Search results

It's just like phones. The batteries are entirely internal now and we don't get a choice in how they're configured, unless we feel like pulling the bottom plate off.

If you encrypt the phone's storage before you factory reset it, anyone attempting to recover anything won't have the key to decrypt, so at best they'd get a bunch of garbage. The last email address I have for Coug is a yahoo.ca one that I doubt he's still using. I'm sure he's still out there...

https://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone/samsung-galaxy-a52-5g Mint is a T-mobile MVNO.

The Galaxy A52 is a mid-tier phone with band 71 support. They're $300 second-hand on Swappa and Ebay. Galaxy A5x have specs that exceed many other brands' flagships. They just don't have the super high end cameras or screens that the Galaxy Ses do.

I also have no affordable health care option. Indiana did everything it could to make sure that the ACA was implemented as poorly as possible, and I can't bring myself to pay $400/month for a health plan with a $15,000 deductible and no other benefits. I also work for a small business with no...

I know someone who has been diagnosed with Covid five different times now. She works at the pharmacy in a grocery store in Florida, where the culture of masking and social distancing is barely even a suggestion, even though she wears hers more or less constantly.

I've used bluetooth earbuds for years. I don't like the full wireless ones, but I usually have a pair of corded ones wrapped around my neck. The ones I'm using right now are SoundPeats Q35s, which I bought for AptX support that my previous Jaybird pair did not have. The SD card to Google...

MicroSD is a pretty big one. I like being able to swap the card out of my camera so I can put camera raw files on Google Photos.

For someone as willing to engage in retro-computing, there's a lot to be said for spending a solid amount of time at runlevel 3.

The A-series has screen, CPU and RAM that are all a step down from the S-series, but they do keep the SD slot and headphone jack, and they're expected to keep those features as part of the distinguishing characteristics of the line. The 18:9 or 21:9 form factor does seem to be the new standard...

A general purpose answer to this: ALWAYS tell the Windows installer you don't have connectivity during the setup process. Windows 11 Home does make users create a Microsoft account a few days after they've connected to a network, but if you say you don't have a connection, it will let the...

Does your notebook have something that overrides the power plan? Group policy settings, maybe? As far as the display not working in DOS/Firmware, I wouldn't expect either of those modes to have an operable second monitor, and the choice for which screen should be the "main" screen really comes...

Exactly what laptop are we talking about?

Seagate SMR drives seem to behave in RAIDz1. I use 4MB block sizes since all the data I'm copying is video, and relatively small 4-drive arrays (two 15TB arrays and two 18TB). Everything is fine, if not particularly fast. Writes are averaging about 75MB/sec/array. I've been feeding data into...

The prompt is at install time, before the screen that asks you to specify if you want to allow things like customized ads and location tracking.

If it had Windows 10 on it in the past, the license is transferrable. If it had a 7 or 8 license that was upgraded, the license will be registered as Windows 11 during the upgrade process. I've literally used license numbers I've found on stickers for PCs that were sitting at my local recycler...

I found out today that Windows 11 is not immune to the "Windows Store apps are fucked, so now not even the Start Menu works"-bug. It's been almost seven years now. How is this still a problem?

Happy "Hey, at least Chinese and Indian places are open"-Day!

I'm already a Never Steam person, to the point that I run an Android VM to play a game (Sentinels of the Multiverse) that has a very good PC release. I do use Steam to give away game keys and share a library of stuff I've accumulated over time with friends who use it, but GoG and Humble are...

If it has a Windows 10 license, it'll just activate. As long as there's no huge change in the storage controller, you can sort of whatever driver issues might exist if there are different devices.

If you still play PC games, Epic is doing a promotion where they apply a $10 off voucher to every game in your cart that costs more than $15 right now. I've never bought a game from Epic but that is certainly tempting, but I don't really know what its stance is toward DRM.

The R5 and R6 version 1.5 firmware update is significant. The R6 is now much, much better at shifting focus to a head when it can't find a face and torso when it can't find a head. That's true for people as well as animals. I found that it even worked on someone's gecko. This update also added...

I'm pretty sure Steelec is just the most insanely kitted out WinPE I've ever seen. The damned thing has OFFICE (2007, granted) in it.

Pins bent on the CPU side. I've never bent the pins on the motherboard side of an Intel board. I used a box cutter to bend everything back. A razor blade JUST fits between the rows of pins.

Dropped a 5900X. 45 minutes with a razor blade later, it did actually work again. One thing Intel got right is using the ball grid instead of the pin grid.

Czkawka is a multiplatform tool for finding and removing duplicate files. I tried it and thought it was really handy and it's relatively fast.

One teensy hitch that may surprise you, and I don't know if it's still true or not, but at one time Thinkpads with cloned drives didn't want to boot unless the cloned drive was in the primary drive position inside the PC. So my standard practice was to pull the original drive into a secondary...

There are the Toshiba nee HGST drives. I buy and de-shell a lot of Seagate external drives because I've historically had high demand for bulk storage, but I've honestly not had issues using them in storage arrays, at least not from Windows or my Drobo 8N. I *just* got the 64GB worth of DIMMs...

Why not use drives from a good brand?

I used to, but it got to the point where the local distributors weren't offering me pricing that was any better than retail for the quantities that I buy. It made a difference 20 years ago, but now I can almost always get the same deal without having to deal with them.

I had to buy parts from Newegg today for the first time in about eight years. Newegg has stock on Ryzen 3700s and I need six of them. The purchase experience was awful. Turns out that all six are being shipped from a different seller's inventory, but FROM a Newegg warehouse, and some but not all...

I completely hate Adobe, but holy crap the neural filters that have recently been added to Photoshop are neat. Stuff like "copy the makeup off a face and put it on a different face" or "make somebody's stupid face look like a normal, realistic smile" or "completely (re)color a photo." I know...

'Tis the season to buy stupid crap. I just ran across this nVMe to 5 port SATA adapter on Amazon. It features everyone's favorite JMicron bridge controller, but it's a potential solution for people trying to figure out how to cram some extra SATA ports on to a contemporary SFF build. Amazon...

During the pandemic I had to explain to my co-workers, who have actually all been using VMs for years on their individual laptops, that we don't in fact actually have 22 different physical computers sitting at the datacenter. It turned in to an all day meeting because they didn't know that's how...

... and on the other side of the spectrum, a Acer/Gateway (but really Tongfang) Ryzen r5 3450U, 8GB, 250GB nVME, 15" FHD IPS system that is selling at Walmart for $360. Got it my It's-complicated as a holiday gift, mostly because it's purple, her signature color. This is the worst keyboard and...

Actually I see that Kingston released the KC600 in mSATA in early 2021 as well. I'm surprised to see new mSATA products.

As far as I know mSATA drives from reputable vendors topped out at 500GB. I punted after my Thinkpad needed extensive repairs, too. The current offerings just aren't worth the money if I can't have storage in the same package. I'm currently playing with a Gigabyte Aero 15 but now that I have...

Kiwi for Gmail is just a web scrape of various Google Workspace tools, but I'm finding that I really like it since I do spend a lot of time switching specifically between Gmail, Google Drive and the various Google productivity apps. If you have a Google-centric work flow, it makes a lot of sense...

Here's a somewhat lengthy breakdown of M1 vs the high end of mainstream notebook CPUs. The long and short of it is that the M1 trades blows with both Intel and AMD throughout testing, but is unquestionably better on battery power or for carefully selected workloads like editing in Apple ProRes.

Handy's Mac is ALSO a $2000ish computer. There is an ARM native version of Windows but it's pretty awful given the lack of available binaries made to run on it. I think it's the same old story where you can run Office and store apps

After looking through pretty much all of Lenovo's current offerings, I think the most viable current Thinkpad is probably the X1 Extreme gen 4. If you elect to buy "only" an RTX 3050Ti, you have 2xnVME and two DIMM slots. It has a 16:10 WQHD 16" screen and weighs under 2kg. Battery life is said...

PhotoPea is a nearly complete clone of Photoshop that runs in a browser. I'm not a Photoshop guy, but I know my way around the UI and core functions and as far as I can tell, it seems identical. You can even do things like import brushes you've saved. I'm sure it's missing out on high end...

Are you finding your choice of RAM amount to be at all limiting? The graphics guy in my office has a 16GB Macbook and M1 iMac and has told me that there are some projects he prefers to do on his Windows PC has four times the memory.

I keep writing W series, but they're Ps now. Same thing. Derp.

You can get a similarly equipped Thinkpad W series. One of my co-workers has a Thinkpad T480 with a Xeon and 64GB RAM. The battery life on that machine is abysmal. Historically, they're all using the same chipsets, so they'll all be roughly as capable. Lenovo's main selling point was sturdy...

Thinkpad W series actually do have discrete graphics and room for multiple internal drives. When I last looked at the T-series, I was extremely disappointed in the lack of flexible internal storage. My T470p DOES have discrete graphics (something just under what a mobile GTX1040 would...

Moto is not great with updates. Samsung and Google are best in that department, each giving about three years of software support on average, though Google is claiming more for the just released Pixel 6 series. Samsung promises support through two Android revisions past the release versions and...

I think Motorola is the gold standard for mid-tier Android phones. They tend to have 700-series Snapdragon CPUs and middling displays, but they tend toward the absurd end of battery life. I've suggested the Moto G Power or Ace for friends who aren't concerned about the camera. Samsung A5x...

There's never been any meaningful discussion of ChromeOS here. I picked up a Lenovo Duet this week. It's a little heavier and not quite as fast as my Tab S6, but I still like the utility of having a full desktop version of Chrome and somewhat better file management than Android. It has 48GB of...

SQL Express also has limits in terms of RAM and CPU cores that it'll use, but those aren't likely to be an issue for anything that runs at Access scale. I have a customer who has used Act CRM for about the last 25 years. I just looked and the total amount of actual data in that MSSQL instance is...