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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...

Looks like the products do exist, at least in the form of a Pulse 8 CEC Injector. Unfortunately, they don't work with high bandwidth setups, so if you have a TV fancy enough to do 12 bit HDR or 120Hz refresh at 4k, they're glitchy. There's also a real annoyance in spending $50 on a device just...

I actually built that low-spec build last night. Ryzen 3600X, 16GB DDR4, RX 5700XT. The whole PC is worth MAYBE $350. I set it up on Fedora 42 and used Heroic launcher to get Gog and Epic titles on it and everything was nice and smooth at 1080p. I have no complaints. I don't have a Steam library...

Health care is extremely frustrating on pretty much every level and you're right that there's pretty much nothing you can do, but sometimes the act of being there is powerful on its own. Maybe it's a good day to sit down and write your dad a letter? You don't have to say all the things you're...

Does anyone know where to get those little rubber or nylon clips some OEMs are putting in systems for M.2 retention?

I am a heavy reader and here are my thoughts: Larger than 10" tablets are too fucking big. They're heavy and it's difficult to read comfortably on one and still do things like flip pages. I did find a use for a (12") Tab S9+ as an extra screen for tabletop gaming but I swapped my partner back my...

Basically my closest friends all live in Florida now. A lot of socialization happened over voice chats in games, but not games I play (I'm not one for Marvel Rivals, for example) but now that my partner is gone I don't expect to be included in that. We have a tabletop game night too, but since...

FireOS kind of sucks given Amazon's app ecosystem. A lot of things just aren't available from the Amazon app store. Fire tablets have very nice screens but the rest of the hardware is regrettable. You should be able to find a much more capable Lenovo M-series tablet in that price range and you...

I've seen mini PC systems get stuck at their lowest Speedstep state as a misbegotten firmware default. Turning off some of the C state options has helped me deal with that.

Apparently tomorrow is the big day. This place is going to be so empty.

I'm 99% sure Haswell is good for XP support. Haswell E, not so much, but anything that does DDR3 is a decent marker for the cutoff. Unused H81 motherboards aren't THAT hard to find, but it's probably easier to find an old fleet desktop than put something together from parts.

Can you direct connect the two NICs without involving the switch? It seems like your switch is ruled out of involvement but it's worth a try. What if you switch the two cards to IB mode instead of ETH? Are you writing to equivalent storage on both sides? 4Gbit sounds weirdly close to SATA SSD...

Vintage is extremely subjective but I've been talking people through retro-gaming setups with either Lenovo Thinkcentre 720q Tiny PCs (i3/i5 7th gen Intel) for around $125 or Beelink Ser5 Ryzen 5800u CPUs that cost around $250. Put Batocera Linux on them, which is basically a front end to...

Inconsistent Power State usually means that a device that the system should be running normally isn't doing that. For these purposes, "device" might mean a software device, possibly even Norton AV, if any part of it is still installed. But it could also be a buggy graphics/audio/NIC driver or...

That is expected behavior. The tool exists to support a borked Norton install because the full set of manual removal instructions is multiple printed pages long.

Fun true story: The same company, Gen Digital, owns Norton, AVG, Avira and Avast. It also owns Piriform, which makes Ccleaner. They're all now equally worthless. Anyway, there's an official Norton Removal Tool that should be used instead of manually deleting registry entries. Failing that...

It sounds like you did a Windows Reset. If the default installation image on your PC had Norton-whatever in it, you'll get it back when you do a reset as well.

Apple keyboards and haven't since approximately the introduction of OS X. They keys feel small and shallow to me and I often wind up with a lot more typos on them. If I know I have to type on an Apple keyboard, I'll bring something different along just to avoid using the Apple version. The...

Oh man it is so hard to explain Andor without going into spoilers. OK. Rogue One is about the successful mission to recover the plans for the Death Star prior to A New Hope. Rogue One has some pacing problems, but it has a Dirty Dozen style cast of memorable characters, particularly Cassian...

I'm feeling that as well. My household is getting ready to switch to single-income and I am not looking forward to it.

Speak for yourself. 😛 I live literally across the street from a national park. May is peak "hey, we can go take pictures on the beach while nobody else is out there to complain about what anyone may or may not be wearing"-time. I'm curious what makes you draw that distinction. Touchpads have...

From what I remember, I made the switch in about 1992. I spent about two hours getting comfortable with a trackball and it's been my primary pointing device ever since. My original reason was that my first "computer desk" was salvaged from a high school classroom, so it just had the tiny little...

AliExpress deliveries either come USPS or else some random Asian dude just pulls up in a car with my stuff. I've never, ever, ever had a shipping problem with AliExpress. I get an Amazon package stolen five or six times a year, albeit not always from my place. Most recently, a box full of...

I'm overwhelmingly a trackball user rather than a mouse person, going all the way back to the Microsoft Ballpoint in the early 90s. My wrists don't bother me at all and I spend actually obscene amounts of time on a computer. I buy a new trackball about every five years and just ordered another...

It's doing OK with opnsense right now, which is the only thing I really wanted it to do. I thought about trying to set it up for Plex but it turns out that the FreeBSD version of Plex lags features vs other versions and I didn't want to mess with virtualizing things and then dealing with iGPU...

I'm pretty sure that even the T6x notebooks still had socketed CPUs and I kinda-sorta remember being able to boot USB drives on a T22 or 23, IBM engineered the SHIT out of those Thinkpads. At varying points in time, Thinkpads have had some oddball configuration issues. One of my favorites was...

I've been able to find volunteer led efforts to get drivers for "unsupported" GPUs years after official support ended. This is most often an annoyance for old notebooks where support vanishes at the drop of a hat about 40 seconds after the last system using that hardware goes out of warranty...

rClone talks to Cloud Storage and virtualizes it for local use. That doesn't sound THAT interesting, but I am telling you that it is, because it allows for multiple account access on the same system, especially if you want more than one Google, Mega or OneDrive on your PC. This is a tool I've...

They're 8GB and don't trace any rays, but RX 5700XTs are unicorn hardware right now because they can be found secondhand for under $100 and are fantastic for 1080p gaming. I bought a couple so I never have to spend $250 on a 3050 again and honestly they're kind of perfectly positioned to tide...

I decided to pick up one of these guys. It's not exactly the same as the Zimaboard I linked, above, but dual m.2s, 10Gb USBs and 2.5GbE ports and updated graphics cores mean it's a lot more flexible than the J1900-based, dual GbE mini PC I've been using for a router for the last several years...

That looks right to me.

My partner repurchased the Oblivion Remaster on Steam and PS5 last night. She has it through Xbox Game Pass as well. She then spent all evening complaining that she couldn't play it because she was downloading it on all three platforms. The game is $60/platform and there's no doubt in my mind...

The new season of Andor seems awfully pointed in our current political climate. Can't imagine why.

Hideous but undoubtedly a sweet PC. My systems never look good enough for pictures either.

Exactly what programs do you think the Windows 11 Installation program should uninstall? If you want to reinstall Windows 11 you can just reinstall Windows 11. As long as you're using the same or new build version than the one that shows up when you run winver.exe, you're doing an in-place...

As a person who is excited about lenses I will never own, Sony released a $3900 50 - 150/2 lens today. It's enormous, weighing in at 1.4kg and having a 95mm front element, but the focal range and fast aperture are lust-inducing. Knowing that such a lens is technically possible and affordable...