Aaron44126

I think Prime95 is the go-to program here. It's free.

Not saying it won't happen, but anything this far out for Intel falls squarely in "I'll believe it when I see it" territory. ...Just look at how long it took them to get 10nm off the ground. It was always a year or two away, but in the end it took them way longer than anticipated.

For Precision specifically I am going to try to keep a link to the NBRCHIVE thread near the front of any owner's thread that shows up. (I posted a link in the M4800 thread as soon as it opened, for example.) I also plan to (eventually) add links to both the old and new owner's threads for each system to the "key posts" post. I'll leave the discussion of whether we pin NBRCHIVE threads directly to this forum up to someone else, but I think that also muddies things up some and could be confusing for entirely new users coming across the site.

There were so many pieces that luckily fell into place at the right time to capture the archive that we have. I started out just wanting to grab the Precision section because that's where I am most active, and maybe the XPS section if there was time (because it is sort of related), and then I posted the HTTrack directions to help other users capture what is interesting to them. Without @Sandy Bridge's app, I would have been limited to HTTrack which took way longer to get through threads. Plus he really was a driving force in getting edge cases completed. I did leave downloads running overnight but I was not up all night checking on things 😛 @Reciever shouldn't sell himself short. He facilitated getting us all on VPNs which multiplied the amount of progress that we could make. (Something that totally hadn't occurred to me.) And he along with @Hiew were pulling stuff along with us, when they are already stretched to the limit just trying to get this new forum stood up (in addition to handling their own real-life stuff). Everyone was building off of each other's ambitions on how far we could take it, it was fun 🙂 Of course, we are tremendously lucky that we got the notice that we did, both in terms of being able to pull stuff for the archive, and also in terms of having time to get this new site up with so many users moving over. As @Custom90gt mentioned in a different thread, there was that forum downtime shortly before the announcement and TechTarget could have decided to throw in the towel right then.

Yeah, so careful with words/terms here, ha. I've spent quite a bit of time on both Windows 10 Pro and Windows 10 Enterprise (non-LTSC). Windows 10 Enterprise is exactly like Windows 10 Pro in terms of "feature stability" — i.e. cruft that they add to Pro, like the "News & Interests" widget thing, is also on Enterprise. Only Enterprise LTSC is free from that (for now). For the foreseeable future I would assume that Windows 11 is going to be "shifting sand" (new minor "features" dropping somewhat regularly + major "feature updates" once per year, in the fall). There won't be another LTSC release until late 2024 at which point hopefully Windows 11 has solidified somewhat. I do see gaming as a downside for LTSC but only somewhat. There weren't that many games that wouldn't work on Windows 10 LTSC 2019. Now, I only hopped on LTSC recently so maybe I missed some but the only ones I remember seeing being thrown around were Forza Horizon 5 and maybe the new Battlefield game? Some games like Ori and the Will of the Wisps claim to require a certain version of Windows 10 to run but actually still work even on Windows 7 and 8. Anyway, there is indeed a chance that some new games will not work at the tail end of a 3-year LTSC release cycle. I think the chance of that is pretty low this time around, since Windows 10 (non-LTSC) will be sticking around for a good while after Windows 11's release. Myself, my game backlog is large enough that I wouldn't mind putting off a new game for a while if I needed to. Don't want to turn this into the LTSC thread. Maybe we should spin up a new one if the conversation is going that way. 🙂

It did end up lowering the ETA somewhat but it is going to take until tomorrow. (This isn't exactly SSD-to-SSD. The F: drive is a remote network share.)

Getting into the weeds, but... With Windows 8.1 losing support next year, maybe you should give Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 a look. Since switching, I'm kind of seeing the LTSC version "as if you were in an alternate universe and this change of direction they took with Windows never happened" (or at least was rather less extreme). The LTSC version is a lot more like traditional Windows in terms of how it is supported. There are no user experience changes in the monthly updates (that is a "promise" of LTSC) — for example, LTSC did not get the "News & Interests" widget thing that landed on everyone else's taskbar without warning last year. You won't be hounded to upgrade to any newer version of Windows. It's built off of Windows 10, version 2004 (released April 2020) so it is mature enough. (Windows 10, versions 20H2, 21H1, and 21H2 are all built off of the 2004 base — same binaries/updates, as with Windows Server 2021 as well.) It is supported until January, 2032. Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC doesn't have some things that regular Windows 10 has. The Microsoft Store is missing and most of the bundled "modern"-style apps are as well. There are PowerShell scripts floating around to add them back if you like. (I have Microsoft Store loaded on mine and it works as intended.) Otherwise, it is basically the same. (It does have the new Edge browser pre-loaded... You can remove web search results from the Start menu search with a simple registry value though and then you basically never have to look at it.) The problem is getting a license. (They want you on the main release train so that they can force the new monetizing stuff on you, so they don't make LTSC easy to grab unless you are a business or OEM.) Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 is probably the way to go. You can get a license from resellers (i.e. CDW) or from eBay. "Enterprise LTSC" and "IoT Enterprise LTSC" are functionally identical, the difference is in how they are licensed. IoT is supposed to be bundled with some sort of single-function product. If you do buy it make sure you are getting the 2021 version. License keys are tied to a specific version, you can't upgrade without paying anything as you can with "regular" Windows 10. You can get an evaluation version here if you want to play with it before buying anything — https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-10-enterprise To upgrade in-place from 8.1 I think you would need to go through Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB version 2015 first. If you have interest in going this way, I can grab the ISO for you (you shouldn't need an actual license for it if you are just using it as an in-between point).

I'm sort of thinking that they haven't been paying attention to the goings-on at the forum for some time; it's been totally off their radar and they decided to kill it because they basically saw it as a money sink and didn't understand the value of what they had. This list is probably what an internal PR person came up with when doing a basic search for community tech sites. I do wonder what was going on with the downtime leading up to the announcement of the forum closure. As I recall it, the forums were down for the weekend and then the closure was announced within a day or two after it came back online? Seems odd. I could concoct a narrative but it'd be even more speculative than my statement above.

That's one that we did not grab but I can tell you that it had around 720,000 total posts (not counting the "Motorized vehicles" subforum, another 19,000 posts). archive.org should have most of it.

I discovered this by accident. Never saw it documented anywhere. I think that I will make a post about it in the "Windows" section here with some screen shots so that I can refer back to it when making the suggestion to other users. One thing that you can do though is open up Task Manager and go to the Performance tab where it shows the current CPU speed. Try changing the power slider and see how it changes the CPU speed in real time.

Ha, well it's going to take a while to move everything that I downloaded to the web server... I wonder if it would be faster to archive it, move the archive, and then unpack it again...

Oh, for the most part it is fine to stick on Windows 10 for a good long while, but here's wrinkle about Windows 10 vs Windows 11 that I can bring up. It's the process scheduler, and in particular, how it works with Intel's new Alder Lake hybrid architecture which features two types of CPU cores, "performance" and "efficiency". You (currently) need Windows 11 to make use of Intel's "Thread Director" hardware-assisted process scheduling with Intel's hybrid architecture Alder Lake CPUs. This helps Windows decide which threads to run on "performance cores" and which threads to run on "efficiency cores". Windows 10 is aware of the difference between the types of cores, but it doesn't support Intel's hardware-assist feature for scheduling. Benchmarks show that in most cases it doesn't matter if you are running Alder Lake on Windows 10 or Windows 11, but in some cases it totally does. For one, Windows 10 automatically runs "low priority" processes on E cores only. So, for example, if you do a Handbrake video encode, that job runs low priority and now performance is poop because it it locked to the E cores. Windows 11 will run such a process across all cores but still give first priority to the "active" application. (...Technically it seems like full Thread Director support wouldn't be required to "fix" this but this is how it stands on Windows 10 + Alder Lake right now in any case.) So part of the reason that i was torn up early on about whether to get on Windows 11 is, I'm planning to replace my nearly 10-year-old personal laptop with an Alder Lake one this spring. Do I have to decide between dealing with Windows 11 bloatware or not having Thread Director support? I think that there's a decent chance Windows 10 will be getting a new process scheduler within a few months. Windows Server 2022 and Windows 10, version 21H2 are pretty similar. Windows Server is only refreshed once every 3 years. Server 2022 just launched like three or four months ago, so a follow-up won't drop until late 2024. Hybrid architecture CPUs will surely show up in the server space before then. Will Microsoft refuse to give Thread Director support to Windows Server until late 2024? Rather doubt it. (If they push a process scheduler update to Server 2022 then it wouldn't be a big stretch to also push it to Windows 10.) Dell has zero Alder Lake business systems. All of the Alder Lake systems that they have announced so far ship with Windows 11 as the only option (probably because of the scheduler). On the laptop side, only Alienware and XPS Alder Lake models have been announced. On the desktop side, Alder Lake CPUs have been available for nearly three months but there are still no Alder Lake Vostro, OptiPlex, or Precision desktop systems. Dell knows that most businesses don't want Windows 11 yet. Does Dell know something that we don't about when Windows 10 and Alder Lake will get along? (I haven't checked the situation with other vendors' business systems.) Intel's Alder Lake Game Dev Guide states the following, emphasis added by me. (Kind of vague, but there you go.) With the release of Windows 11, you can automatically have your threads scheduled by the OS using hardware hints from Intel Thread Director. If your strategy is to allow the OS and ITD to do the heavy lifting for your thread scheduling, you will need to detect which version of Windows your application is running on. Without the updates for Windows 11, ITD will not be supported. Some ITD features will be backported, but it is essential to check for a minimum supported version of Windows. You can use VerifyVersionInfo API, which will allow you to include Service Pack Minor and Build Number in your version specification.

The Notebook Review forums appear to have gone down at around 10:07 AM (U.S. Eastern) / 15:07 (UTC) today. There is currently a note stating that they are "offline for maintenance" but I think that it is safe to assume that they are not coming back... I was working with @Sandy Bridge on grabbing exception threads up to the last minute. In the end, we ended up with around five longer Alienware threads that got cut short. That was the last thing that we had to process. So close, another ten or fifteen minutes and we would have been done with that. There's probably some other minor issues in the archive that haven't been discovered. We know that there is an issue with duplicate thread names in the same subforum (only one will make it into the archive) but it doesn't look like any of those were terribly consequential. The vast majority of content from the covered subforums should be present. Some stuff might be able to be fixed up later using data from archive.org. Anyway. I have my web server extracting a number of 7-zip archives that were submitted to me. That process is going to take a few hours. I will see about having the bulk of the data that we have collected available in basic form sometime this evening. [Edit] As of 10:30 (U.S. Eastern) / 15:30 (UTC), they are now directing to this site with a number of poor replacements for NBR! https://www.techtarget.com/technologyguide/

I'm not really "in charge" on that aspect, but I've been rather against this idea. It just muddies things up too much, both technically and legally. I don't think that we should put any risk on this forum because "eh probably TechTarget won't care if we copy a bunch of their stuff over" — especially as the community is at risk of fracturing as there are two other alternate forums that have been stood up. I'd love it if users who have posted guides and such would copy those over to the new forum, though (or even one of the others).

I was really excited when Windows 11 was announced. I've upgraded to each new Windows release at launch since XP. ...My excitement quickly turned sour. I have some major issues with how Microsoft is handling things. Silly launch bugs (Start Menu "recommendations" service bringing down the desktop (happened before launch but not by much); expired certificate breaking apps) Missing power user features (Start Menu is greatly simplified, no more subfolders for tiles or free placement of pinned items; taskbar is a mess) Their general attitude of "just ship whatever, we'll fix it up later" — you'd almost think that they rushed this out for the holiday shopping season — I am glad that they are making improvements, but in the past (before Windows 10) Microsoft has held off releases until they were ready and then bent over backwards to avoid any user-facing changes afterwards ... now you never know if a monthly update will introduce a new "feature" or change the way that something behaves Trying really hard to monetize Windows users (half-baked widgets system, Start menu search links sending you to Bing, all OS links open Edge rather than chosen default browser, even if you put a workaround in place — Edge itself is becoming a monetization platform by including "helpful" features like this and this which end up providing a kickback to MS, either in the form of money, or user data that can be used to make money) System requirements are arbitrary; Windows 11 works fine on hardware without secure boot, TPM, or a CPU on their "supported" list — you'd almost think that they're trying to drive up PC sales by not offering the upgrade to older systems ...and more. I know there is some good stuff happening in Windows 11 and some real, technical improvements. I'm just disappointed that they had to pile this junk on top of it. I like Daniel Aleksanderson's wording: Microsoft still charges 200 USD for a Windows license while simultaneously filling the operating system with ads and crapware. Weeks before launch, Windows 11 wouldn’t even show the taskbar when it failed to display an advertisement dialog. Just last week, first-party apps and features of Windows 11 stopped working due to an expired encryption certificate. These aren’t the actions of an attentive company that cares about its product anymore. Microsoft isn’t a good steward of the Windows operating system. They’re prioritizing ads, bundleware, and service subscriptions over their users’ productivity. I'm preparing my own detailed post on the subject which I will post as a separate thread here in about two weeks. That said, I have been helping out other users with upgrades to Windows 11, just not recommending it at this point. Myself, I have recently "upgraded" to Windows 10 LTSC 2021. I'll look at Windows 11 when there is a LTSC version.

So on the day of the NBR close, I can confirm that we have pretty much everything that we were shooting for. The exceptions as @Sandy Bridge mentioned are the "What notebook should I buy" forum, "Site suggestions and guidelines", "Off topic", and all of the marketplace forums. We are working through some exception cases while there is still time but by and large we are in really good shape. We were able to grab threads with rely counts below the thresholds previously posted. There is no post threshold for any of the subforums that we have now. What I need to do now is sift through all of the files and get everything prepped for hosting in a basic form. "Quality of life" improvements will be coming later.

Trick that I use on my systems... I like to set the "maximum power state" to 99% which effectively disables turbo boost (CPU won't go above mid 2 GHz range). This is mostly to keep the fans under control. Windows 10 has a "power slider" that appears if you click the battery icon in the system tray, if you have the power profile set to balanced. Setting it to the far right setting causes Windows to ignore the "maximum power state" option that you have set and run the CPU at full (turbo) speed. Setting it to the middle setting restores the CPU speed limit. So, setting it up this way makes the power slider an easy way to enable or disable turbo boost on the fly.

This looks like it is crawling the main site (www.notebookreview.com) and not the forum site. The WARC files for the forum add up to a bit over 30 GB. I know they're compressed so it's really more data than that (possibly significantly more). I wonder if it is mostly just the thread contents (text) or if they have images and attachments in there too. I see there is a desktop viewer so I will download them and dig in soon, just to see. I am downloading them but at current speeds it is going to take forever as you said. (Over three hours just for the first 5GB chunk.) [Edit] Found the link that you were looking for. I was following this thread, but missed it. http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/all-technologyguide-forums-will-close-jan-31-2022.837524/page-56#post-11139925

Ok, this is news to me. I’ll take a look and see what we have here.

Right. The archive.org guys have been crawling the site too so they may well have a copy of threads that we do not. (They normally crawl around from time to time but I read that someone tipped them off to the closure so they're making a special effort to do a full crawl.) In fact my thread index is going to link to archive.org for any threads that we do not have downloaded, so hopefully it will be "sort of" seamless to browse.

So I'm going to have the full thread list and it will look similar to what you saw at NBR. See the archived Precision section for an example. https://www.nbrchive.net/forum.notebookreview.com/forums/dell-latitude-vostro-and-precision.1051/ As for the threads themselves, they will basically look as you see now; I am planning to add pagination (maybe more like 50 posts per page instead of 10) and links back to the forum thread list. I think that individual post permalinks are broken right now so I will fix that too. But it won't be exactly like NBR. These will be coming over the next few days/weeks. Right now the focus is just on pulling down as much as possible and getting it staged online in some form as quickly as reasonable.

We actually have the lower reply count threads for most of the manufacturer forums now. We are working through the last few. Off topic, gaming, and marketplace forums are the main things that haven’t been grabbed. If NBR goes down tomorrow, I’ll post an update with what we have and don’t have. (I haven’t been making updates this weekend because things have been happening pretty quickly.)

This is discussed in this post which everyone should check out – https://efgxt.net/topic/111-its-time-to-clear-the-air-first-orders-of-business/#comment-462

I downloaded this one myself. It's a large subforum so it took too long to include in the first batch, but we have it.

I think it is system specific but it is supported on the entire Precision line. ...Sometimes Linux support is not available until a few months after the system launch. I feel like they've been pretty good at having it available right away in the last generation or two. Already some info on the next few generations. It looks like 13th gen "Raptor Lake" will be a pretty minor iteration over Alder Lake. (Thinking similar to 9th→10th gen on the mobile side.) On the desktop side they will add a 8P+16E configuration but I will be a little surprised if that makes it into the mobile side. 14th gen "Meteor Lake" will feature a node shrink and be a bigger update.