My "new desktop PC".
6 core xeon CPU with hyperthreading x2 (24 virtual cores) over clocked to 3.9ghz

128gb ddr3 ecc ram
256gb SCSI hard drives in RAID 0
256 Samsung ssd
AMD r9 something something 8gb ddr5 vram gpu

Got it for £120 on eBay (except for the ssd and gpu). Still missing a sound card :(

I have no idea on what to use it yet except for development but I thought it'd be cool to build a pretty good "desktop pc" for around £350-£400.

Around 27 hours at new customer location.

They had a server failure due to incompetence.

They had fired their own IT guy and called us 6 months later because the server stopped responding.

First diagnostic. 2 drives are dead in a raid 5 with one hot spare. Raid controller then proved to be broken once the disks was replaced.

Waiting for new raid controller and installing.

Backup non existing, no one changed dat tape during the 6 months without IT. The tape was just a transparent plastic band, no media left.

Raid config is stored in static ram on controller, no backup!

Several hours in tech support to find out how to rebuild raid config from existing disks.

Proves to be impossible to rebuild raid set due to some checksum failures.

More hours with support to enable some diagnostic read only mode to mirror low level content to external drive.

Then many more hours to copy parts of the tree until it gets an error, restart after that and go on.

In the end we got around 70% back.

During this time I manage to be in contact with the raid manufacturers all support centers, one in europe, one in the us and one in Taiwan, switching each time one if them closed for the night.

The customer later declined a steady support contract due to us being to expensive ;)

Some just don’t want to learn.

I do not like the direction laptop vendors are taking.

New laptops tend to feature fewer ports, making the user more dependent on adapters. Similarly to smartphones, this is a detrimental trend initiated by Apple and replicated by the rest of the pack.

As of 2022, many mid-range laptops feature just one USB-A port and one USB-C port, resembling Apple's toxic minimalism. In 2010, mid-class laptops commonly had three or four USB ports. I have even seen an MSi gaming laptop with six USB ports. Now, much of the edges is wasted "clean" space.

Sure, there are USB hubs, but those only work well with low-power devices. When attaching two external hard drives to transfer data between them, they might not be able to spin up due to insufficient power from the USB port or undervoltage caused by the impedance (resistance) of the USB cable between the laptop's USB port and hub. There are USB hubs which can be externally powered, but that means yet another wall adapter one has to carry.

Non-replaceable [shortest-lived component] mean difficult repairs and no more reserve batteries, as well as no extra-sized battery packs. When the battery expires, one might have to waste four hours on a repair shop for a replacement that would have taken a minute on a 2010 laptop.

The SD card slot is being replaced with inferior MicroSD or removed entirely. This is especially bad for photographers and videographers who would frequently plug memory cards into their laptop. SD cards are far more comfortable than MicroSD cards, and no, bulky external adapters that reserve the device's only USB port and protrude can not replace an integrated SD card slot.

Most mid-range laptops in the early 2010s also had a LAN port for immediate interference-free connection. That is now reserved for gaming-class / desknote laptops.

Obviously, components like RAM and storage are far more difficult to upgrade in more modern laptops, or not possible at all if soldered in.

Touch pads increasingly have the buttons underneath the touch surface rather than separate, meaning one has to be careful not to move the mouse while clicking. Otherwise, it could cause an unwanted drag-and-drop gesture. Some touch pads are smart enough to detect when a user intends to click, and lock the movement, but not all. A right-click drag-and-drop gesture might not be possible due to the finger on the button being registered as touch. Clicking with short tapping could be unreliable and sluggish. While one should have external peripherals anyway, one might not always have brought them with. The fallback input device is now even less comfortable.

Some laptop vendors include a sponge sheet that they want users to put between the keyboard and the screen before folding it, "to avoid damaging the screen", even though making it two millimetres thicker could do the same without relying on a sponge sheet. So they want me to carry that bulky thing everywhere around? How about no?

That's the irony. They wanted to make laptops lighter and slimmer, but that made them adapter- and sponge sheet-dependent, defeating the portability purpose.

Sure, the CPU performance has improved. Vendors proudly show off in their advertisements which generation of Intel Core they have this time. As if that is something users especially care about. Hoo-ray, generation 14 is now yet another 5% faster than the previous generation! But what is the benefit of that if I have to rely on annoying adapters to get the same work done that I could formerly do without those adapters?

Microsoft has also copied Apple in demanding internet connection before Windows 11 will set up. The setup screen says "You will need an Internet connection…" - no, technically I would not. What does technically stand in the way of Windows 11 setting up offline? After all, previous Windows versions like Windows 95 could do so 25 years earlier. But also far more recent versions. Thankfully, Linux distributions do not do that.

If "new" and "modern" mean more locked-in and less practical and difficult to repair, I would rather have "old" than "new".

I've got a rant-type question:

Why would you EVER use Google Chrome?

There are a million browsers in the world, you could've used Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Bad Wolf, Qute, st, Epiphany etc, but you chose to uss Google Chrome.

What would be the reason you would ever choose Google Chrome over any of the million browsers, out of which many of them get the job done much better than Chrome? Okay, I get it why you might use IE or Edge, cause you might be too lazy to install any other browser or you just want the performance benefits you get with Edge which totally, most definatelly, a very big plus point for Edge.

*"Chrome has a balanced-bloat out of all browsers"*
But how tf does that matter? That doesn't even help performance wise anyways.

I can't get over the fact that I have to see/hear about 'Chrome hogging RAM' EVERYWHERE. Like, why do you even care about the god damn browser? Why is it a standard over the million other browsers that exist? Why can't the general public be educated that browsers have choices (just like phones) and you don't have to spit crap over people who don't use Chrome.

It just drives me crazy of how many people hate Chrome, and still it's a 'default' browser.

I would quote Vivaldi (the company/browser):
'A browser should adapt to you, not the other way around.'

(Disclaimer: Rant of a former Firefox, qute, st, Opera, OperaGX, Edge, and ofcourse, Chrome user. Currently in deep love with Vivaldi.)

I'm done ranting. Have a nice day!

(My first post here, if I did something wrong, let me know! I'll make sure I don't do it again!)

I need ideas.
What's the best use for several old, moderately crap laptops (<= 4GB RAM) I have lying around? I'm using one as a minecraft server because 3GB ram is enough and the Pi isn't, but past that, I'm pretty stuck. They all work, mostly, have CD drives and mostly free hard drives.

I really love Mr Robot.
The show though... not the guy...

But there's one thing that bugs me since the beginning:

For security reasons Elliot destroys all his drives and puts his RAM into the microwave which of course is effective but why would you even consider frying volatile memory?

Sure... the data can remain for some time but not that long that he would risk anything...

Any ideas?

Oh and btw... SEASON 3 IS NOT THE END??? LIKE WHAAAAAT?

FUCK SPOTIFY
This bloated buggy piece of shit
This fucking piece of bull dick that runs efficiently as much as a legless cockroach this motherfucker thinks its offline even though its in the motherfucking browse screen and I have a 4.5g connection (this retarded cunt) fills space faster than a hot gas released in a vacuum chamber just to fix its goddamn internet bug I have to reboot my damn phone. I see so many damn bugs in this shitty app that I think they rolled back to the alpha versions sometimes if I had any other god damn alternatives (google music is not available where Im from fuck you too google) the only thing I would give them would be my middle fingers. It just fucking froze on me while I'm just trying to listen to my Retrowave playlist while I fucking get ready for bed FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU YOU RETARDED INFECTION FILLED CUNT I WOULD PUT A BIKE CHAIN ON MY DICK AND RAM YOU WHILE WE ARE TIED TO A CAR THAT DRIVES OFF OF A CLIFF IF YOU WEREN'T AN INCOMPETENTLY PUT TOGETHER 1S AND 0S

Instead of asking how old people are, how about this:

Post the specs of the first computer you regularly used. I will start.

Tandy 1000 SX. Not one, but TWO 5 1/4" floppy drives. An 8088 CPU and 640K of RAM. The operating system was MS-DOS 3.2, which was always in the A: drive.

We used it to make papers for school in Wordstar, and my parents made spreadsheets in Lotus 1-2-3. We learned to type on it. We played Space Quest, King's Quest, Carmen Sandiego, and Lords of Conquest on it. We transcribed BASIC programs from the, "BASIC Training" column in 3-2-1 Contact magazine.

We LOVED that computer.

So I am back home for a week without my laptop and my phone was low on power so I finally give up and decide to use a old PC we had.

I was gonna download some anime which I did but as I was waiting I started just looking around...

1. The drives are huge, 3 HDs with 400GB each.... vs my current 128 GB SSD

2. I found an old stash of anime (2013-4), several series... that I had actually not watched

3. The machine is known to be slow but after using it for awhile to install VLC and JDowloader... It's actually OK...

4. Video can playback at 3x speed... No lag... Apparently I forgot the onboard GPU failed and my dad replaced it with a cheap (I think) GFX card that has like 1GB RAM/processing power...

It's 2022 and Firefox still doesn't allow deactivating video caching to disk.

When playing videos from some sites like the Internet Archive, it writes several hundreds of megabytes to the disk, which causes wear on flash storage in the long term. This is the same reason cited for the use of jsonlz4 instead of plain JSON. The caching of videos to disk even happens when deactivating the normal browsing cache (about:config property "browser.cache.disk.enable").

I get the benefit of media caching, but I'd prefer Firefox not to write gigabytes to my SSD each time I watch a somewhat long video. There is actually the about:config property "browser.privatebrowsing.forceMediaMemoryCache", but as the name implies, it is only for private browsing. The RAM is much more suitable for this purpose, and modern computers have, unlike computers from a decade ago, RAM in abundance, which is intended precisely for such a purpose.

The caching of video (and audio) to disk is completely unnecessary as of 2022. It was useful over a decade ago, back when an average computer had 4 GB of RAM and a spinning hard disk (HDD). Now, computers commonly have 16 GB RAM and a solid-state drive (SSD), which makes media caching on disk obsolete, and even detrimental due to weardown. HDDs do not wear down much from writing, since it just alters magnetic fields. HDDs just wear down from the spinning and random access, whereas SSDs do wear down from writing. Since media caching mostly invovles sequential access, HDDs don't mind being used for that. But it is detrimental to the life span of flash memory, and especially hurts live USB drives (USB drives with an operating system) due to their smaller size.

If I watch a one-hour HD video, I do not wish 5 GB to be written to my SSD for nothing. The nonstandard LZ4 format "mozLZ4" for storing sessions was also introduced with the argument of reducing disk writes to flash memory, but video caching causes multiple times as much writing as that.

The property "media.cache_size" in about:config does not help much. Setting it to zero or a low value causes stuttering playback. Setting it to any higher value does not reduce writes to disk, since it apparently just rotates caching within that space, and a lower value means that it just rotates writing more often in a smaller space. Setting a lower value should not cause more wear due to wear levelling, but also does not reduce wear compared to a higher value, since still roughly the same amount of data is written to disk.

Media caching also applies to audio, but that is far less in size than video. Still, deactivating it without having to use private browsing should not be denied to the user.

The fact that this can not be deactivated is a shame for Firefox.

TLDR; After my dad was lazy, I assembled the parts myself.

As far back as I can remember, if I think of my father he is sitting behind his pc playing games. It was like me, his escape.

When I was between 3-5 years old he upgraded his pc to one that supported windows 95. The most exciting thing I remember about his new pc is that it had a sound card or what passed as one anyway - think polyphonic ring tones in place of onboard beeps. It was fucking awesome.

He gifted his old 386 to my brother and I which we spent a blissful year or so playing DOS games on until it finally died. I wouldn't have access to a home computer again until I was 11 - touching my fathers computer was out of the question, never mind actually using it.

The reason I didn't have access to a pc was simply because he didn't replace his pc - he made minor upgrades to it until he died with a whopping 512mb of RAM. Seriously his pc specs were a bragging factor like geek porn - better than any else's I ever saw including his I.T friends (he was an electrical engineer), everyone knew this apparently aside from his boss...

Auto-cad started becoming a thing and my father for the first time ever had a reason to actually do work on a computer, he immediately used the opportunity to leverage his company into paying for a pc. To get better "value" for the company he ordered the parts in place of a pre-built machine - in reality he blew 90% of the budget on a new motherboard and graphics card to upgrade his own pc and the cheapest entry level components for everything else. The day they arrived he upgraded his own pc, threw the excess parts into a box and told us it was our new computer which he would put together over the weekend. He didn't.

After 3 months of nagging I was fed up and taking liberties with him that landed me more than one hiding, at some point he was over it and told me if I wanted something that badly I should do it myself. He walked into my room after becoming concerned if I had run away/hurt myself since he hadn't heard a whistle from me in 6 hours and I was battling my ass off trying to install windows 98.

He inspected my assembly gave me an approving nod and showed me that the hard drives physical jumper was set to slave and the rest is history. I hadn't used windows before, or built a computer let alone used one in years but somehow I always knew, it just clicked and made sense to me.

I didn't truly recognise just how much I had learn't watching him play DOS games over his shoulder and clean/upgrade his pc. It changed everything and thanks to only being allowed to watch him use a pc, once I finally had access to my own computer again I revered it and all it's possibilities. I knew I should use it to do something special.

I am looking at replacing my Dell XPS 15 from 2019, but because I work 100% remote I am considering building a desktop developer rig instead of getting a new laptop. I have only had laptops since early 2000s, but thought it would be fun building something from scratch again. The problem is I have fallen tragically behind on everything hardware, and therefore looking for some pointers.

I don't want an RGB rainbow unit with 6 loud fans requiring a noise cancelling headset to work on. I want a top spec, stealthy thing that has all the goodies but also runs quiet. A decent graphics card that can run the latest games at a decent frame rate, but not the top of the line either.

Any tips on cases, motherboards, RAM, drives, fans and grahpics cards appreciated. The budget is roomy, comparable to a top spec Dell XPS 15 or ThinkPad X1 Extreme.

Hey all

Much rather ask here than on a subreddit full of jerks

I have a PC running Ubuntu 20.04LTS that I use as a media server.

8GB RAM
i3 6100
1TB Samsung HDD (Boot)
3TB Seagate Barracuda
2TB WD Blue

The 2TB and 3TB are NTFS drives. I formatted them that way because they are network shared to Windows machines. Often when watching videos off those drives, they kinda just stick for a second here and there. You know, like how a scratched DVD would.

This happens regardless of if I watching directly on the server or over the network on another PC or my TV

I tried copying a video over onto the boot drive and then it worked fine.

The 3TB has one bad sector and the 2TB is reportedly perfectly healthy. So any ideas?

Could it be as simple as bad sata or power connectors?

Speeds seem fine when copying to and from though

grrrr

last week my laptop died out of nowhere. it stopped recognizing the one drive in it. I lost a bunch of files, code. evidently ssds fail out of nowhere unlike hdds which slow down and error all the time before ultimate failure

my warranty for this 4k$ laptop expires in 12 months and this was month 13. nice. I don't like warranties anyway, and the site said they would replace things with "comparable hardware, sometimes refurbished" wtf no thanks

so I found some guides of people upgrading the drive in this laptop. seemed easy enough, unlike older laptops from back when I was in school where you had to take out 12 things first to get to anything
unfortunately I needed a specific screwdriver. I walked several miles to the nearby hardware store thinking they would have said screwdriver. the old guy in the basement said there was a kit where it started from t4 (I needed t5), but he had just sold out his last one. I checked their online store with a friend for a while on my way back home and we kept finding torx screws but the wrong sizes. fuck.
he said screwdrivers this small are only used for electronics, asked if there's any other hardware stores and there aren't near me
however it occurred to me this strip mall has a lot of suspicious computer stores on it. so I walked back up the street looking for one.
found one with a suspicious poster, saying it was an internet cafe but the last point on their poster said they do repairs. walked in. nobody is in there, suspiciously 2 desks with old computers all empty, then you go forward in this dark cave, with plastic wrapped implements on the walls, you finally find a glass shield and behind it was a meek Asian man that took me a moment to notice
I asked him if he had t5
he handed me a plastic baggy full of tiny screwdrivers, for me to take one
I asked if they're t5
the shape looked right, but I can't tell the size
I took one out and tried to find size marking, but nothing
he didn't seem to know what I was asking when I asked about its size
he said if it's wrong I can come back and trade what I took for another. lol
I asked him if I can buy it, since that wasn't evident to me due to how sus this random bag of screws is being thwarted on me lmao
he said 5$ cash
I gave him a fiver
this sus shop literally avoiding taxes lmao

walked back home, ate food cuz starving, tried the screw and FUCK, it's too big. put laptop in a bag and hauled ass fast, checked on maps the store I got this from closes in a few minutes so I really wanted to make it there because what if the receptionist changes and they don't know I took this screw. I got no receipt

got there right before closing, put my laptop down, said it was too big. he used a few screws until he found one that fit, said I could try it and I did (so scam aware!). bingo bango. now I got a screwdriver that fits the laptop.

walked home, sat down and took apart the laptop. been a few years since I did so. the hardware inside looks entirely unrecognizable to me. started cycling through YouTube videos of laptops of the same name as mine, but their insides don't look like mine. is this ram? is this the NVMe? what the fuck is anything?
finally found a video guide where the guy was quite informative. not the same laptop but he's informative enough I figure it out. ram and drives are so different and weird now. took parts out, put them back in, rebuilt laptop, tried to boot, same problem. jiggling parts like this works with desktops often, guess not with a failed NVMe

so I'm screwed. get on Newegg and bought a new NVMe. should arrive in 3 days via Purolator

yesterday was day 3. it was at a sort facility near me, then out on delivery, but nobody ever came. then it went back to sorting. now it's out on delivery again. I'm sitting here thinking that's a little weird, wasn't Purolator the delivery company that had me go 2 hours outside of town to pick up a 15lb desktop case once?

... and then I looked up Reddit comments... then reviews on the purolator facility it's at... I am screwed. last time iirc they were out for delivery for 3 days, never tried delivery, then on the last day at the end of day they stated they attempted delivery but no go. that was bullshit. then it ended up at that facility. which takes 2 hours to fucking reach.
the reviews are so bad... the facility has 1.2 star reviews with thousands of them. they won't leave even a stub, then seem to not know where your package is at the facility, or they deny you have the right to pick it up despite ample IDs, or someone ELSE picks it up and it's not there. they also ship your package back after 5 days, so if they don't leave a note and you miss it tough luck...

fucking hell
also rumours that they just hire "contractors" in normal cars to drop off packages? wat? lol
AND EVERY REVIEW HAS A BOT COMMENT. THEIR SUPPORT IS JUST A CHATBOT

I thought this was just a small hiccup
I think I might not have a drive for weeks now
fucking hell
now I'm sitting on my porch

I work in a repair shop, I have 300+ sticks of RAM laying around, from DDR to DDR3 (DDR3 of 4+ GB and DDR4 are either good for replacement on new computers or are sold immediately so don't count them as laying).
Also I have 200+ hard drives, IDE, SATA, SAS, 2.5, 3.5, 20 GB to 1 TB. Lots of them.

What can I do with all this crap? Not enough matching CPU and MB to make a working system (unless I make a very obsolete one but there's no point in doing so). I also am using single hard drives for backups (only 500+ GB SATA-3 though) so I'm mostly concerned with all that old ram. What can I do with them??

I want to build a small personal linux server from an old PC

specs:
Intel atom n7 blah blah
Intel HD graphics card
4gb of ram
six cell battery(its a laptop)
sata hard drives

I was going to go for free nas but I read that I'll need to connect the PC to the router via a lan cable, I dont have a router and very costly for me rn to purchase one.

I also feel like it will end in tears but I'll try

pass or nah?

spent a few days trying to track down the cause of a thermal shutdown in my workstation. intel 4790k with no overclock would spike to 95C on one core (core1) whenever maxing out all 8 threads, be it real work, mprime, anything with 100% cpu being used. I quadrupled my RAM from 8gb to 32, because its cheap and id like to have all data in memory sometimes, not because I thought that was the problem. I reseated my watercooling block. I checked out the PSU. I unplugged all unnecessary peripherals, drives, etc. It turned out to be a bug in Gigabyte MOBO BIOS (causing temps to be read incorrectly i think, still not exactly sure...) updated from version 5 to 10 and poof now temps are back in the high 50's at full load. it only took 2 days to figure out and i think i learned something

Ram drives are a very good and useful thing why has no one made a nice ram drive caddy using laptop ram, the speeds on the older ram and drives out do any drive on the market and the unit is not a lot to make, I happy to put some old DDR 2 ram a new life as a USB ram drive using as a page or swop drive or Live CD Drive.

Or am I missing something and they really hiding somewhere, the ram drives I seen are stupid price and offer functions we don't need or aimed at big server companies but this would really help privacy, or better still anyone know if we can make some kind of ram drive with maybe a maker board and laptop ram ?

Let’s play a game :
With some spare part you have somewhere in the boxes, what can you build “best” and what’s missing ?
I’ll start. With unused parts in my boxes I can build :
• Core I7 3770k on Sabertooth motherboard
• 16 GB of RAM
• GTX 770 as video card.
• 4K Asus screen
• Creative sound card
Missing :
• The case
• PSU
• Hard drives/SSD