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Aaron44126

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Everything posted by Aaron44126

  1. Aaron44126
    Not really sure, I think we will hear something from Dell pretty promptly once Intel formally unveils HX. No telling when that will be though. Maybe late April or sometime in May?
  2. Aaron44126
    Still poking around. Ran across this recent post at AnandTech and came to realize that the marketing name for Alder Lake S-BGA is Alder Lake HX. Found some existing rumors about this pointing to second quarter 2022 release. Alder Lake HX looks like it will use a CPU die derived from Alder Lake S (desktop CPU) in a BGA package, with a separate PCH (like Tiger Lake H, but unlike Alder Lake H), and push the TDP higher than Alder Lake H. (This basically as expected from S-BGA rumors that have been floating around for nearly a full year now.) Wondering what this means for the laptop space in general moving forward. Both OEMs and press seem to be largely ignoring Alder Lake HX, and even acting like the Alder Lake lineup is complete since P and U series CPUs were revealed the other day. Flagship gaming notebooks have already dropped using Alder Lake H. So it seems like HX is going to be a niche CPU for the high-end MWS space (or maybe a few beefy gaming notebooks)? Even ignoring the potential CPU performance difference between Alder Lake H and HX, Alder Lake H seems like a step back from Tiger Lake H to me because of the much more limited PCIe configuration and cut down to 64GB max RAM. ...Anyway, we'll see what happens over the next several weeks. Not that much longer.
  3. Aaron44126
    Dell has made the 2022 G15 system available for order. The models are G15 5520, or G15 5521 "Special Edition". Intel 12th-gen "Alder Lake" CPUs (i5-12500H 4P+8E, i7-12700H 6P+8E) NVIDIA Ampere GPUs: GeForce RTX 3050, 3050 Ti, 3060, 3070 Ti Three display choices: FHD 120, FHD 165, QHD 240 Appears to cap out at 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD There does not appear to be a 17" version. The 17" space for gaming laptops from Dell is just Alienware for now. See options: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/sr/laptops/g-series/12th-gen-intel-core?appliedRefinements=39795
  4. Aaron44126
    Was just poking around and I noticed that TechPowerUp has an entry for a mobile NVIDIA RTX A4500 GPU. I can't find any upstream source or leak for this so I have no idea where this came from. They don't seem to have any other Ampere refresh MWS GPUs in the database yet. The specs are notably different than the desktop RTX A4500 GPU so it doesn't look like it was an accidental or speculative copy/paste. Laying it out against existing other Ampere MWS GPUs: RTX A4000 = GA104, 5120 CUDA cores, 8 GB vRAM RTX A4500 = GA104, 5632 CUDA cores, 12GB vRAM (speculative, from TechPowerUp data) RTX A5000 = GA104, 6144 CUDA cores, 16GB vRAM RTX A5500 = GA103S, 7680 CUDA cores, 16GB vRAM (speculative, my own guess based on new mobile GeForce GPUs and NVIDIA's typical behavior) If the specs are accurate, A4500 slots nicely between A4000 and A5000. Upgrading to 12GB vRAM is a bit of a welcome surprise. I wonder if there is any chance for a vRAM bump for the A5500? I had seen previous rumors of 20GB for GA103S, but none of the GA103S GeForce GPUs released so far go above 16GB, and the core may not support higher vRAM amounts. A4500 might launch in systems before A5500. If we see mobile workstations with Alder Lake H CPUs, it might make sense to include A4500 as a choice but not A5500 which could be saved for when Alder Lake H55/S-BGA CPUs drop. (Also just speculation on my part.) [Edit] Based on these specs, A4500 is the same as GeForce RTX 3070 Ti (mobile), except with 12GB vRAM instead of 8GB. I noticed that there is a A4500 "embedded GPU" in the PCI IDs database. I wonder if this could be in reference to that. The specs don't line up though. The embedded A4500 has 16 GB vRAM and 5888 CUDA cores.
  5. Aaron44126
    Wondering where you are getting that from? Is it anecdotal or do you have something that you can cite? Windows 7 had tons of optimization over Vista to improve performance or lower resource use. I think that you would see many cases of performance improvements after an upgrade. A good example is WDDM 1.1. Here, from the Ars Technica review of Windows 7: Windows 7 is backwards compatible with WDDM 1.0, but introduces a new WDDM 1.1 driver model. Almost all the downsides of WDDM 1.0 in Vista are resolved by WDDM 1.1 in 7. Key GDI operations are now hardware-accelerated. In turn, this means that the main memory buffer is no longer required; each window is buffered in video memory alone. In limited scenarios, this can result in a performance reduction (namely, applications that need to examine or manipulate the entire window image now have to read it from video memory, which tends to be slower than reading from main memory), but in general it means that Windows 7 has considerably lower memory usage than Vista; Vista's memory usage scaled according to the number of open windows, 7's system memory usage is constant. Now, it certainly did help that Microsoft was able to take advantage of three years of hardware improvements for Windows 7's initial impressions. Windows Vista shipped on PCs that were clearly under-equipped to handle it properly. But I don't think you can claim that Windows 7 was slower than Windows Vista, either. On the subject, Windows 8 had many optimizations over Windows 7. Windows 8.1 also had the only system requirements decrease that Windows has ever seen; Microsoft saw fit to reduce the RAM requirement after putting some memory optimizations. (That said, Microsoft's RAM requirement has always been laughably low for what one would expect for a decent user experience.) Anyway, for starters you can look at Microsoft's comments on addressing boot time, memory consumption, and power consumption in Windows 8 (...I miss the days when Microsoft would post stuff like this). Windows 10 vs. 11 benchmarks show largely flat performance (no meaningful increase or decrease in most situations). This does change a bit if you throw Alder Lake into the picture, where you can hit some cases where Windows 11 is up to around 10% faster, and some even some cases where Windows 10 performance is pretty dreadful (if you don't muck with process priority/affinity anyway) because of process scheduling improvements in Windows 11 specifically addressing CPUs with a hybrid architecture. This just highlights how pressure will continue to stay current with Windows, at least if you want to run on new hardware. I feel like Microsoft has gotten worse here, too. My home system, the Dell Precision M6700, released in 2012. Dell supports it with a full set of drivers for Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10. Lots of systems releasing right now are supported by the OEM only on Windows 11. Again, interested to see how this plays out over the next few months as more business systems with Alder Lake become available. I can't believe that many businesses will accept systems with Windows 11 as the only choice... and OEMs have to know this, too. And I posted this in another thread but I'll include the comment here too — Windows 12 rumors are starting to fly. No idea what's going on here. Right-clicking the taskbar produces the context menu instantly for me... (On 10-year-old hardware to boot.) Context menu delays are often the fault of third-party applications hooking in to add their own items, but, I'm not sure if apps can do that for the taskbar context menu. Anyway, ShellMenuView and ShellExView will allow you to see apps that have hooked in such a way, with the option to disable the hooks. (This situation is largely why Microsoft has, to the dismay of many, upended how context menus work in Windows 11.)
  6. Aaron44126
    Hi, this is a known issue. Dell has changed the BIOS interface starting with 11th gen (2021 systems). At the moment, there is no option for manual fan control.
  7. Aaron44126
    I use WinRAR... Basically this. Actually I also paid for WinZip back in the day, before it was owned by Corel. Pretty sure I picked it up in the late 90's (after using it unlicensed for a while before that, I'm quite sure it's the first compression tool that I ever used). They originally had a lifetime license policy — pay once and you get upgrades forever. When Corel took over, they started making users pay for each upgrade, and I didn't see the value in that so I bailed.
  8. Aaron44126
    Windows 12 rumors starting
  9. Aaron44126
    Recommendations... The fact that you couldn't finish the BitLocker decrypt tells me that there was some issue with the drive reading or writing to a particular spot. If this happened to me, I would consider the drive "suspect" and definitely replace it if possible. Regarding the "disappearing drive issue", it seems like Dell has actually come up with a fix for this — it was to remove the switch from the motherboard altogether. If you replace the drive, you will know pretty quick (within a few hours) if it is going to be subject to this issue. If the PCIe4 drive is your boot drive, the issue will probably manifest itself as a system lock-up. (Mouse might move around, but nothing will work, probably similar to what you saw when it was locked up with the BitLocker decrypt.) If it is a problem, you can just immediately move the drive to one of the PCIe3 slots as a temporary fix, until you put a permanent fix in place. The permanent fix would be something similar to what I did to keep the switch pressed down, or having Dell replace the motherboard.
  10. Aaron44126
    Have you tried scrolling with the touchpad? Using two fingers will perform a scroll.
  11. Aaron44126
    Ah, I forgot about Fn+Left/Right for home/end, but I was really frustrated with that because I tend to use shift+home/shift+end for "select to beginning/end of line"... and occasionally even Ctrl+Shift+Home/End for "select to beginning/end of document"... and throwing more keys into the mix for those combinations just drives me crazy. I also use Alt+PrntScrn a lot but having it as a Fn key doesn't bother me, probably because I'm already used to it from prior laptops. One thing that I wanted to mention is that you can use the dedicated keyboard "menu key" in place of Shift+F10 to bring up the right-click context menu. On this system it happens to be mapped to Fn+right ctrl.
  12. Aaron44126
    Not that contested either.
  13. Aaron44126
    TrueCrypt was discontinued the better part of a decade ago and may have unfixed security vulnerabilities (example: article). VeraCrypt is a fork of TrueCrypt that is still maintained. https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Home.html
  14. Aaron44126
    Pleased to kick off an owner's thread for the Dell Precision M6700. Release date: July 24, 2012 Intel 3rd-gen CPUs ("Ivy Bridge") Up to 32GB DDR3 memory NVIDIA Kepler Quadro GPUs (K3000M, K4000M, K5000M) This machine is near and dear to my heart, serving as my personal daily driver for nearly a full decade. It is highly tinkerable! With a MXM GPU slot, you can fit in a Maxwell GPU like the Quadro M5000M or GeForce 980M with little trouble, bringing it forward a few years in terms of graphics performance. (Pascal and Turing GPUs are also feasible, but with more work required.) With an mSATA slot and the ability to install a 2.5" SATA drive in the optical drive bay, you can fit in up to four SATA SSDs. The system was released at the tail end of the Windows 7 era, but received a BIOS update adding support for Windows 8 features like UEFI seamless boot and UEFI secure boot. It still works great with Windows 10 today. NBR owner's thread System review by Bokeh Quadro M5000M upgrade thread Quadro P5000 upgrade thread NGFF Wi-Fi upgrade thread Precision M6700 driver RSS feed
  15. Aaron44126
    It's probably "Device Encryption", a minimal version of BitLocker. See: https://www.elevenforum.com/t/turn-on-or-off-device-encryption-in-windows-11.1424/
  16. Aaron44126
    Lazy-load image placeholders have no height. When they get filled in, the layout of the page changes, and if you aren't consuming the page top-to-bottom then it will be noticeable. This page describes the issue (and a fix which seems a bit complex to me). https://css-tricks.com/preventing-content-reflow-from-lazy-loaded-images/ If you have disabled lazy loading, it seems like it is still happening — maybe it is just loading all of the images in right away without waiting the user to scroll, but the page is still loading first with images "missing" and they are getting filled in moments later. This is what is causing the "loading scroll jerk". [Edit] Checked out some HTML coming back from the server and it looks like images are set up properly, with "src", "height" and "width" attributes which should not cause a lazy load or lazy load jerk. Unless, I wonder if this is causing the problem.
  17. Aaron44126
    I think that it may yet have to do with image loading happening late. The "unexpected offset" of the scroll seems to be line with the height of images loaded in further up in the page.
  18. Aaron44126
    Playing around with this. Here's the JavaScript to correct the scroll after load. If you can find a place to put this so that it fires when the page is fully done loading then it's a workaround. [Edit] Can we also please fix code blocks in the inverted theme, thanks 🙂 if (location.hash) { document.getElementById(location.hash.replace("#", "")).scrollIntoView(); }
  19. Aaron44126
    If you actually disabled lazy load... I'm still having "loading scroll jerk". Annoying because it breaks anchors, or links to a specific post in a thread. If I try to open the oldest unread post, or if I hit a bookmark to a specific post, it loads to the right spot briefly and then scrolls way off so I have to scroll down to find what I wanted. (Firefox + Inverted theme, if it matters.) Easy example I just picked out of a hat. This link should take you to the second to last post on the first page of this thread. It lands there briefly and then throws me up to like the 7th-to-last post. Never had such a problem with NBR. There is something happening during/after load that is throwing it off. If the cause can't be determined, it might be fixable as a workaround with JavaScript (reset the scroll to the anchor after load is fully done).
  20. Aaron44126
    For me, Windows 11 insider build 22557 brings a notable plus and minus to the table. Plus: Start Menu now supports "subfolders" or groups of pinned items (which I complained about being a regression from Windows 10 in the OP). Minus: Taking away more user choices. Similar to Windows 11 Home edition, Windows 11 Pro edition now requires internet connectivity. If you choose to setup device for personal use, MSA will be required for setup as well. You can expect Microsoft Account to be required in subsequent WIP flights. (...And why would they require MSA, if not for some form of user data collection?) https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2022/02/16/announcing-windows-11-insider-preview-build-22557/
  21. Aaron44126
    Try this. Open up "ODBC data sources (64-bit)" (Start Menu search) Double-click "MS Access Database" then click the "Select..." button. Blast from the past Windows 3.x file browse dialog box. Yes, yes I do... 😁 And thanks for that note about the 7X60 fingerprint reader under Linux. I knew that they had it working with XPS and 5000-series systems but not 7000-series systems (I seem to recall us digging into this around the 7X60 launch). Glad that this is finally getting addressed.
  22. Aaron44126
    They were indeed saying this when Windows 10 was new, planning to just release periodic feature updates and make Windows 10 a sort of ever-improving rolling release. There was a time when I was expecting them to eventually drop the "Windows 10" name and just start calling it "Windows" since it would be continually refreshed. Really, it doesn't matter that much what it is called, it is meaningless now and just up to whatever Microsoft's marketing department decides. Windows 11 is in many ways little more than a slightly larger than normal "feature update" for Windows 10 (...tied in with a system requirements hike). Incidentally, the version number under the hood — that you see when you open the command prompt, or in a web browser user agent — is still 10.0 as well. I have considered a switch to Linux. I ran Linux full time for a while (some time ago, 2008-2009), getting very familiar with it and that helped me out a lot with work later on. It would be fine for a basic system if you just need a web browser, generic office software, file management, etc. It's gotten a lot easier to run Windows games on Linux in the last few years, as I understand it, but I'm not really up for a potential "battle" every time that I want to get a new game to work, there's other software that I'm pretty stuck to that doesn't necessarily run great on Linux (Quicken, Lightroom, Outlook+Exchange, iCloud for Windows), and it is just plain less hassle to do some types of things in Windows (BitLocker, Storage Spaces).
  23. Aaron44126
    NBR Precision M4600 owner's thread NBR Precision M4600 GPU upgrade thread Precision M4600 driver RSS feed
  24. Aaron44126
    Sorry that I can't offer confirmation, but I think there is quite a good chance that this will work. I'm not so familiar with the ins and outs of the HP ZBook line, but I know that Dell Precision 7000-series works with both ECC and non-ECC memory if a Xeon CPU is installed. This is true for all generations where Xeon has been offered (6th gen - 11th gen). Intel supports it, so it seems like it would work with HP systems unless they went out of their way to block it.
  25. Aaron44126
    How did you find it? (Just curious.)
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