Aaron44126

The new heatsink should come with new pads and factory applied paste, so hopefully it works well enough like everyone else’s newer heatsink and I’ll just hold out until then.

Repasted. Observations: Repaste brought RPM speeds down 200-300 RPM, enough to be "silent" again, but not all the way down to 1000ish RPM. I probably didn't do a great paste job (shaky hands / sort of in a hurry) but good enough for now. ........."Optimized" profile is quieter than the "Quiet" profile, huh? If I switch to "Optimized" it will drop to the 1000 RPM range, and if I switch to "Quiet" it shoots right back up. Guess I'm using "Optimized" as my low-power profile from now on? ("Cool" and "Ultra performance" run at higher fan speeds than "Quiet".) I'll have to test with it and see if it ramps up more quickly (which I do not want). Also, got a notice from Dell on the heatsink shipping. They put an estimated ship date of March 24 on it. Good thing this isn't a part that I need in a hurry?

How many devices? 40 doesn't really seem like too much. I have a family of four here... On the network are four laptops, a Mac Mini, multiple phones & iPads, at least three gaming consoles, a Blu-ray player, TV streaming boxes, a couple of printers, a handful of IoT devices, not to mention a few switches and three APs... Isn't that hard to get up to "tens" of devices.

Yes. I was going to upgrade next week (with Windows patches) like I mentioned before. But, given this issue I will probably push that off until April patching, I don't want "variables" flying around when trying to address this.

Yeah, and really, 1000-1200 RPM (at idle) has been the norm for months, no matter where I was using the system. And like I mentioned, I was running an artificial CPU load if the fan speed got too low to keep them from powering off. (That is no longer necessary.) It is still the tail end of winter time here, ambient temperatures aren't very elevated... I haven't been paying close attention, it could have been creeping up over the past few weeks and I just noticed it when it started to regularly be over 1500 RPM (which is when it becomes noticeably audible). Today I was poking around for possible alternate causes but I can't find any. dGPU is properly powered off when it should be. CPU doesn't seem to be doing any background busywork, and clock speed is low (I have turbo boost off most of the time). Yet CPU temperatures are in the mid 50's to low 60's, definitely too high for an idle workload. Since I don't know when the replacement heatsink is going to be in, I might take it apart and repaste this evening anyway, if I can find the time — mostly because I'd like to know if it is an issue with the cooling, or something else (crazy PCH load driving up temps or something?).

I ended up doing the online chat, because I though it would be easier. In the end, it was probably not easier. The rep wanted to go through my BIOS version / chipset driver version / asked a lot of questions. All due diligence, its fine, but it took like half an hour. Anyway. A new heatsink assembly is being dispatched. (Part only, no technician.) A funny thing is they gave me timeframes of "2 business days" for parts only and "3 business days" for an on-site tech. I thought this was supposed to be next business day service? Hoping to get the heatsink assembly tomorrow, but we'll see... [Edit] ...Of course there would be a parts delay.

Last year we got these "confirmed" dates from sales reps: May 10 June 7 June 16 June 21 June 23 June 28 ...The actual release date was July 7. No rep actually dropped that date until July 5. So, just a heads up — take anything the reps say regarding the release date with a grain of salt. Now, they were having supply/production difficulties last year which delayed the release. Maybe they have that sorted out and it really will launch on April 1...? [Edit] April 1 is a Saturday, which doesn't make sense as a launch day. Now, you said "by" April 1 so they could release before then. Dell typically launches systems on Tuesday or Thursday. It will definitely not fit. Get the one without the heatsink. You can use Dell's provided heatsink or get a 2mm aftermarket heatsink, that might fit.

Noticing that my idle fan speeds have been creeping up. It used to idle at 1000-1100 RPM (and I had to run an artificial CPU load to prevent the fans from periodically turning off). Today it was running at more like 1700-1900 RPM. I blew out the fans (quite dusty) but it only went down to about 1500 RPM. ...Rather than repaste again, I think that tomorrow I am finally going to call Dell and ask for a new heatsink assembly. I'm still using the original Delta version.

Yes, Chrome is weird and launches many processes that don't actually have windows associated with them, and I'd suspect that only the actual GUI processes are marked DPI aware here. (Chrome's scaling support is very good as you noted.) ...Every tab gets a process, every extension gets a process, and there are some processes that just manage GPU access, networking, storage, and so on. I think that they set it up this way just to make it harder for one process crashing to bring down the whole browser? There are probably articles about it. Anyway, you can see some of what Chrome is doing by looking at its own Task Manager (right-click the top bar, the empty space where tabs go above the URL, and select "Task Manager" from the menu). You can match the PIDs with the PIDs in Windows Task Manager to see what is what. (Not sure why you would really need to, but possibly interesting.)

AFAIK, Windows 11 and (later versions of) Windows 10 behave the same when it comes to DPI scaling. That said, I haven't done a whole lot of testing on Windows 11, so there could be improvements that I am not aware of. I am subscribed to a lot of Microsoft tech blogs where they post about the ins and outs of OS changes, so I'd think that they would have an article if they had made specific improvements to scaling in Windows 11, and I would have seen such a thing... but... maybe not. The scaling inside of applications that you reference is not really related to system-level scaling, it's mostly handled by the application itself. I think that you would find that the behavior is pretty consistent between Windows 11, and say, Windows 7. Apps can scale most things fine by just blowing up the font size and adjusting the layout accordingly. There might have been improvements to font rendering on later versions of Windows to help it look a little bit better. Rasterized content (i.e. embedded images) might look blurry scaled up, unless the image was already higher resolution than its display size. So, I haven't done anything to tweak Quicken's scaling, but I might try the "System (Enhanced)" DPI override if you think it works good. I do have a couple of comments that I can make here. The first comment is with regards to how Windows decides to scale applications that do not support native scaling. It uses bitmap scaling like I mentioned before, basically rendering the apps at 100% and then blowing them up to match the desktop's scaling ratio. The thing is, though, the bitmap scaling method used is different depending on if you are using an integer scaling ratio (200%, 300%, 400%, etc.) or not (150%, 175%, 225%, etc.). With a non-integer scaling ratio, you get a blurry bilinear filter which I think is what you are complaining about. Here, I have Quicken scaled to 175% (blurry) behind Notepad scaled to 175% (Notepad supports scaling natively so it is crisp by comparison). I zoomed it way in so the individual pixels are visible. (Click the image to zoom in if the forum shows it small.) With an integer scaling ratio, Windows uses a pixel doubling / nearest neighbor scaling method. There is no blur, it looks "blocky" instead. This is what I experience using Quicken on a 4K panel with 200% scaling. It basically looks the same as it would running on a 1080p panel at 100%; when you're not zoomed in like this the blockiness isn't noticeable unless you kind of stop and look at it closely. This isn't just true of Quicken... Any app that doesn't support native scaling behaves like this. The second comment is regarding Quicken itself, just a little performance trick that I have discovered which you might find useful. Quicken keeps everything open that you have ever looked at during the current session. Every view that you open (transaction registers, screens with graphs, etc.) basically gets opened in a window and never closed, even if you move to a different view. You might have noticed that it gets bogged down and slow if you have been bouncing around between a lot of different screens in the app, and closing and reopening it can restore performance back to "normal". The reason is that, whenever you change something (add/delete/update a transaction), it has to update not only the window that you are currently looking at, but also all of the other views that you have had open in the current session (even though you can't see them). ...And Quicken is not exactly super speedy at updating even one view in many cases. The trick is that you can close out views, so that they will not have to be updated anymore, and that will improve performance. Just hit Ctrl+F4 and the current view will be closed. I discovered this by accident one day. I'm in the habit of doing this whenever I am done with anything other than registers for accounts that I use most commonly. Also, when I first open the app, I go to the "All transactions" screen, then I go back to the "Home" screen and close it with Ctrl+F4. The "Home" screen will have to be updated on pretty much any transaction change, but I never look at it, so there's no reason to spend time waiting for it to update whenever I update or enter a transaction. ...I have to visit "All transactions" first before going to close "Home" view, because it will not let you close a view if it is the only one running. (You can also press Ctrl+Tab to switch to the most recent opened view "behind" the current one. It doesn't let you cycle between all open views, though.) I agree on the whole subscription thing, I am similarly disgruntled by the price of Quicken. I need the Home & Business version which is the most expensive one. It actually costs more than buying a personal Office 365 subscription, which seems crazy for the amount of "app" that you get. ...But there's no way around it, and the $6/month or whatever is definitely worth it compared to the thought of trying to do the same work without Quicken. ...Though I am happy that the new management is actually cranking out real features and fixing stuff from time to time. It seems like for the last several years before Intuit sold it, they would release a new version every year that was barely any different than the year before but want to charge full price. (And you had to pay up at least every few years because they would discontinue online support for the old versions after a period of time. So it was basically a subscription model already.) [Edit] One other thing I remembered. You can actually add "DPI awareness" as a column in Task Manager if you want to see what's going on with each running program. "Unaware" apps would be the blurry ones. I would like to continue discussing the ins and outs of various Linux things, but separate from this discussion... I'll try to make a "Here's everything I'm worried about for a potential switch to Linux!" thread over in the Linux subforum sometime in the next week or two.

He's apparently been failing to pay out severance — which is required by California law in some cases (since he gave short notice for the initial mass layoff) — in addition to failing to make rent payments and fulfill other financial obligations. I'm not sure what's up with this guy, it is bound to catch up to him eventually indeed as lawsuits play out, but he doesn't seem to care about "guidelines" right now. He's also been shown to fire people at the drop of a hat for basically saying things he doesn't like to hear. If I were employed by Twitter then I would certainly be treading carefully.

You have to cut a piece off that hits one of the VRMs at the "top" of the card (far side from the socket/connector). People have done it with a Dremel or similar tool.

Windows has very robust high-DPI support (since around Windows 10, version 1703) and it is probably better than any other desktop OS. But you do have to sort of get how it works in order to use it effectively. Scaling issues are virtually always the fault of the application, not the OS, often because the application is claiming a level of DPI awareness that it does not actually have, or claiming to be DPI aware but implementing it wrong. (I use some Java applications at work that claim full DPI awareness but are not actually aware, so they just render everything very tiny on a 4K display set to 200% scaling for example.) There are options in Windows to override the scaling behavior by-app so in my experience it is always possible to get a workable experience for any application (though you may have to resort to plain bitmap scaling which can make the applications appear blurry). On the flip side, some apps claim to be DPI unaware but use largely standard GUI elements so no dev work is really required for them to be scaled; such apps can be safely "forced" to run with scaling enabled and they will look better for it. Mainstream applications have come a long way in implementing proper scaling support, as high-DPI displays become more mainstream in both laptops and desktops. But, I still routinely run into lesser-used business applications that have poor scaling support. So, part of what I meant when I put that in my list for Linux is figuring out how to mange applications that do not scale properly, or override scaling behavior if I so choose. Can you force applications to run with bitmap scaling if they do not implement scaling properly? Can you run some applications at a scaling level other than what you have set at the system level? Do applications running under Wine scale properly at all? Etc. Scaling is tricky business for a GUI developer. It's way easier to implement scaling in a macOS application. macOS only supports 100% and 200% scaling levels. (All other options that they have are achieved by running applications at 200% and then using bitmap scaling to make them larger or smaller from there — the OS handles that — and it will make apps appear blurry.) So, application developers just have to provide 1× and 2× versions of various graphical assets and the work is mostly done. Windows supports any arbitrary scaling level (25% increments in the basic graphics settings screen, but there is an advanced screen where you can enter any scaling value that you like) so it can obviously be more of a pain for applications to properly implement scaling if they are using any custom GUI elements. Some Windows applications support per-monitor scaling, which I greatly appreciate as well. If you move application windows between monitors running at different scaling levels, the application will adjust the scaling level on the fly. (Applications that do not support this run at the primary monitor scaling level and are bitmap-scaled up or down when running on other monitors at a different scaling level, again adding a sort of "blur" to them.) Most Windows built-in apps, UWP apps, and web browsers support per-monitor scaling. MS Office apps do as well (except OneNote for some reason). I don't know if any Linux applications support per-monitor scaling. macOS does not support this at all, it again relies on bitmap scaling to run apps at any level other than 100% or 200%. (Windows has supported DPI scaling since at least Windows 98, which I have recently tested in VMware, but it was sort of a hidden away option so not many applications supported it properly until more recently. It's only been really usable in more recent versions of Windows, since they have added support for to changing the scaling level without having to log out and start a whole new desktop session, selecting different scaling levels for different monitors in a multi-monitor configuration, overriding the scaling behavior for particular misbehaving applications, signals needed for developers to implement per-monitor DPI awareness, etc.) There's one of my key applications that I would have to figure out how to deal with to switch to Linux. Quicken is so terrible in its own way, but every other personal finance management solution is far worse, there really is no replacement for it. 1. When I looked into this, my understanding was that KDE isn't running on Wayland yet (or at least that is not the default configuration) which means that using different scaling ratios on different connected monitors is not possible. (When working, I have my laptop display which is 4K/200% and I pair it with a larger external display which is 4K/125%.) GNOME and other DEs on Wayland can offer different scaling ratios for different monitors. (But I did not realize that GNOME has to basically use full integer scaling.....) 2. This is also normal for Windows, some apps have robust support and can switch on the fly but many just use the scaling level that was set at launch need to be restarted to switch.

Yeah, NDAs are one thing to worry about, but I was thinking more directly of the fact that anyone speaking publicly about internal turmoil will likely be outright fired by Musk as soon as he figures out who they are...

If you're asking about the article immediately above, The Verge has many links in the article pointing to information about the downtime itself and Musk's statements on the matter, but as far as Twitter's internal situation is concerned, The Verge has acquired some internal sources (Twitter employees) that can't go "on the record" for obvious reasons. So I guess it's up to individuals to decide how reliable that reporting is. (I've been reading The Verge since its launch in 2011 and have found no reason to doubt their credibility... It's my second favorite tech news outlet.)

What happens when you put one engineer on the API project. How a single engineer brought down Twitter https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/6/23627875/twitter-outage-how-it-happened-engineer-api-shut-down (...Though, apparently they have their Slack instance back.)

Yes, the lack of control over your own system is ... out of control. Another reason that I am on Windows LTSC which doesn't ever get forced updates to a newer version/build, just a monthly security update package. Windows LTSC works a lot like how older versions of Windows worked from a maintenance perspective (pre-Windows 10), so I'm OK there, but licenses are sort of a pain for ordinary users to acquire. In any case, I've been a Windows user for ... a few decades ... and a reasonably happy one for much of that time (once I got off of 9x and onto the NT kernel anyway), and I just have to complain about the direction that they have been taking things in the past few years. I'm very interested in switching to Linux as a daily driver at some point. I have done a fair amount of thinking on it and I have a literal list of things that would have to be addressed in order to make the switch. The main problem is, I use some professional software that isn't available on Linux, so basically I have to choose between three options, none of which I especially like: Try to run the software in Wine (...I've done some limited testing with this and it didn't go well). Run the software in a Windows VM which I basically leave running at all times. (What's the point of switching then? It's just going to make my whole setup that much more complicated.) Don't switch and just keep using Windows. Other than that, the other issues that I have mostly require time to overcome. One is that I would have to reimplement my custom laptop thermal solution on Linux. (Everything that I need for this is available on Linux, it's just a matter of stringing the pieces together.) The others just require time to understand how certain things work (full disk encryption + TPM unlock, remote access to a running desktop session, dealing with NVIDIA/Intel hybrid graphics, DPI scaling with Linux applications, DPI scaling with Wine applications, selecting a full system backup solution, .....and like 15 other things....), and then do some trial and error with the available solutions, and decide what I like. It sounds like a kind of fun thing to tackle, actually, but I don't really have time to commit to it these days. I've been thinking about making a thread about this over in the Linux subforum; my specific issues on switching to Linux are sort of out of scope for this thread. Yeah, I'm pretty familiar with macOS as well and Apple likes to shuffle stuff around even more than Microsoft does (or at least that was the case until recently). I do like Apple for a lot of reasons, but I don't think that I could switch to a Mac as my daily driver (though in some ways it would be easier than switching to Linux).

Well, actually the short MXM cards will work if you can get the heatsink mounted properly. I don't remember seeing anyone try it in the M6800 specifically. You'll have to check the position of the screw holes (should be the same) and make sure that copper parts of the heatsink cover the RAM chips & VRMs, and that there is no other physical obstruction, and then you should be good. The heatsink is mostly flat so you can just cover the important bits with thermal pads and let the rest of it just hang off the end.

Yeah, I know it's not a super deep connection, and I was definitely aiming the "complaint" sort of comparison at GNOME 3 in particular, not Linux as a whole. It just sort of rings similar on the "GNOME/Microsoft does what they want, removing features / ignoring the needs of the more techy users / largely ignoring feedback from such users (or at least not giving enough time for feedback before launching their redesign)", something that occurred to me when I read the article. Otherwise like you say it is a very different situation, I fully realize the situation on Linux is very different — not the least of which is that no one is tied to GNOME on Linux, but Windows users don't have an option to switch out the desktop environment. And I wanted to point out how much I respect Linus Torvalds's approach to running things (clearly different from the GNOME approach) and how I wish Microsoft would be more like that, especially when it comes to bending over backwards to not break/remove things that end users actually use, even if its a small number of users. 😛

Yes, not "wrong" but definitely not good design. They could fix it by just adding some text like "Microphone access is currently allowed" near the "Don't allow" button. (Or better yet, just have a drop-down or radio buttons like you suggested.) The whole thing with microphone access controls is kind of funny. This has been tacked onto Windows (I'm not sure if they added it in Windows 8 or Windows 10, but it did not exist before), and there are ways for apps to go "around" this function and access the microphone even if access is not allowed according to this control panel setting. —————————————————————————————— As an aside, I've been reading some of the complain-y articles by Felipe Contreras on the state of certain things on Linux, and this recent one on GNOME 3 strikes me as echoing some of my complaints about Windows 11. For those that don't know, GNOME is a desktop environment for Linux, and for a long time it was the most widely used DE, but in 2011 they released GNOME 3 as a major overhaul to much controversy. Things were dumbed down a fair bit, and there was no way to get back a GNOME 2-like environment, other than continuing to run GNOME 2 (or one of the forks that popped up). GNOME developers were chasing "hypothetical" less techy users with their GNOME 3 design and from their statements you can see that at least some of them think they know what the users want better then the users do, and the project as a whole just did its own thing without really paying attention to user feedback. (.....Sound familiar?) Which runs counter to Linus Torvald's own running on Linux (there is a video about it embedded in that post), which is a philosophy that I really like: don't break user applications or user workflows. If they make a kernel change and it breaks an application, the kernel change is nearly always reverted, even if the application was "in the wrong" in the way that it was developed or using the Linux API. Same thing for user workflows using Linux tools. They might be adding new things on top all of the time, but they won't take away options or workflows that people use. If something works in a certain way, you can expect it to continue to work that way after the next update. There is a video on the subject featuring Linus himself embedded in the blog post linked above. (Linux desktop environments like GNOME are outside of Linus's management.) Now, I know that the Windows team has a strong commitment to backwards compatibility for applications, and I comment them there. (Most applications written for Windows 95 still work on Windows 11, after all.) I just wish that they would also take an approach like that when it comes to core functions of the OS, especially those that "power users" are likely to use. Things like missing an option for seconds on the taskbar clock, not allowing free placement of pinned items on the Start Menu, removing pretty much all of the customization options with regard to the taskbar, not allowing rounded corners on windows to be turned off, and even adding arbitrary/unnecessary hardware requirements (CPU+TPM) just run counter to this philosophy and that's at the core of one of my major complaints about Windows 11. Or really, I guess I am complaining less about Windows 11 specifically and more about this new direction that Windows has been heading towards since Windows 10's launch. It's not just about the specific features that I just listed, its also about the fact that now I have to consider the fact that any (obscure?) functions that I make use of to make my life easier may not be there in the next release or the one after that. And that Microsoft apparently feels that they can change things whenever they want and not stick to a release schedule or allow users to defer updates. This is partly why I am on Windows LTSC, and also no longer using Windows's built-in file manager or application launcher (and I'd love it if someone could come up with a better/alternate taskbar...).

It needs to run elevated which is tricky. Windows will generally automatically decline to run such apps at startup. My suggestion would be to add a job in Task Scheduler, set it to run at login, and make sure "Run with highest privileges" is selected.

If you look at the service manual, you can see that both the CPU and GPU chips are right there on the motherboard, not separate. https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/inspiron-16-7630-2-in-1-laptop/inspiron-16-7630-2in1-service-manual/removing-the-system-board?guid=guid-7db6166b-f81c-4e7a-b7a9-434fe48cd6aa&lang=en-us (This is for Inspiron 7630; looks like there are three different "16 2 in 1" models.)

I'm a laptop guy these days, but I do have some old USB stuff still hooked up. Still hooked up to my USB hub at my desk is an Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive, which I bought in early 2008 (literally a few weeks before HD-DVD died as a standard). I bought it because I wanted to be able to play both HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies, and I was purchasing a new laptop with a Blu-ray drive built in. (That laptop was my Inspiron 1720, which marked my transition from a desktop to a laptop as my daily driver.) I do occasionally use this drive to rip DVDs to Plex. Oh, I also have a USB 3.5" floppy drive hooked up to the same hub, which originally belonged to my wife (before I met her), which she bought in 2003 to go with her new laptop that did not have a floppy drive built-in. I rarely use it but it has come in handy a few times to rescue some data that other family members had on floppy disks. (Still having an A: floppy drive listed on my current Windows system is kind of fun, ha.) I did a hardware purge a few years ago so I don't have much left in the way of old desktop hardware, but I still have a GeForce4 Ti 4600 graphics card (AGP) sitting in a drawer; I bought in 2002 when it was the best graphics card that you could buy ... the price for a top-of-the-line gaming GPU back then was around $300 USD.

Yes, both. Using the built-in display. I rarely use an external display with this system. It has happened infrequently (occurrences could be weeks apart) and a reboot clears it up. I'd been trying to track it down to a background app or service but hadn't spent much time on it. I guess I'm not sure if past occurrences of this issue had the same root cause but I sure will be checking on it if it happens again. My only purpose for making this comment was to indicate that there may be an issue with the NVIDIA audio driver causing issues that apply to systems other than mine. I think it will be used for any audio output to a display that supports audio and is connected to the NVIDIA GPU. (All Windows audio output needs a sound driver to go through.) And it's clearly not "dormant", even if it is supposed to be, I caught it loading a whole CPU core on the System process while there were no external displays connected at all. I appreciate your suggestions but I won't be bothering with that. The solution that I have concocted for myself is causing literally no problem at all, including no work required to repackage the NVIDIA driver when I want to upgrade to a new version. (I'm sort of tired of doing that from my days of running Quadro M5000M on the Precision M6700, which as an "unsupported GPU" required an INF mod for every driver update. Though I did end up scripting that down to one command.) And I was also able to quickly create another stub/dummy driver for the "light" part of my Pro IntelliMouse which causes a 5-minute login delay if a second user logs in to my system, something I've also been meaning to do for a while.

...Why bother? It's going to be a pain to investigate since the issue does not occur consistently. (I have had microstutters in the past as well that went "uninvestigated" but I am now suspecting this was the cause. It's also not hard to find other people with a similar problem on Reddit/etc.) On top of that, having the NVIDIA audio driver enabled does nothing beneficial for me. With my config, there is no situation where it would be needed, since even if I did attach an external display with audio, it would go out via the Intel GPU and use Intel’s audio driver. I don't see any reason to spend any further time messing with it, I'll just stub it out and be done; just one less thing that can cause problems. (If I do another NVIDIA driver install without the audio driver included, then I'd have a device sitting out with an "!" error in Device Manager because no driver is installed, and also probably Windows Update trying to force the driver down on me anyway.)