Aaron44126

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.

There was a time when I would say that they'd never go back to 16×10, but now they have on a number of product lines, and with a chassis refresh potentially coming in, who knows... I hope that they keep the 4K/120Hz option (or even better, add a dynamic refresh rate option). ...1440p seems like a stretch to me, other than some Alienware models they seem to be going for FHD or UHD with nothing in between. I think that AMD is going to have a hard time competing at the high end for the next few years, until they get a CPU with big/little architecture out. They have a laptop CPU refresh incoming as well but early benchmarks are looking like it doesn't catch up to Alder Lake. (I think one could argue that Apple M1 Max still holds the power efficiency crown. Alder Lake beats it in performance by drawing a good deal more power.) Don't know if you've seen an Alder Lake die shot. I think it's pretty cool. This is a desktop CPU, you can see the eight "performance" cores and eight "efficiency" cores, and you can see that basically four E cores fit in the space of one P core. (The whole idea is that eight E cores brings notably better multi-threaded performance than the two P cores that you could have put in their place.) Writing this from my M6700 which is 9.5 years old. 🙂 PCs really can last a long time these days. Really, other than some newer game titles, there isn't much that I try to do on my M6700 which I feel that it has any trouble with. For the last few days I have been running multiple VMs to help with the NBR archive effort, and still enjoying smooth 60fps gameplay in the evenings while those jobs are running... (admittedly not running that complicated of a game right now). I guess it'd be nice if it could do video encodes faster, I guess... and I would really like a 4K display panel. When I got the M6700, I figured that it would be good for perhaps 6 years. A GPU upgrade helped stretch that out longer. Honestly, I was ready to upgrade this past year but knowing what was coming down the pipe with Alder Lake made me want to stick it out for one more year. The 7770 may be similarly long-lived for me. I'll be going for top spec and I can't throw that kind of cash at a PC very often.

I'll have another batch going up on Monday. Right now the focus is just on pulling down as much as we can, it's sort of hard for me to keep up with what is coming in. (...And there's a "thumbs up" button in the corner of every post :-P)

I will check on this. Thanks.

Make sure that you check the RAM timings, in addition to the speed, if you are planning to "mix and match" with the two modules that you already have installed. You want the CAS latency (CL) to match up. You can check the value of your current modules with CPU-Z.

I believe the HP business subforum is completely backed up (linked in my original post). I know that the thread list is yucky right now; I'll be addressing that this coming week. But do you see any threads missing that you were interested in? https://www.nbrchive.net/xfa/hp-business-class-notebooks.1083/

It’s from the Clevo “owners lounges” subforum which we have downloaded but is not posted yet.

Likewise, I would think that the 7560 cable would work ... if the display port on the motherboard is the same and in the roughly the same position. I know you already have it but for anyone else who stumbles across this, the 7560 display+IR camera cable DPN is GDB55. https://www.nbrchive.net/forum.notebookreview.com/threads/precision-7560-7760-owners-thread.836381/page-77.html#post-11114355

Archive is live. Details here. https://efgxt.net/topic/104-notebook-review-forum-archive-–-nbrchive/

Presenting: NBRCHIVE — a static, read-only archive of the NotebookReview forum. (Super early version.) Along with myself, @Sandy Bridge, @Reciever, and @Hiew have been involved in this project. I'll give extra props to @Sandy Bridge who brought along a tool specifically designed to pull data from XenForo forums. Without that, we would have been basically left with HTTrack, which takes way longer... and much less of the forum would have been able to have been archived with the level of resources that we have. We've been working over the past few days to grab as much as possible. We have not yet captured every single post, but we have hit the areas that appeared to be of the most value and also areas that were requested by other NBR users. (We are actually still actively pulling down content and will continue until NBR shuts down.) I'm still working to tie everything together and I will edit this post with updates as new sections are hooked in. This was a quick and dirty job, to some degree. TechTarget didn't give us that much time, and their web application firewall which starts throwing errors if you download too many pages too quickly also slowed down progress. For some forums, we only pulled threads with a certain number of posts (varying from forum to forum) and excluded the smaller threads. Also, I wanted to get something live for everyone as quickly as possible and I'm still working through cleaning some stuff up. You may see oddities while browsing threads — missing images, links from one thread to another not going to the right place, and maybe even a small number of threads that are cut off or otherwise "damaged". There are some known but fixable issues that will be addressed over the coming days and weeks. Threads downloaded with the XenForo archiver tool are not paginated, so your browser might choke on very long threads. (Internet Explorer seems to handle these the best, if you can believe it.) The Dell business laptops section (pulled via HTTrack) also has issues with some attachments and the "up arrow" link next to quotes, and it's still trying to pull a few files from the live NBR server when you view one of these threads. If you see anything else odd that seems like it could be fixed, feel free to let me know. Bear with me as I work to integrate all of the downloaded threads into a cohesive archive. I'm working on a simple tool to link threads downloaded by @Sandy Bridge's tool into the forum/thread list that I grabbed with HTTrack. This project is dealing with literally millions of tiny files so there is also some just waiting for stuff to be transferred around as I get it all prepped for hosting. When the integrated archive is ready, any threads that were not pulled down before the cutoff will still be present in the list. I will have them point to archive.org, which hopefully has a record of most of the threads. Also, I'm going to see about changing the top-right search function (currently pointing to "live" NBR) to just perform a Google site search. I will also clean up the presentation somewhat — removing any hint of the ads, non-functional bits like the logon link, and so forth. I don't think that I should be the sole holder of the archive. For NBR regulars who would like to download an offline copy, contact me via PM and I will arrange it, once the archive is in just about the best shape that I think that I can get it in. If TechTarget issues a takedown request, obviously I will have to comply. I'm hoping that they will leave it alone. I'm hosting the archive at my own expense; there are no ads and I am not taking donations. By taking the forum offline, they are not in a position to profit off of the material anymore, so it might as well be made available. The current status of the archive is: Forums integrated into the archive: Dell business laptops (Precision, Latitude, Vostro) Forums available to browse but not yet fully integrated into the archive: Hardware, software, and accessories Hardware components and aftermarket upgrades Accessories Gaming software and graphics cards eGPU / external graphics discussion Windows OS and software Security and antivirus software Linux compatibility and software Chome OS and software Networking and wireless Notebook cosmetic modifications and custom builds Desktop hardware Smartphones and tablets Notebook news, reviews, and deals Notebook news and reviews Notebook and tech bargains Notebook manufacturers Acer Packard Bell Gateway eMachines Alienware Alienware M11x 2015+ Alienware 13/15/17 Alienware 14 and M14x Alienware M15x Alienware 17 and M17x Alienware 18 and M18x Alienware Area 51/Aurora and Legacy Systems Alienware desktops Apple and Mac OS X Asus Asus reviews and owner's lounges Asus gaming notebooks Dell Dell XPS Fujitsu Gigabyte and Aorus HP HP business class notebooks Lenovo LG Microsoft MSI MSI reviews and owner's lounges Panasonic Toughbook buy, sell, and trade forum Razer Sager and Clevo Sager and Clevo reviews and owner's lounges Reseller feedback forum Samsung Toshiba VAIO / Sony VAIO / Sony reviews and owner's lounges Other manufacturers You can Ctrl+F for the name of a thread that you are interested in if you want to take a look at it.

This is normal, the tamper protection in play. I feel like I saw an option in the BIOS somewhere to reset it? I'll try to remember to check on it next time I reboot. (Not quite as annoying as older Dell desktop systems which I can recall showing an alert that the case has been opened at boot, and requiring a keystroke to dismiss it every time, prior to the OS booting...)

Some chatter on & pictures of NVIDIA’s new GA103 GPU chip, which will presumably be used in GeForce RTX 3080 Ti (mobile version) and also some of the high-end Ampere refresh mobile workstation GPUs. https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-ga103-graphics-processor-pictured-features-496-mm%c2%b2-die-area https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-ga103-pictured

I heard good things about Mass Effect (original trilogy, anyway) and I'm planning to give this a try soon. Sort of liking the "activity" feature on this forum as it has me poking around different parts a bit... on NBR, I stayed in the Precision niche. So I will ramble about games for a bit! I pretty much always have a game going. I have a backlog that is way too long to ever get through (like most of us probably). I enjoy bouncing between genres, and between epochs (checking out both older games and newer games). If I had to pick a favorite genre it would probably be "Metroidvania" (Hollow Knight FTW, can't wait for Silksong). But I also enjoy platformers, JRPGs, strategy games, puzzle games, .......I'll basically try anything. My time is limited with work & kids so I stick to single player (playing for an hour per day maybe after everyone else goes to bed). I'm also into emulation, I love how you can play games from just about any platform on the PC. Always interested in suggestions for basically something that is an enjoyable single player experience but doesn't take like hundreds of hours to feel like you finished it. Lately I've been doing more 2D/pixel games — I do enjoy the style, but also I recently downgraded my graphics card to raise funds for a new laptop purchase this year. Once that arrives I'll get back into some newer high-end/3D games. Some 2D/pixel games that I have played lately that I enjoyed are Celeste, Wargroove, The Messenger (hilarious dialogue), and Shovel Knight: King of Cards. I am currently playing an older game – Tales of Phantasia, PlayStation version, in RetroArch, with this English patch specifically. I've been playing it for about a month and I'm pretty close to the end, exploring the depths of the Moria mine.

Well, I was curious so I went to look back at the video. You can find it here. Time code 16:50. I thought it was XPS-style system (5000 series) because of the glossy display. Looking more closely though, it seems too thick and it has ports that are clearly not USB-C on the right side. Seems like it is 3000-series, it looks a lot like the Precision 3560/3561. Only hint of a business Alder Lake system from Dell so far, as far as I know.

You can click your name in the top right to see how close you are to the next rank. You get points for posting, and also if other people react to your posts ("like", etc.), and maybe other stuff too. It seems that you also get points for sending PMs? (That might be why I have more than some others with around the same post count. And I've started a few threads.) As you'd expect, the number of points you need to rank up increases with each rank. I found these other stats pages. 1. Go to your profile and click on "Recent badges" to get a page that shows all of the ranks and where you stand on the forum (percentage-wise). [Edit] - Reading more carefully, I see that you already found this. 2. https://efgxt.net/leaderboard/ I saw the leaderboard after it notified me that I "won" a couple of days. Not really trying to. 😛 Looks like a three way tie yesterday and it probably gave me the reward because my name dominates alphabetical order. I also feel that ranking up is a bit too easy. I have less than 30 posts and I am on rank 6 out of 14 somehow. I don't know what the later levels are like though. Hopefully we don't have everyone sitting at the top rank after 2-3 months. Also, going by these "stats" I am one of the top members here now, but I was never among the top at NBR and I expect that I won't be top for very long if some of the other NBR members get over here and start being similarly engaged.