Aaron44126

Consistency mode has specific requirements. Its purpose is to lock the fan speed at a low level, but you have to wait for the EC to "decide" to turn the fans on before they can be locked. The reason is to prevent the fans from turning off (I detest the constant on/off cycling). They will automatically be unlocked if the temperature rises above the threshold set. The status bar will show the current status of this mode.

Instructions given to the embedded controller to modify the fan behavior will persist past a reboot. A full shutdown is needed to fully reset it. Dell Fan Manager will remember its previous settings but they will not be "applied" to your system until you actually run the app.

No. If the program causes trouble (which is unlikely), fully power off the laptop and then turn it back on. There is nothing that it does that survives a full shutdown.

...It is linked in my post immediately above. As an aside, I'm having difficulties with the ML-1210 printer now. The driver doesn't work with Windows on ARM. There doesn't seem to be a good way to get it working with ARM macOS, either. Also, the printer has started picking up multiple sheets at a time from the input tray and cleaning it didn't help to stop this behavior. I'll probably be replacing it later in the year.

Eh? Being based on Chromium, I fully expect Microsoft to move to the same release schedule as Google in short order, as well as other browsers that run off of Chromium (Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, etc.). They won't want to be seen as "behind" on security. ...At least updates are handled in a mostly transparent fashion and most users won't notice (other than the occasional prompt to restart your browser, if you don't already shut your machine down daily). The weekly updates are only bugfixes. "Major" updates will continue at the four-week cadence.

Yes, it applies to one of the ports but not the other.

Found this picture. Its the checkbox on the right (which should be available to click if switchable graphics is enabled). If it is not there on your system, don't know what to suggest. (Despite the name of the option and the help text, it will permanently attach that display to the iGPU.)

It is listed as being under the "Video" section, which is where I found it on the M4800. https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/precision-m6800-workstation/precm6800om/system-setup-options?guid=guid-fafcef15-7de3-4df2-a3f1-00e66aba9d3a&lang=en-us

Fortunately in this case, the keyboard is cheap to purchase and easy to replace. That "easy to replace" part at least is no longer the case with their newer 2022/2023 systems.....

The option is something like "Enable dock Display Port through Integrated Graphics". If enabled, it will move one of the DVI/DP ports on the dock to the iGPU. (I used to use this with my Precision M4800.)

Check video section in BIOS setup. There is a checkbox that will move one of the ePort outputs to the iGPU. I think it is normal for the right-click GPU selector to be missing these days. It is “supposed” to automatically pick the appropriate GPU, but you can override in either NVIDIA control panel or Windows advanced graphics settings. Unlike with Windows, you should not have to do any modding to get the driver to load in Linux. Ideally, your distro has an NVIDIA GPU driver package in the standard repos… install that and you’re good to go?

It is around that spot. It will be pretty obvious. You need to make it "flat" so that it is in line with the other parts that cover VRMs on the card. Cutting/grounding down is the obvious way to do that, but "bending" would be fine if you can make it work.

You need to flip it over. The part that needs to be removed is on the "bottom" side (the side that makes contact with the GPU card). It is around that area and it will be pretty obvious.

I don't know anything with regards to the AMD GPUs or GPU heatsink.

Missed the "action" but some notes. Tesla M6 has the same specs as a GeForce 980M or Quadro M5000M, and there have been a number of cases of people using it in this system without issue, though you do have to forego direct video output and use it with Optimus. This also means that the HDMI and DisplayPort on the laptop will be non-functional. I believe that the display outputs are physically disabled on these cards so you can't get them back by flashing a different GPU's vBIOS on. (VGA port will work, it is hooked up to the iGPU. If you have an ePort dock, you can also configure one of the DVI/DisplayPort ports on the dock to attach to the iGPU, in BIOS setup.) Pascal GPUs need a vBIOS flash before booting Windows will work. With regular commercial vBIOS, you will get an ACPI BSOD when booting Windows (even if you are just trying to boot Windows PE or the installer). You have to flash an early "engineering sample" vBIOS on to get around this. We only have working vBIOS'es for Quadro P3000, P4000, and P5000; no GeForce cards. (Somehow, this is not an issue under Linux and you can boot it up with any Pascal GPU, without messing with the vBIOS.) ...But Turing GPUs will work with Windows without any issue from the vBIOS, if you can find one that you can physically mount. My recent experience with Optimus on Linux was that I had no problems at all with it rendering games out through Optimus. I tried both native Linux games/emulators, and Windows games running through Steam+Proton. No trouble at all. Things have improved a lot over the past several years and it is now basically "plug-and-play". However, I was working with a GeForce 3080 Ti GPU (Ampere) and I am not sure if NVIDIA has done the same work with earlier GPUs. I saw lots of driver notes about certain things only working with Turing and up. As noted, depending on which cooler you have in your system, you may have to dremel off a bit of metal in order to have it fit with a newer GPU. This is true on NVIDIA GPUs in particular, anything Maxwell and later has a VRM on the board in a different spot than it was on the Kepler GPUs and it will be "in the way" of a bit of the heatsink that sticks down off the bottom. I'm not sure what the situation is on AMD GPUs. There is a version of the NVIDIA heatsink that is flat on the bottom and won't need any modification. It is not very common and it has the same part number as the normal one that you do have to mod, so you can't tell without physically inspecting it. Just sort of luck of the draw which one you got.

Err, apparently X will pay your legal bills if you face some kind of unfair treatment from your employer because of something that you post on X. Those employees that Musk fired for criticizing him on Twitter can make a claim, right? Anyway, a guy who doesn't pay his office rent is totally trustworthy.

If you are up for weird chess, I have got some enjoyment out of Really Bad Chess. (Android | Apple)

Terrible luck with laptop displays. Every single personal laptop that I have ever purchased has come with or developed a display issue that I had to have serviced, be it stuck pixels or debris stuck in the LCD or whatever. Actually, a new display issue with my Precision 7770 was part of what kicked me into switching to the MacBook. (This is just personal systems. My work systems have always been fine ...) Anyway, as it turns out, the MacBook Pro is no exception. Last week I noticed a "bright spot" on the MacBook Pro. Only visible on a bright background, it covered way more than a few pixels, being about three-quarters of an inch tall and one-quarter of an inch wide. It may have been new or it may have just taken a while for me to notice since I normally use "dark mode" applications. I took it to the Apple Store and the tech there easily saw the issue when I pointed it out and didn't give me any grief about having the display replaced. I left the laptop with them on Friday, and they promptly sent it to a service depot in Tennessee where the display replacement was performed on Saturday. I just got it back now (Tuesday) because the service depot couldn't ship it out until Monday. A letter says that the display panel was replaced, and also the "lid angle sensor" which they said had physical damage...? I was not charged anything for the repair. So, four-day turnaround, but it could have been two-day if there wasn't a weekend in there. I was mostly kept on-edge by inconsistent tracking updates, both on the end of Apple and UPS. For example, UPS tracking showed it moving through the system early this morning but it never showed "out for delivery", so I was sure that it had missed the truck and I'd be waiting another day. But then it just showed up at my door... without the driver knocking for a signature... even though "signature required" is printed right here on the shipping label. Anyway. I hope that was my last laptop display replacement? (Ha.)

Twitter... I mean X... "took" the @X handle from a photographer. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/07/26/x-twitter-handle-account-owner-not-paid-elon-musk-rebrand/

I've had more time to use it, so more impressions. The biggest thing that has struck me is, Apple really knows how to make a laptop. I mean, setting aside for a moment the fact that there isn't really any modularity to it so you can't upgrade the RAM or storage, and it's not even that straightforward to replace the battery, which is a quite notable downside to me. And the fact that it doesn't have a numeric keypad for some reason. As a "PC", it might be a bit of a disappointment, but as a laptop, it is a really nice system to use. Some comparisons with the Dell Precision laptops here because that's what I've been using for the last 10+ years. I have zero complaints about fan behavior. The fans ramp up when there is a big compute load (but only get about half as loud as my Precision systems did), but otherwise the system is silent during normal use. Battery life is borderline ridiculous. I haven't had the battery drop below 50% yet and I'm using the system "unplugged" way more often than I did with the Precision, which I'd be lucky to get 3.5 hours out of if I was being pretty careful. And there's the fact that it doesn't get hot when idling, whereas my newer Precisions were always on the warm side (especially the bottom/back) which didn't make them that nice to use as laptops. And lastly, you can use the system at full performance on battery power. I was playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider yesterday on battery and it still maintained a consistent 60+ FPS at 1500p/"highest" graphics preset. Now, obviously a situation like that means you can't run on battery for more than a couple of hours. I only did about 20 minutes and the battery dropped from 80% to 64% during that time. But, the Precision systems throttle down hard on battery (the GPU especially) so gaming on battery isn't something you can really do. Bottom line, I guess, is that this system strikes a great balance between battery life and performance, and shifting between them depending on what you are doing. On the "PC" side, you sort of have to pick which model laptop you want based on which of these is more important to you. I do hope new regulations coming out of Europe at least mean that the battery will become easily swappable in future models. I don't really have any hopes for the RAM and SSD ever being swappable again. You have to get the system with the specs that you need for the duration of its life. One thing I'll note is, if you pay for the ongoing AppleCare warranty, they'll replace the battery for you at no cost if the OS triggers the "your battery is degraded and should be replaced" warning. I'll also note that it attempts to save the battery lifespan by only allowing it to charge higher than 80% once per day. (You do have the option to force a full charge if you know you're going to need the power.) Another thing that I noticed is that it makes the efficiency cores primary, not the performance cores, which is backwards from how Intel is doing it. macOS actually seems to take steps to avoid using the performance cores at all unless there is sufficient CPU usage. There is no way to force a process onto the performance cores, as far as I can tell. Regarding the display. When I saw this, I got to looking at the display response times, and saw reviews showing a slow response time of 40+ ms, not a great figure. I saw people on Reddit complaining about this as well. It does seem to be better than the M1 models which are even worse. Poking around with this myself, I am not able to see any issues with "ghosting" when scrolling or when watching videos. The response time is normally fine. I haven't observed any issues or latency/delay while gaming. It's not perfect though by any stretch. Situations when drastic changes to the mini-LED lighting are needed cause visible issues. For example, an easy one to see is moving the mouse cursor around an all-black background. The mini-LED lighting seems to be on a slight delay to keep up with where the mouse cursor is. I've seen practical issues when watching videos that involve a lot of "all black" as well. Another easy one to see is ending credits to a TV show or something. If there is no "scrolling" or "fade in/out" and the credits are just popping from one set to the next with an immediate transition, you can see the mini-LED display take a moment to figure out which zones should be lit at each transition. Also, scenes that involve a lot of darkness and quick transitions can look a little funny. An example would be the very opening moments of the Foundation season 2 premiere. There is a quick series of dark black and white shots with moments of black in between, and I could see the mini-LED display "confused" about whether some zones should be lit or not at some parts. One other thing I've seen is the backlight being a little weird when working in the Windows command prompt in an RDP session, where the command prompt background is all black. So, areas of abrupt motion or quick transitions on top of all-black seem to be the problem areas. This would probably need a switch to OLED or micro-LED to fix. Otherwise, the display is brilliant. With regards to macOS itself. Overall, I am finding the experience to be pretty smooth, even though I am still figuring it out somewhat. (I use to admin a bunch of Macs but never have used one as a "daily driver" until now.) I'll say that I'm now regularly using the system with 20+ windows open and there is no hitching at all in the UI, it's really smooth. I have "Time Machine" set up to back up to a network drive and that seems really nice for keeping file history. (Hourly snapshots for a day, daily snapshots for a month, and weekly snapshots "forever" until the drive runs out of space. It uses hard links to consolidate identical copies of files in different snapshots without taking up additional space to store them, similar to "Timeshift" on Linux.) I've had to do some scripting to get system behaviors that I want, like correcting the display backlight setting to my preference when I plug in or disconnect from AC power, automatically locking the session and power off the display if I shut the laptop lid, or automatically switching the system to a 16:10 display mode for gaming so that the "notch" is hidden but I don't get black bars on the left and right side of the display. This is something that I don't really count as a negative. I did similar work in both Windows and Linux to work around "idiosyncrasies" of those systems that didn't jive with the behavior that I wanted. I'm normally a mouse guy but I've been making use of the MacBook trackpad. It's way bigger than any "Windows" trackpad that I have used. Gestures for scrolling, zooming, switching between multiple desktops, going "back" in the web browser, moving apps out of the way to expose the desktop, and bringing up Launchpad are implemented well really handy. What has sort of surprised me is the ecosystem of slick apps that allow for improving macOS in ways that I think Apple "should" do, but doesn't. I've been making use of a number of them. Some examples... Rectangle provides window snapping like you would expect, coming from a Windows or Linux system. Drag a window to the left edge to snap it on the left half of the screen. Things like that. LinearMouse allows you to adjust the behavior of a mouse scroll wheel, which is messed up on macOS. On Windows and Linux, scrolling the scroll wheel one "notch" scrolls by a fixed amount. On macOS, they want it to have "acceleration" so the scroll starts out slow but picks up speed the more you go. I usually scroll by discrete "clicks" of the wheel so I prefer the non-accelerated behavior. LinearMouse allows you to set it to work this way, reverse the scroll direction if you like, and even control the scroll amount on a per-app basis if you like. Bartender lets you clean up the "menu bar" (sort of "system tray" in the top right that fills up with icons reflecting background apps that are running). It doesn't seem like its possible to set up "custom resolutions" for the laptop display anymore, but BetterDisplay will allow you to set up a dummy "external" display at any resolution that you like. You can then set the laptop built-in display mirror the dummy display to force a certain resolution or aspect ratio. (I've seen at least one game, StarCraft Remastered, that will stretch a 16:9 image to fill the display and mess up the aspect ratio. This can force the display to stay in 16:9. It could also be handy for screen recording a video for YouTube or whatever.) Almost everything seems to be available through Homebrew so I get a Linux-like package install/upgrade experience. A lot of utility apps include the "install through Homebrew" command right on their web site. Homebrew also allows installing Linux-ish terminal tools (i.e. a proper current version of rsync). I also found terminal utilities through Homebrew to do things like set the display brightness and change the display resolution. Microsoft Office for Mac is not as "good" as I thought it would be. It's a step down from the Windows version. Outlook is very stripped down. It doesn't support "Tasks" in the same way that the Windows version does (it just wants me to use Microsoft To Do, basically), and not all of the rules for junk mail handling are exposed (ability to mange the "safe recipients" list is missing for example). Also, it will prefer to "copy" mail instead of "move" it if you drag-and-drop a piece of mail to a folder that belongs to a different account, unless you hold down the "Command" key while doing the drag-and-drop. I actually ended up dumping Outlook for Apple's built-in "Mail" app, and I'll use the Windows version of Outlook when I need to do some specific tasks. I'm also trying the Apple Calendar for my personal calendar, which offers better syncing with my phone and watch anyway. Excel seems to have its zoom level set too low by default; everything seems a bit small. OneNote is OK, I have been using it over the Windows version most of the time, but I do wish there was an option to put tabs "on top" like the Windows version has. Publisher and Visio are completely missing, I have to use the Windows versions for those. I was a little bit pleasantly surprised to find that Microsoft does now ship an ARM64 version of Office for Windows, so it is able to run in my Windows/ARM VM without x64 translation needed. That's it for now. Still happily moving forward with the discovery and setup.

Oh, apparently Microsoft also trademarked "X" a few years back and "social networking" is on the list of uses. https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87980831&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch (I saw this on a news article stating that Facebook/Meta owns this trademark, but the documents all point to Microsoft ...?)

The police stopped this sign demolition, leaving the letters "er" in place for now ... https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/24/23140317/twitter-sign-sf-hq-removal-demolition-police Saw that a Japanese band has a local trademark on "X". https://www.npr.org/2023/07/25/1189902006/what-will-twitter-be-named-in-japan-since-x-japan-is-already-taken-by-a-rock-ban

Twitter is rebranding to "X". Tweets are to be called "x's". The logo change has happened already but it looks like the transition will be gradual and not all at once. https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/24/23804973/twitter-x-logo-brand-replacement How much of Twitter's remaining value is the "brand" which is now getting tossed out?

Suspend BitLocker. Disable the TPM device in Device Manager. Reboot to BIOS setup. Clear the TPM. (You check the box in BIOS setup but it won’t prompt to clear until you boot up normally.) Boot back to Windows and try to update the TPM. I’m not sure if you have to enable the TPM device in device manager first, but only do it if it makes you, because Windows might “claim” it right away. If it works, enable the TPM device and then resume BitLocker and you should be all set. Have your BitLocker recovery keys handy just in case.

This wouldn't be on the Windows 2000 side, but rather on the side of whatever system you are trying to talk to from your Win2K box. You need to enable SMB 1.0 on the newer system in order to talk to it from Windows 2000. (If I search "Turn Windows features" on my Windows 10 system, it pops right up. You need to enable SMB 1.0 client and/or server, depending on which way you want traffic to go, but not the one about SMB 1.0 automatic removal.)