. The user is already an admin on the PC in question. The Registry settings...

$150 is more or less my sweet spot for drive purchases. I've seen 14TB SAS system pulls for not much more than that, so we're getting there.

There's no comparison. Drobos are slow, especially if you're using them in their special RAID mode. Almost any other way someone could get a RAID5-like setup will get something that reads and writes faster. The special sauce they add is that users can supposedly mix and match drives of different...

Yes, but you can just use Crashplan Small Business instead. That's appropriate for my needs anyway, but people who were on individual plans were migrated over and just asked to pay a little more for it if they were on a family plan.

If you have seldom-accessed data like media files, there's no reason to look at SSDs anyway. Most of your inexpensive high capacity drives are going to be crummy QLC NAND, and anything that isn't that as of this writing is probably an expensive Enterprise-class model. Intel D3s or something. I...

Drobo filed for Chapter 11 this week. I have some Drobo hardware and it's been fine-ish. No complaints in particular but I've always liked Synology better for all the same stuff.

I just ran in to a problem with an MS account earlier in the week. User wanted to create a new account on her personal laptop. It wouldn't let them because her kid tied her cell phone number to an Xbox account a dozen years before. There's no way for her to remove it. Her kid would have to do...

I've been advocating for Google as an SMB solution all along. Google Docs and Sheets are sane and need virtually no management. Gmail, if used as a web application, is perfectly fine, although there can be weirdness if you're using a third party client. I've found EMclient to be a solid full...

Microsoft is making it harder and harder to have fully local Windows. I disable Onedrive with a registry hack that's integrated into my installation .wim files. I think it's still installed, but Windows no longer tries to use it. No customer I deal with can afford to move to Azure, and MS...

As I've said repeatedly, I do most of my processing with Capture One. My roommate is an Adobe person. The newest version of Lightroom does something that's flat out amazing, though. It has special magic now that can replicate masks in different photos. It's not dumb; if she masks someone's hair...

There's still Pentax!

I can verify that Rufus 3.19 will skip all the hardware checks, most of the OOBE BS and MS Account creation for a bootable Windows 11 image as long as the PC in question isn't connected to a network. My new pet peeve in life is that current releases of Office now require registration by an...

Haiku is today what was once called BeOS and still looks to be in active development. Looks like they built a compatibility layer to use a lot of bits of FreeBSD. The hardware requirements are fairly minimal (Pentium 2 with 384MB RAM) but not quite the realm of the ancient Ambra 486.

How does one get an employee discount from B&H?

Back in the day before I started college, I was running OS/2 on a high end 486. That might be another interesting project to go along with your collection of legacy hardware.