Aaron44126

This is another red flag. It really seems to be a textbook scam site; lure people in with low prices and then make them pay using a payment method that is difficult/impossible to revoke when you don't deliver a product. Without any actual business details listed, even filing a legal challenge to be reimbursed would be difficult. Do not buy anything using a payment method that you won't be able to reverse or dispute, unless you have some reason to really trust that you will get what you paid for...

...Wait. The SupportAssist test you can do from Windows has a fan test, and the program actually manipulates the fan speed during this test? (I knew about the one you can run from the BIOS, but not about a Windows one.) If so I'll have to find time to dig in and see if it can be reverse engineered, it might providing the missing piece to allow manual fan control on these newer systems...

I think that must be a copy/paste error from the M6800 immediately below in the sig; M6700 can definitely only take 3rd-gen CPUs...

Having my own heatsink/fan assembly replaced. I just called them a little bit ago and they agreed to send the part out. It sometimes makes a grinding noise but only when it is operating at low speeds. It has been getting more frequent over time. Enough is enough...

Haven't seen any of these upgrades, though upgrading Precision 7X30 with a 7X40 GPU was shown to be possible originally by @Ionising_Radiation. In the case of 7X50/7X60, the GPU cards are not quite the same. Precision 7X60 supports PCIe4 and they have removed one DGFF connector from these cards compared to the 7X50 ones, running them at 8×PCIe4 rather than 16×PCIe3. If you were to install such a card in a Precision 7X50, it will only run at 8×PCIe3 (assuming that it even worked). You'll also want to compare photos and see if the screws are in the same place (I seem to remember seeing a difference there but it has been a while since I looked). If the cards are physically compatible then there is a decent chance that it will work, but I'm not sure if a Precision 7X50 would be happy about not having all of the DGFF connectors on the motherboard side attached to something (I guess you could test that by removing the appropriate DGFF connector on your current card and seeing if it will run at 8×PCIe3), or if Dell has not changed the DGFF pinout when they dropped one of the connectors.

If you need help with Directory Opus customization, you are probably best off asking at the Directory Opus forum.

I used mSATA in the M4800 for the whole time that I had one with zero problems. It goes in the WWAN slot. (There might be an option in the BIOS that you have to check to switch that slot between PCIe mode and SATA mode.... I do not recall, it was there on some older Precisions but I think that this one switches automatically.) Double-sided should fit fine, there is plenty of clearance. You cannot put a mSATA drive into another slot. It has to be hooked up to the chipset SATA controller and only the WWAN slot has that connection; the other slots just offer PCIe and USB connections. (You could, however, put a WWAN card into one of the other slots, since that uses a PCIe connection... if you could somehow get it to physically fit, or if they make a half-height one.) I have not put an mSATA drive into any systems older than M6700 so I can't say for sure about those older ones. I do recall people mentioning that there was trouble booting from the mSATA card in the M6500.

Installed on my 7560 just now with no issues.

Eh. I am kind of inclined to go along with the suggestion in the message. Worry about it "if the problem recurs". Not sure what really can be done other than replacing the fan assembly again — or the motherboard, if this turns out to be not a fan issue.

Eh, I generally agree with @Etern4l. My original assertion was based on a cursory web search. If Google isn't being explicit about the level of privacy offered with this backup method, then you can assume that it is not private and they would be able to turn data over to i.e. law enforcement that comes in with a court order.

Yeah, I haven't used it myself but I see the claim that "Google One" device backup feature has the data encrypted by your Google account password.

This is the second time I have seen this site linked here recently, but I am suspicious. There is no physical address listed and it is full of misspellings and grammatical errors. That plus "prices that are a little bit too good" are typical scam site red flags. Buyer beware...

I have found Apple One to be a good value, but you actually do have to make good use of it, I can see that it would not be a good value for that many people. Cloud storage is absolutely necessary if you want to keep photos/videos backed up and iCloud does a good, seamless job of this in iOS. (With iCloud "Advanced Data Protection" turned on, you can actually back up your whole phone including passwords and health data with end-to-end encryption. I understand that Android has something similar, but third-party apps have to specifically register with the backup service to have their data backed up and not all of them do it....?) My kids both have iPads and Apple Arcade is a good source for games for them to play. Most "regular" games on the App Store are full of ads and/or constantly trying to get you to spend money on microtransactions; Apple Arcade games are pleasantly free of both. There's a lot of fluff on there but some decent titles too. (I don't play anything off of there myself, though I am mildly interested in Fantasian.) Wife and kids are both doing music all of the time as well, so Apple Music is beneficial to have and it means that I don't have to pay for Spotify or similar. Plus, they offer lossless audio which Spotify has been teasing for years but still hasn't launched (to my knowledge)... I actually do workouts with Apple Watch + Apple TV, so Apple Fitness+ is beneficial to have. Apple TV+ actually has some decent shows too. This is not a service that I would stay subscribed to it all of the time if it wasn't part of the bundle. But, currently enjoying season 4 of For All Mankind for example, Foundation season 2 was also fun, and there are a few others that I want to try out like Extrapolations and Ted Lasso. Apple News+ is the least interesting of the bunch. I've never found the need to pay for access to news (though I do support public media), but I do occasionally use Apple News+ to read something from a normally paywalled site like the The Wall Street Journal. For each individual service, you can definitely find a cheaper non-Apple alternative. However if you actually use several of them then Apple One is probably cheaper than a pile of alternatives added up. Plus, the general benefit of not having them try to monetize my usage of their services with data tracking and targeted ads is something that I am willing to pay a little bit extra for.

Unfortunately, nothing about this story is a surprise. :-\ Dell does generally use FedEx for delivery and doesn't require signature. They also "lock down" many of the options that you can use with FedEx like rerouting the package. One thing that you can do is place a "vacation hold" on your address through FedEx, and FedEx will not attempt to deliver the package on days when a vacation hold is in effect. But really, you do have to decide where you want the machine shipped and be prepared for the uncertain delivery date. (If I worked in an office, I would have it shipped to the office, even if I was not sure if I was going to be there on the delivery day.) The lack of repair parts is also not a surprise. When I bought the Precision 7770, I had to wait over a week to get a replacement display panel and a multiple weeks for a replacement heatsink when I asked for those. I'm not sure what is up with Dell's parts supply these days. It wasn't like this in the past. The mouse thing is weird. I can sort of get it if you're talking about the touchpad, but you should still be able to connect a USB mouse and use the PC. If you have tried multiple different mice and it is still not working, then it is most likely a software problem and not a hardware problem.

...Because laptops already don't have enough space for keys that people actually want. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/ai-comes-for-your-pcs-keyboard-as-microsoft-adds-dedicated-copilot-key/

Maybe S3 sleep (old systems) vs. "modern standby" (new systems) have a difference in terms of this behavior?

Best I can tell, there is an "issue" relating to the extradition from The Bahamas being tied to the seven charges that were the subject of the original trial and The Bahamas not responding to a request to allow them to pursue additional charges (which will prevent the second trial from starting), and also the SBF lawyer team asking the Judge Kaplan to delay sentencing until the second trial is completed so that sentencing can be determined based on "all relevant conduct". Given that he is pretty well damned after the outcome of the first trial, and that the sentencing guidelines would be the same even if he were convicted at the second trial, dropping the second may be the best way to keep things from being held up for an indefinite period of time.

Looks like they possibly did it to avoid delays in sentencing and restitution? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/bankman-fried-wont-face-trial-over-alleged-foreign-bribes-campaign-funds/

I'm always suspicious of an online eCommerce shop that has "really good" prices, is full of grammatical errors and misspellings, and doesn't list a physical address anywhere... Anyway, you'll want to check if this card supports LVDS output. It is new enough that it probably doesn't, and thus won't work in the Precision M6700 (unless you have an eDP display, a rarity). M6700 doesn't support graphics switching with AMD GPUs, so you can't just rely on Optimus and run the internal display off of the Intel GPU as you could if you have a newer NVIDIA GPU installed.

All of the Precision 7680 displays are 60 Hz, including the OLED panel.

I actually did have this issue on both Windows and Linux. It manifested itself slightly differently, but in both cases I could observe the GPU becoming throttled when the system decided to give the CPU extra power. I remember being able to see a "cycling" behavior to it just by looking at the graphs in Task Manager — GPU utilization up and CPU utilization down for a bit, and then vice versa, like they were competing with each other even though actual load that I was running was not changing. (I much prefer the behavior of my older M6700 where the GPU was just automatically given power priority, and the CPU would be throttled a little if the GPU needed to run full tilt.) I spent more time digging into it on Linux and was never able to fully fix it before I stopped using the system. I guess this is what happens when you try to cram desktop chips into a laptop, and don't give it enough power (despite the chips being power-limited compared to the desktop configuration, 240W is not enough).

I ran Linux on a Precision 7770 for some time and only had a few issues to note that were specific to the system. First off, the fingerprint reader doesn't work consistently, and you also need to set it to "never power off" lest you get a buzzing sound coming from the system. Next, there were issues with GPU performance being inconsistent which I attribute to the power management situation (CPU "stealing" power and causing the GPU to throttle down hard). The GPU would normally perform fine but then have random drops to low performance that would last for 10ish seconds and occur a couple of times per hour when gaming, causing very noticeable FPS drops. Can't speak to HP vs Dell as I have only ever used Dell. I do like the business support ("ProSupport") that Dell offers, it is not hard to get the system physically serviced if you have a need to, wherever you are. However, I don't think that I will be getting another Dell workstation anytime soon because of various issues (between Dell, Microsoft, and also I guess NVIDIA). I don't necessarily think that HP would be any better from that regard, for me.

Second trial cancelled. Seems prosecutors decided that it is unnecessary. Still three months until sentencing. https://www.reuters.com/legal/sam-bankman-fried-will-not-face-second-trial-us-prosecutors-say-2023-12-29/

This seems to be an ongoing issue. There was some chatter over here, with links to some Reddit threads where people are also seeing this; it seems like Intel still has some driver issues going on. (I have an AX210 card but no 6 GHz capable router to try to use it with ...)

Yeah, I am basically chalking this up to hype turned into reality as people spent more time with the game.