Aaron44126

Windows 12 "subscription fee" rumor seems to have been shot down. https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/no-of-course-windows-12-wont-require-a-subscription-to-use ...Not to say that Microsoft won't look to take advantage of anything that they think that they can get away with, to make money from users running Windows. Ads, I mean "recommendations"... plus pushing people to Bing for more ad revenue, and pushing people to Edge so that they can monetize the "shopping features" and whatever other crud they are adding there. (Really, it makes sense, no one would go for a subscription fee. They can't even charge people for Windows upgrades like they used to because people just won't buy them, and then how would they start taking advantage of the new monetization features in their latest version of Windows?)

Eh. I think the number of people who actually use their phone charging port for data transfer is pretty low. I'm in an iPhone family and I know of no one who uses it for this except for me. The vast majority of people won't notice the "low data rate", and anyone who really cares about it will hopefully be aware enough to just get an iPhone 15 Pro.

iPhone 15 (non-Pro) uses the A16 SOC from last year, so that would make sense...

This looks fine. Fan replacement is what I would do. They don't send fans individually for these systems, since the 7000 series came out. You'll get a whole heatsink assembly with two fans attached to it. My Precision 7560 also has bad fan noises sometimes. When it is operating at a certain range of low speeds, it makes a kind of grindy/grumble sound. I usually hear it when it is "slowing down" from a busy load to an idle load. I will be having them replace the heatsink assembly before this thing goes out of warranty.

As an iPhone user, I think this is absolutely the right move, and it's sad that the EU had to drag them into doing it. (Though I think they would have done before too long, anyway; they've already been transitioning the iPad from Lightning to USB-C.) iPhone will join the rest of the world with being able to plug in any old USB-C thing and have it mostly just work. The worst thing about it will be the transition period. In my house, my wife and I both have iPhones, and my kids both have iPads, and they are all still Lightning devices. We have charging cords scattered around and it is nice that you can just plug one in to charge whatever device. My wife will be getting an iPhone 15 Pro in a few weeks, so we'll start the period of having both USB-C and Lightning cables hanging around until we get all of the devices transitioned (which I am in no particular hurry to do just because of the connector change). And it's not just chargers. We plug the phone into the car to enable CarPlay, and now I will have to have both a USB-C and Lightning cable in the car which will need to be swapped around depending on whose phone needs to be connected, until I also get a phone with USB-C. I have a collection of Lightning accessories (HDMI out, USB in, 3.5mm hookup for speakers, SD card reader) that will eventually need to be replaced as well.

SBF trial started today with jury selection; expected to last about six weeks. https://www.theverge.com/23894366/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-trial-updates-news His parents are also facing some legal issues. https://www.npr.org/2023/10/02/1200764160/sam-bankman-fried-sbf-parents-ftx-crypto-collapse-trial-stanford-law-school

Pretty sure you can't use a non-eval key with eval media at all. Doesn't matter where you get the key from.

Microsoft is going to stop allow people to use Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 keys to activate Windows 10/11. ...Or so they say. https://arstechnica.com/?p=1972170 It appears that this only applies to new versions of Windows 11. If you have an older version, you can still activate with an old Windows 7/8 key (for now). So, presumably you could save a Windows 11 22H2 ISO, use it to activate with an old key, and then upgrade to the current Windows 11 build with Windows Update.

Funny because the issue occurs with Optimus turned on... if the GPU upgrade was causing an issue with the display panel, I would expect it to be more problematic with Optimus off. (With my M6700 + M5000M, I basically had to keep Optimus on because of odd behaviors and stability issues that would occur if I did not.)

First off, I'd reseat the display cable (probably won't fix anything but easy enough to try and there is the small potential that it is a stupid simple fix like that). Another thing that you could try is to switch the setting for NVIDIA Optimus / graphics switching on or off and see if that changes the behavior, could give a hint as the display panel would be "attached" to the iGPU or the dGPU depending on the configuration there. But assuming that changes nothing, next, I'd be worried about the display panel itself and start thinking about replacing it.

One day later... CrossOver 23.5 is out! With D3DMetal integrated, tons more games now work. https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2023/9/27/crossover-235-is-a-real-game-changer

Exactly right. There are tons of choices with various pros and cons. Only you can decide what is best the best option for you. What can I say ..... I got fed up! Fed up with Windows. Fed up with the state of high-end laptop offerings (specifically from Dell but many of the issues are "global"), compromises involved with them, thermal issues, power management issues (specifically random GPU power drops because of it trying to balance CPU/GPU power and not doing it right), and general lack of attention to detail all around. I've posted about these issues elsewhere on the forum. (Never mind the issues I have with the direction that Microsoft is going with Windows 11, I tried switching to Linux for about two months and posted in that thread about some frustrations I was having with Windows; and later my rationale for switching from Linux to macOS, and I've also written about my frustrations with the Dell Precision 7770 which I was initially so excited about.) So I went to a Mac because it seemed like the only place to go that made any sense. (Apple's recent attention to the gaming space did help push me over the edge.) What I have found that I didn't fully expect going in is how %@#$ good of a laptop a MacBook Pro is. I'm not talking about "as a PC", but "as a laptop" specifically. It offers a balance between high performance when needed and cool/quiet/long battery life the rest of the time that you simply can't get from anyone else, where you have to pick between one or the other when deciding which model to get. And it offers other things that you'd want a laptop to have; quick battery charging, a really good display panel, good speakers as well, and a solid mostly-metal build. And yes, there is definitely a compromise when it comes to both "tweakability"/"upgradeability" and "absolute top performance". For the latter, I am settling for "good enough" performance (which is pretty darn good) because, to me at least, the benefits from this system more than make up for it. And, I mean, I played through Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1510p resolution and "highest" graphics settings preset, it had no trouble maintaining a stable 60 FPS, and that was running through the Rosetta 2 x64->ARM CPU emulator to boot, so I have nothing to complain about with regards to gaming performance. I might not be able to run at 4K/120 or use the latest ray tracing glitz, but I can play games fine and they look nice enough for me. With regards to the former, it's sort of something that I've just accepted that I have to deal with. But, laptops have been become less upgradeable all around so if I'm going to be pushed down that road no matter which manufacturer that I go with, I might as well get a something that works as a good laptop rather than something that tries to be a mini desktop and, as a result, is on the bulky side and runs noisy and hot. (I'm really at a point where I can't have my computer stuck in one place, so actual desktops are not under consideration for me right now.) Still, while I don't mind having to pay up front to max out the CPU/GPU/RAM, the lack of at least replaceable/upgradeable storage is indeed ridiculous. To be clear, I have found multi-threaded performance to be not quite as good as a 12th gen Core i9 laptop CPU (never mind a 13th gen which is notably faster). The M2 Max doesn't top the chart in CPU performance, but it is up there near the top, and certainly can trounce anything more than a couple of years old. (Intel sure does have throw a lot of power at the CPU to beat the M2 Max, though; M2 Max probably wins in terms of power efficiency.) Something I've been mulling over lately. What's the difference between a translation layer and "native support", anyway? Modern games are largely just bits of computer code that target a set of APIs, and if you swap out those API implementations with something else that works the same... is it a "translation layer" or just an "alternate execution environment"? Could a "translation layer" still offer "full performance"? ...Leaving Mac aside for a moment — obviously it is running a whole different CPU architecture so it must be translated if you want to run x86/x64 games. Let's look at trying to run Windows games on Linux, on a PC with a typical x64 CPU. Modern Windows games generally just x64 binaries (with supporting x64 libraries & data files) that make calls to various Windows APIs to handle various things that they need (open files, play sounds, network chatter, etc.) and use the DirectX 11 or 12 APIs for graphics. On Linux, running on an x64 CPU, running the code from the game binary should not be any slower than it is on Windows. What you have to worry about are the external API calls that the game makes, which flat out don't exist on stock Linux. Valve, CodeWeavers, and others have basically cooked up replacements for the APIs (Wine, plus DXVK & VKD3D for DirectX/graphics). The game doesn't care if it is making calls to "real" Windows+DirectX or to Wine+DXVK, as long as the implementation is good and the right stuff happens, it just executes the same code and the game chugs along. And, if the "alternate API implementations" are good enough, there is no real reason why it should be "slower" than running a game on Windows directly. After all, it's still just the same sort of CPU churning through the same x64 game code, in the end, just the parts where it calls out to the OS to do something have been swapped out. And, you'll find that under Proton, many games run just as well as they do on Windows ... and sometimes, even better. There are issues obviously when the behavior of the alternate implementation doesn't match up with Windows's behavior, which is why some games are broken (DirectX 12 in particular since that is newer), but if you compare Proton today to just like three years ago you will see that they have made incredibly rapid progress in fixing that up. On the Mac side, to pull this off you need to both have a replacement backend for the OS APIs (something like CrossOver with D3DMetal) and you have to translate the CPU instructions from x64 to ARM (Rosetta 2). The biggest performance hit seems to come from translating graphics API calls right now (D3DMetal or MoltenVK), but that has been doing nothing but getting better over time. D3DMetal performance has actually gone up like 20%-80% (depending on the game) over just the past three months or so. On the CPU translation side, Rosetta 2 performance actually seems to be really good, again looking at my experience playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider which has not been compiled for ARM. It does have a one-time performance penalty hit when you first launch the game, as it basically trawls through the executable and translates all of the x64 code that it can find to ARM code. It might happen again when you hit new bits of code (i.e. when getting from the menus to the game proper for the first time). The results are cached, so you don't have to wait for the same translation a second time (unless the game is updated). This is probably why I originally complained that loading times seemed longer than they should be early on, but that problem quickly went away. So, is there performance overhead? ......... In some cases, yes, though it is shrinking as these technologies mature, and there are groups of people that are working really hard on "unlocking" games from the environment that they were written for. Honestly, the whole approach of making alternate implementations of backends that games need (and ideally, open source ones) is critical for long-term preservation. There's been chatter recently following this study that, unlike other media like music and films where translating from one format to another is relatively easy, the vast majority of games ever made are currently unavailable to general users. If you are like me and like playing older games as well as new ones and don't want to have to maintain a collection of old hardware, then you've gotta get used to making your own backups and playing in an emulator or translation environment of some sort. Heh. That's all of my off-topic ranting for now!

Back earlier in September, CrossOver 23.5 beta was "announced" (to beta testers only). CrossOver has integrated GPTK/D3DMetal into their product. It will be much more capable than before when it comes to playing DirectX 11 & 12 games. While there are many options to get GPTK working without CrossOver, CrossOver 23.5 is the only solution that allows using GPTK with Wine 8. All other solutions use Wine 7. ——— Today, we have the release of macOS 14 "Sonoma". (I was hoping for updates to GPTK and/or CrossOver to go along with it, but that does not appear to have happened ... yet.) [Edit] - There is a CrossOver 23.5 release candidate today, still available for beta program members only. .....I'm going to wait a little while before upgrading my system, targeting mid-November, just to allow time for the bugs to shake out, apps to be updated, and community knowledge to build up. But, I'm very interested in trying some more complex Windows games on this system. For the near-term at least, I think emulation and translation is the only real way to go if you want access to a broad library of games on macOS. I've gotta believe that Apple understands this as well, even if they aren't saying so publicly; why else would they have dumped so much effort into GPTK and then changed the license to allow CrossOver to use it ...? In addition to GPTK, I'm following the MoltenVK enhancement roadmap. There are a few interesting items on the list, including the ones about shader conversion (which builds on recent work Apple did also attached to GPTK) and the one on pipeline caching. If implemented, these would help bring modern console emulators more up to par with their Windows versions, and it would also make it more feasible to get the Proton stack up and going properly on macOS, giving an option to run newer Windows games other than D3DMetal.

Ha ha... (As a guy who recently dumped Windows laptops for a MacBook Pro, and has been happily using it for gaming...) As you may be aware, in June, Apple released beta software "Apple Game Porting Toolkit" (GPTK), which is basically a custom packaging of Wine with an additional library called "D3DMetal" which translates DirectX 11/12 calls to Metal calls. It was presented as an evaluation tool for game devs considering a possible macOS port, but folks on the Internet had full Windows titles like Elden Ring up and running in a matter of hours. GPTK was released with a tight license, preventing it from being used with any third-party products or game ports. The guy at Apple driving GPTK is Nat Brown, who used to be a graphics & VR guy at Valve. Since then, Apple has been releasing updates to GPTK every few weeks, and performance has gone up bit with each release. Tooling built up around GPTK like CXPatcher and Whisky, which made it a bit easier for non-technical folks to try to use it. In August, Apple changed the license to allow redistribution of the D3DMetal library. (Still can't be used to ship a game port, though.) In mid-September, CodeWeavers released a beta version of CrossOver (23.5) which integrates D3DMetal, making it much easier for "anyone" to use this to run Windows DirectX 11/12 games. Install CrossOver, install the Windows version of Steam, toggle D3DMetal on, install a game, and run it. Later today, macOS 14 "Sonoma" is launching and all of this stuff should be heading out of beta. Definitely an Interesting time to be a Mac gamer. (There's also really interesting stuff going on in MoltenVK.) There's still a notable hole, though; there is currently no way to run games that use AVX instructions on Apple's ARM CPUs, because neither Rosetta 2 or Windows 11's x86-to-ARM emulator support AVX instructions. (Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, The Last of Us: Part 1, et. al.) Not to derail the thread, this will be my only post on the matter, but there has been some chatter over here.

My experience has been that Windows 10 and Windows 11 licenses/keys are interchangeable.

Ok, I see what you're saying, you want to attach a desktop GPU to the laptop via the DGFF port. It seems like this would be completely possible for "anyone" to build because the spec for the ports is public, but I haven't heard anything about such a contraption being made. A couple of "gotchas" occur to me. The Framework 16's "empty" expansion bay module which just has fans in it still uses the DGFF ports. The fan power and speed sensors go through those ports. So, such an adapter would have to take the form of an expansion bay module with fans AND some kind of data output connector for the eGPU. It would still be somewhat cumbersome because to detach at the DGFF ports because you would have to power the system off, snap out the keyboard, and remove the screws holding the DGFF connector in place. (...This could be "solved" if the data connector between the expansion bay module and the eGPU could be easily detached from the outside.) Err. Heck. They already have an expansion bay module that has two NVMe connectors inside. Hasn't someone made a NVMe-to-GPU adapter already...? (Granted, it would be limited to four PCIe lanes unless you could somehow use both NVMe connectors at the same time.)

Framework themselves indicated that they would release an eGPU enclosure that could fit one of their laptop GPUs. It would be Thunderbolt. Possibly not until they have an upgraded GPU to offer, so people have something to use their “old” one for.

I didn't see Death Stranding, but they did show some other current/modern console games like a pair of recent Resident Evil releases. I think they are getting to the point where the technology is there... It is now a matter of convincing game publishers that the market is there to justify spending resources to port their games to Apple platforms. ......I also remain a bit unclear about what their plans are for Game Porting Toolkit (GPTK). It was pitched as a developer tool only to basically evaluate games on macOS, but developers are not allowed to use it to ship a game, they must complete a port to macOS/Metal. As such, GPTK was released with a restrictive license, basically allowing you to download it freely but not use it in any shipping products. Like I said before, it seems like they put a lot of work and polish into this thing and it seems weird if that is all they intended to use it for. It didn't stop other folks from getting to work and quickly figuring out ways to use it to run pretty much any Windows game on macOS, and tools like CXPatcher or Whisky make feasible for non-techy people to get it up and running. Anyway. With the most recent beta "1.0.4" released a couple of weeks ago, Apple has silently changed the license for GPTK to allow redistribution of the D3DMetal library. They are still not allowing it in commercial products, but Wine packagers can now include it. The tools I mentioned above are now bundling D3DMetal directly so it even easier to get Windows games up and running on macOS and they are including everything you need in one package; you no longer need to go and fetch the GPTK package from Apple's dev site. Why did Apple make this license change? They clearly would prefer that game publishers make proper full Mac ports, but it seems sort of like a "wink-wink here you go" towards the crowd that is trying to just get Windows builds of games to run on macOS. They've also been notably improving performance with each release. Elden Ring FPS has almost doubled between the original June release of GPTK and the most recent beta. (I saw people struggling to get it above mid-30s FPS and now it can run at a pretty constant 60 FPS, 1080p with medium settings on a M2 Max.) Also noteworthy is that the guy in Apple who is driving GPTK is Nat Brown, who used to work for Valve.

https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2023/08/25/announcing-windows-11-insider-preview-build-23531-dev-channel/ Second bullet point: In the European Economic Area (EEA), Windows system components use the default browser to open links. So, if you are in Europe, they will stop making all Start menu search results and widget clicks open in Edge ... but if you live elsewhere, then sorry, we're going to continue shoving Edge down your throat? 😕 Score for Europe for once again kicking big tech into making a positive change for consumers. If only they didn't limit it to that geographic area. Though the EdgeDeflector guy says it doesn't seem to have changed at all for him. https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows-system-components-default-edge.html

You can take an ISO and flash it onto a USB drive using something like Rufus, and that will work fine.

If you are talking about a fresh install, it goes just like any other Windows install. It's been a while since I did this but I actually think it doesn't ask you for a product key during the install, you just end up unactivated and have to enter the key from settings after the install is done. If you're talking about an upgrade install, similarly it works like any other Windows install if you are upgrading from an earlier LTSC. If you want to upgrade from regular non-LTSC Windows to an LTSC version, you have to change a registry key first to allow it (I detailed this in the first post of this thread).

This is one thing that interests me about Framework... If you're willing to run a couple of generations behind, then ongoing cheap upgrades to your laptop could be a thing! It remains to be seen if they can keep this going for a string of several generations and if they will offer more variety on the 16" side.

Yeah... I guess you could check and make sure that the battery contacts are clean in your M6800. But most likely, if the battery seems good in another system, then the motherboard is the next suspect.

It is, unfortunately, poorly documented that the battery will gobble up one of the NVMe slots in the Precision 7670 unless you get an RTX A3000 or better GPU, which will get you a slightly "thicker" chassis that can hold the battery off to the side. Realized I never really followed up on the post above about the display panel. Man, I really wanted to like this laptop and I was very excited during the lead-up to purchase, and upon receiving it, coming off of 10 years on my Precision M6700. But ongoing mounting issues just made me turn sour to it and the direction that Dell is taking with this line in general. Don't get me wrong. It is great that they are offering a 17" system (...no other workstation vendors are...) with high-spec parts, up to 128 GB of RAM, and 4 NVMe slots. But... The audio situation is crap. I think most of the blame here falls on the Realtek driver so I don't know how much you can blame Dell (other than that they insist on continuing to use a Realtek audio chip in their laptops). It's not just this laptop, I have the same issue with my Precision 7560 and other Precisions that I have used. It has a long delay on switching to 3.5mm/headphones and sometimes it just stops working with 3.5mm until I reboot. Sometimes, there is a "popping sound" when the audio system turns on and off (poor power management?), which you can hear before and after a Windows alert noise. It tries really hard to make the experience better with "audio enhancements" that just make things sound weird and echo-y on VOIP calls (i.e. WebEx). Audio dropouts under certain types of load are not uncommon and work must be done to make other system-level components in the system behave well with minimal DPC latency. (None of these problems existed under Linux. I am mostly blaming the Windows driver from Realtek.) The cooling system needs work, as detailed numerous times in this thread. Maybe Intel CPU power management is at fault here too. Why is the system running hot when it is sitting idle, at <3% CPU usage? I was afraid to run it for long periods with the lid shut because the entire top lid enclosure got toasty. Fan noise on top of that. The system makes a very audible whir-up sound when the fans turn on. They run higher than needed for a second or two before settling into the normal run speed. Since the system wants to cycle the fans on and off on a regular basis when the system is running an idle workload, I had to run a program to measure the fan speed and run an artificial CPU load to keep the fans from powering off when the fan speed got too low. (My sensorimotor OCD can't handle that fan-power-up noise occurring randomly.) I had issues with inconsistent GPU performance and it randomly throttling the discrete GPU while gaming. Not just me, @Ionising_Radiation reported similar behavior on the Precision 7560. It seems like it has to do with NVIDIA Dynamic Boost and generally the CPU and GPU stealing power from each other, and it can be "worked around" with a specific configuration, but who should have to spend time figuring this out? (Also, never mind the fact that Optimus never seemed to work right and fully power off the dGPU consistently when it was not in use.) And then, then there is the OS. I have railed about the direction that Microsoft is taking with Windows 11 already (link in sig). Ongoing performance issues that "should not be there" are part of what prompted me to dump it for Linux back in April. And ongoing things like nagging pop-up windows asking you to switch to Bing bring me back to the notion of "Whose computer is this, anyway?" and really put me off from using Windows. Back to the display panel replacement... A Dell tech did show up with a second display panel replacement, and the new display panel was "fine". The whole experience was kind of the last straw for me, though. I really stopped using the system after that. I did some research and ended up buying a max-spec MacBook Pro later that week. I've been happily using it since then. A learning curve, sure, even coming off of previous professional Mac experience this is my first time using one as a daily driver. But, performance is "fine". (Even for gaming — I just finished playing through Shadow of the Tomb Raider and it ran fine at 1510p/60FPS with the "highest" graphics preset. Gaming performance is there, just getting games that you want to run is the issue sometimes.) GPTK has opened new doors for bringing newer DX11/12 Windows games to macOS (along with things like CXPatcher), and Apple has continued to refine it since the first beta release only 2.5 months ago, with each new version squeezing out more FPS. The battery life is easily triple what the Precision 7770 could provide, it is cool and silent when doing office-type work but can offer high performance when needed (and full performance on battery power to boot), the screen is wonderful, speakers are great as well, it has a giant trackpad that works great with gestures, and the OS is performing great even with two dozen apps open and a Windows VM running. On the negative side, I will complain about the keyboard layout. I miss the numeric keypad and I'm getting used to a whole new set of keyboard shortcuts. And of course, the there's the general lack of modularity or upgrade potential, and the lack of removeable storage in particular is a bummer (I just configured it with the max 8TB, which will work for now, and I have moved the drives from my Precision 7770 to work as NAS storage). Granted, Dell (and other vendors) have already been generally moving in this direction. Even in these newer Precision systems, just look at how painful it is to replace the keyboard, or the fact that the display panel is attached with adhesive rather than screws. Definitely something I would throw out to consider if your workload can tolerate it. Performance might not be quite as high as the latest Intel-based mobile workstations, but as a laptop the MacBook Pro is really the system to beat these days, not requiring you to "decide" between a cool/quiet system and a high-performance system but being able to offer both. (This is all I will say about the MacBook in this thread for now. For more discussion about a possible Mac transition I would ask to not side-rail this thread but look at my thread over in the macOS/iOS section of this forum.) Really, though, in the end everything is a compromise in the end and you have to decide what is the least annoying tradeoff for your particular situation.

Huh. That's new. I messed around with this with Quadro M5000M and P5000 and it would never budge.