Search results

Tiny 11 Builder has been updated to support all Windows 11 releases. It's basically a long Powershell script that pulls out a list of bullshit Windows Store applications, but it also gives your Windows 11 install an Edge, Media Player and OneDrive-ectomy. The script is very easy to read and...

It's a FUN example; it was a form of identity that worked perfectly anywhere someone might reasonably encounter a European ID card in the US. I think it actually got less scrutiny than oddball US State IDs, where someone might actually look for all the details on the card. When my friend...

My best friend's older sister is a naturalized citizen of Germany, and so my friend was given on an older National ID card to my friend to use for 18 - not-quite 21 shenanigans. Hilariously, that meant we could go to The Aviary in Chicago but got the cops called for trying to use it to walk in...

I had to service three Windows XP systems earlier in the week. They talk to commercial embroidery systems that don't have software that operates anything newer and won't virtualize worth a shit because of a USB security dongle, so they've just had their second whole system transfer. As...

AMD released desktop and notebook Ryzen 8000-series Pro CPUs this week. They look basically the same as the 8x00G models but AMD says they have NeuralPUs for AI workloads. I'm not sure if that's a pile of marketing or something real and useful, but it is a move forward. This might make the next...

My partner's Microsoft account is the one she made for Xbox when she was a little girl, and it's tied to just under two decades of product purchases and game achievements. Unfortunately, it's also tied to 2FA info that belongs to her dad, since six year olds generally don't have private email...

Apropos of nothing, I love it when major media sources have to report reddit and twitter users as sources for breaking news, including their hilariously inappropriate user names. We live in a dystopian media hellscape where we have to take Elon Musk's stinky poo garbage site seriously, but it's...

Aren't the 670p drives QLC NAND? Maybe not the best choice for a primary drive.

My favorite high endurance 2.5" drives are Intel S4510s, followed by Samsung 860 Pros. The 860 Pros are more or less impossible to find new, but the Intel drives are pretty easy to come by, which is one of the reason I like them as much as I do.

DRAM prices can fluctuate in a similar fashion to other memory types. No manufacturer wants their goods at their lowest prices and you must remember other times that we've seen peaks and troughs in that pricing.

SSD prices fell to historical lows last year. I'm REALLY happy I have a stack of Intel 8TB u.2 drives right now because the supply for those evaporated in late February and I know I can't afford the current generation models.

His eye socket was shattered in a fall down some stairs a couple years ago, where he was also diagnosed with dementia, along with substantial weight loss probably due to depression. He chose to retire during the pandemic and had been working on a text of personal interest, which involved travel...

Also, the phone number he provided to his Microsoft account is apparently a land line. The only progress I've made with this is that he finally did come up with the email address he signed up to use on his computer. An address he no longer has access to. I'm at the point where I've tried...

A Windows 11 horror story: I'm looking at a Dell XPS 9320 (11" 13th gen intel, just over a year old). Its owner is in early onset dementia. He can't remember his Microsoft PIN or password and his appearance has changed so substantially over the last year that he can't use his Windows Hello...

I built an application about 25 years ago that was originally created in Object Pascal and rewritten by others to be an ASP.net project. The person who did this (and prevented anyone from changing anything) just retired, so the three of us who are left are finally in the process of rebuilding it...

Until a couple years ago, I was using powershell to generate sqlcmd scripts because that was easier than reinventing the wheel with things that weren't implemented by the sqlserver module. And then I found out that the dbatools module has been around for years and did pretty much all things I...

I don't understand this "get stumped by writing" concept.

Probably, but it remains to be seen if Microsoft will allow them to operate. Supposedly, just renaming the impacted executables twice allows them to operate again, but that's definitely anticompetitive behavior.

Apparently, Microsoft doesn't like end users mucking around with File Explorer. The hot new thing about the next semi-annual Windows 11 update is preventing users from using popular tools for modifying the Start Menu and/or file explorer, such as ExplorerPatcher. Because who cares what users...

My S9 usually lasts about a week on a charge at my typical level of activity. If the screen on time is very high, for example if I'm seriously trying to finish a book, it might only last a full day. Even that seems very reasonable to me. I don't often use the S-pen or the official Samsung cover...

There are a number of heat resistant polymers that you can use in consumer 3D printing. ABS (good for 90+ C) is the first one that comes to mind, although not every print head can get hot enough to use it. Your plugged-in PSU will be a path to ground in literally any PC case. Sure, but it's...

It is apparently possible to ditch the Ugreen OS, although the 10Gb NIC they use isn't terribly well supported by BSD *nix and you have to take an extra step to replace the boot drive out and void the system warranty before you can do so. The 8 bay model is half the cost of Synology 8 version...

Apparently, a lot can be done to lower idle power, especially by disabling USB 3, Wifi and Audio if you aren't using those things. It's very possible LM's setup might still be on the high side. Of course, I'm going to slap a Broadcom 9600e and a ConnectX 3 in whatever I build so if it's still...

Ugreen's NAS Kickstarter is ALL OVER youtube right now. Might as well bring it up here as well. I feel like all the options they offer are flawed in their own way, like using 10GbaseT on the NVMe model and not supporting m.2 drives larger than 4TB, but the prices during the kickstarter period...

I just noticed that AMD seems to have bumped power thresholds on next-gen desktop CPUs. Looks like 170W and 105W instead of 105W and 65W like we've had up to now. I don't particularly like this development, but maybe it'll improve overall stability. Speaking of power costs, my plan is to...

The 7000-series desktops didn't seem that much better than the high end of the 5000s, and I still feel like I made a good choice to hold off. Speaking to the idea that Granite Ridge will be socket compatible, Asus is apparently updating its AM5 boards with firmware support for larger DDR5...

I'm sure the S9FE is a fantastic tablet, though you might want to compare it to the Lenovo P11, which is considerably cheaper.

Rumors say it's AM5, which suggests you'll just need a BIOS update. I suspect we'd probably be hearing about it A LOT if AMD did a one-generation CPU socket. AMD also just released a new line of low end Ryzen 5000XTs, just in case you're still rocking an A320 with an old Ryzen 3 on it.

I have a Tab S9 and a Tab S6 Lite that both see daily use. The S9 is more or less equal to my S24+, only with a bigger screen and a card slot. The S8 and S9 are also water resistant and are entirely legitimate for Samsung DeX desktops, if you want such things. My S6 Lite is mostly used as an...

Intel has been and still is playing the same game basically since 8th generation: Release a new CPU every year with high enough power requirements for a high end CPU to clock 100MHz faster than last year's model. Since 12th gen, they've added the E-cores nonsense to the mix and a DDR5...

There aren't many comparable benchmarks published for the 8840U yet, but if it's 15% faster per P core than 155H and the pricing is comparable, it might be worthwhile. Supposedly, the new architecture should see 15% better IPC vs the 7000 series Ryzen.

Minisforum is shipping a Ryzen 7 8840U tablet in China, available now. 8c/16t, 3.3 - 5.1GHz Zen5 CPU, 28W TDP, Radeon 780M graphics. That doesn't change the delivery date of next-gen desktop parts but these guys might show up in Beelink or other NUC-style boxes soon.

I'm still weighing my options since I don't particularly want to buy components for Aliexpress. The idea would be a local backup system for a customer who wants that to stay in-house.

KVMs don't change all that much and new or oddball keys don't impact how they work. Copilot seems to be one of those things like Onedrive that will show up again even if you disable it, but it's also really easy to ignore.

I just started using this thing specifically because I can bind a bunch of nonsense in my content creation applications to it. I have a Davinci Resolve Editing Deck as well but it's a little too big to go on my desk and share space with my drawing tablet. Many keyboards seem to treat the menu...

Microsoft is changing the PC keyboard again. We're all going to have a Copilot key soon. I'm sure that will be great the very instant I figure out why people need copilot in the first place.

Ideally, everything should be ECC. If you're on DDR5, it is. I've also long-since learned that if an OEM says their platform does something out of line with specs, it's generally true under at least some condition. That might require a particular set of HCL DIMMs, but if I'm doing anything...

I was just about to say that as far as I know, nobody is selling the N305 as a barebones motherboard but no, there it is on AliExpress. Looks like getting the upgraded CPU adds about $100 to the system cost AND I'd have to get it from "Tan Lancheng Products Business Department" but that is...

Something mildly obnoxious: Adler Lake Celerons are actually pretty respectable CPUs with extremely low wattage and it's pretty easy to find ITX boards with 2.5GbE and a Celeron N100, probably with a couple m.2 and maybe 4 or 6 SATA ports and an 8 lane PCIe slot. Perfect for a NAS build, until...

iGPUs are always going to be about getting to some minimal level of capability, but for my purposes, anything that has the Codec feature set of Arc or Xe is giving me something that nVidia doesn't. It's the same thing with the Vega cores on AMD in integrated vs discrete hardware.

The information may simply not exist, especially if you're zeroed in on DxO or Topaz as the tools you might be concerned with. The only generalization I know to be true is that there seems to be a significant performance improvement for between the 4060-series nVidia and the 4070-series in...

If I'm using Resolve Studio, the correct answer right now is either an Intel CPU with an iGPU + a high end Radeon, or a Threadripper with both Arc and Radeon hardware. That's the only video editing application I actually care about. Premier is a crashy mess on Windows for reasons that seem...

It's application specific. For Resolve, AMD is actually preferable to nVidia overall, but even that depends on assumptions in what is being processed and how; I still benefit from Intel because I want to preserve the chroma data from my camera. Adobe does very little on a GPU aside from things...

Macs aren't better for video. They are well optimized and power efficient for it, but so is a Snapdragon 8 gen 3. I'm sure Apple Silicon is Adobe's primary optimization target as well, and that definitely helps both sides, but for GPU compute workloads, the mainstream M3 Pro is somewhere...

I don't care if they are or not. I don't like Apple's architecture. More or less every computer I have ever owned has gotten RAM and storage updates over its useful life, and I definitely prefer to have dedicated GPU memory rather than letting it float on top of system RAM. I'm definitely not...

The main goal I have is to find the right GPU for content creation acceleration. Probably LM as well. The field in this area is very uneven. Adobe does a lot with Intel Xe cores and RTX, but almost nothing with AMD. I have a theory this is because Apple was using AMD GPUs leading up to the...

Blackmagic Cameras are beautiful if you are the opposite of LM in terms of photo/video capability. However, the newer ones are not small, which is usually the thing Micro Four Thirds is good at. I only ever use my Lumix if I'm worried something might happen to a camera. It gets taken to...

For GPUs? Leakers say they're still targeting a TDP of 225W like the A770 have. Arc had tons of driver issues and performance quirks at launch, but these things have largely been addressed and are really of primary concern for gamers rather than regular people.

The world of video card leakers seems to think that Intel Battlemage will have 3, 5, 7 and 9-series SKUs, with the most expensive models landing somewhere around RTX 4070 in terms of standard benchmarks, but with 24GB RAM and an MSRP of around $500. That would be just about perfect IMO. Also...

That's a legitimately interesting use for MFT, other than the $1000 price tag. You can get a pretty respectable Panasonic MFT camera for under $250.