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Sandy Bridge

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  1. Sandy Bridge
    I'm 98% sure it's still a toast notification above the system tray in 10. Only 98% sure because I almost always can find an outlet when I have it plugged in at a coffee shop, so I haven't seen many lately. The battery icon on the tray should also change to a low-battery one, but the toast ought to be more noticeable.
  2. Sandy Bridge
    52 TB of HDDs, plus 4 TB of SSDs, to revamp my storage and backup solutions, allowing full retirement of my existing drives, other than my 1 TB SSD which would upgrade a laptop. But... I could buy a whole new computer that even included a low-end dedicated GPU for that cost. So... probably either going to do a much more incremental upgrade featuring an additional 6 TB of HDD and 1 TB of SSD, or just be more selective about what needs a fully resilient backup. Maybe a combination of those. Limited mobility doesn't necessarily rule out VR; there are a surprising number of games that support VR while seated. It isn't quite the same as room-scale, but if room-scale was the main discouraging factor... it might still be worth considering. Although in my opinion, VR didn't really live up to the hype. It is cool to try the first few times... but it did not displace 2D games for me. Although part of the reason for that was the setup required for room-scale, and that where I first lived when I bought a headset, it wasn't feasible to leave the room-scale set up out all the time, so the setup overhead was much higher than for 2D games.
  3. Sandy Bridge
    Bought a couple patio chairs for my new-to-me apartment's balcony, with warmer weather arriving. It's amazing the range of price points that are available for patio furniture. It's almost as wide of a range as for microprocessors. I went with the equivalent of the Pentium, more comfortable and less likely to blow away in the wind than the Celeron, but a much better value than the Core i7 fancy models that they put near the front of the store. (Celeron patio chair = plastic, $12. Pentium = steel frame + fabric, $24. Core i7 = all sorts of nicer materials, cushions that can withstand a rain storm, larger armrests, $400)
  4. Sandy Bridge
    For (1), I don't know of any software, but on my laptop that has a similar issue with it being easy to accidentally disconnect the power, one trick that I've used to make it more likely I notice is setting the screen brightness to different levels when it's plugged in versus when it's unplugged. Only works if you're using the built-in monitor though, rather than an external one. Steam will also provide a warning if you are in-game and the battery hits the low power state (I assume this is the one you set in Windows, which defaults to 10%, but haven't verified it isn't just always 10% in Steam). But that requires being in-game in Steam. It's saved my bacon a couple times though. For (2), I know such technology exists, IBM/Lenovo used to ship utilities that let you do that. But I don't know of a general-purpose one off the top of my head. I wonder, you mention it's an old battery and it said "47%" afterwards one time. To me that suggests that it's likely a few of the cells in the battery have already croaked. When I've had old batteries, it's not uncommon for the estimates to become inaccurate, and it will go straight from "perfectly okay, 35% remaining" to "critical battery state, must hibernate now and might not have enough power to finish that", even though Windows estimates the low power (not critical) state should be at 10% or 12% (you can adjust this somewhere in the power settings IIRC, so you probably could set it artificially high to something like 90% so Windows gives you the "low battery" warning very soon after it gets unplugged. Would check where, but I'm on my desktop). Linux Mint (and probably other Linux variants) will tell you the battery health in their battery bar, in terms of current maximum capacity versus designed maximum capacity. These might work in a virtual machine, I'm not sure, but it could also be worth firing up a live CD/USB and seeing what it says about your battery. If it says something like designed 66 MWHr, current max 38 MWHr, they your battery has lost significant capacity and it's probably why Windows is not doing the world's best job of estimating remaining battery life.
  5. Sandy Bridge
    What's the summary for those of us conserving out bandwidth by preferring text/images to video? My guess is it's that in some use cases DDR4 is as good as DDR5. MSI did a study on this: https://www.msi.com/blog/a-closer-look-at-ddr5-benchmarks-with-intels-Alder-lake-cpus The tl;dr is that at the same capacities, top-of-the-line DDR4 can match or exceed most DDR5. Two relevant charts: So that 3600 C15 vs 4800 C40 is pretty close for write speeds at the same capacity, and 4800 C20 DDR4 wins over 4800 C40 DDR5. Presumably DDR4 3200/3600 is cheaper than DDR5, although whether 4800 C20 DDR4 is going to save you any money over DDR5, I'm not so sure... What I don't know the answer to yet is why doubling the capacity helps so much with DDR5. It should be dual-channel in all cases in the second chart. But it seems to be relevant. Now if the video is looking at game benchmarks... I wouldn't be surprised if the difference is negligible. Unless they're running on integrated graphics, faster RAM usually doesn't have major impacts on game frame rates. And DDR5's weakness at this early stage of its lifetime is its latency - the DDR3 in my desktop (9-9-9-24 1600) will beat any of the DDR5 that MSI was able to test in latency, and DDR4 almost always wins too. So for a game that is more dependent on latency than bandwidth, DDR5 might do worse. Latency should improve as DDR5 matures... but it's the tradeoff of jumping on board early, along with the higher price. IIRC, workloads like compression and encoding are more likely to benefit from DDR5's bandwidth improvements.
  6. Sandy Bridge
    It's partially that the weather is improving, we've had some nice spring days (and now winter is coming back for a visit). But I also got better at figuring out how to enjoy being outside when it's cold. Some wind-proof winter gloves and figuring out that somewhat hilly, forested terrain is a lot more suitable for winter than flat, wind-swept plains or city wind tunnels were the key factors. So, while I'm still less motivated to go out if it's cloudy all day (very common here in the winter), and mud is still a problem, if it's cold enough to not have mud, and we get a rare sunny day, there's a decent chance I'll venture out. My TV signal is quite poor at home for two of the three major networks, but my cell signal is okay. Most of the times that I really am out of cell phone signal coverage aren't close to home, but when I venture over to the more remote parts of Pennsylvania or West Virginia. I found some 3G only spots in PA last year, I guess they'll be out of luck by next year. I agree on not using my phone a lot at home... anything Internet-related is generally better on a larger screen. Whoever was the original owner of the phone must have been a moderate user too - it's a 5-6 year old iPhone SE, had 86% battery health when I got it at 3 years of age, and is at 81% now. Whereas one of my relatives had a newer iPhone, and it was down to about 1/3 of its original battery life by the time he upgraded - but he also used it for 100% of his computing needs, so much more than me. At this point I don't have any motivation to upgrade to the SE 3rd-gen. Its flagship features are 5G and a faster processor, neither of which be noticeable for my use cases. They did upgrade the GNSS module, which would be nice... but not $480 nice. If they'd left out 5G but added Night Mode on the camera, it would have been more appealing.
  7. Sandy Bridge
    Circling back to this topic... I got distracted for a month or so, but recently decided to give Fedora a try. Looks like maybe I should have tried VMWare first, as Fedora doesn't even boot under VirtualBox (with the latest Fedora 35 x64 Live DVD image). Re-reading the replies, I realize that my criteria are different than Hiew's, and probably than most Linux users'. I don't really care if the software I'm using is open-source, as long as it's reputable. I don't want to have to think about package managers, I just want one that works. I guess I've only really used apt, apt-get, and Synaptic over the past decade, and I never fell in love with them. Although I do know enough to know I'm leery of snaps, due to the overhead of them and consequent slower startup time for applications, and to a lesser extent the space requirements. As an option to resolve conflicting dependencies, maybe, but as the default in a package manager, no thanks. I'm currently waffling between Manjaro KDE, or maybe PC Linux OS or Mageia. Manjaro being Arch based is a bit intimidating, due to Arch's reputation of having to set everything up yourself. Back when trying Linux distros was exciting to me, I did try Arch, but even then my enthusiasm was not sufficient for it. But supposedly Manjaro tries to be easy to use. Really, I wish there were a flowchart for choosing a Linux distro. I've chosen semi-randomly over the years, and sometimes I've lucked out (PC Linux OS and Mandriva in the late 2000s, Mint 18), and sometimes not so much (Ubuntu 18.04 GNOME, Mint 20, Gentoo back in the day).
  8. Sandy Bridge
    I almost switched to T-Mobile in 2012. Decided to get a minimal plan just to make sure they had coverage where I lived, and the number they gave me was one being targeted by a collections agency. So, yeah, it happens. Needless to say, I did not switch to that number. Kept my existing number and switched to an AT&T MRVNO instead. Although it can work the other way too. One of my friends was the spammers' best friend, and switched numbers a month ago, and doesn't get spam anymore. My guess is if a number gets recycled within a certain period of time, there's an elevated risk of that happening. Network standby can eat up a lot of juice, especially if the cell signal is weak or nonexistant and it's searching for towers. At home, it's whatever, I'll plug it in if need be. But if I'm outdoors for a good part of the day. The 3G shut-off does kind of stink. My parents had to replace their phones for that reason. Although theirs were getting pretty long in the tooth, so they likely would have early this year anyway. Still, it probably created a lot of e-waste.
  9. Sandy Bridge
    On that original topic... the only thing that comes to mind to explain it is that you have a lot of IO going on, and waiting for the SSD is causing other tasks to become delayed. If enough background tasks are hammering it, foreground tasks can become delayed. Kind of like a traffic jam - your task might not be the cause of it, but it still gets stuck where the bottleneck is. When there isn't an obvious cause for it a major slowdown, I use the "IO reads", "IO writes", "IO other", and the corresponding "bytes" sections (e.g. "IO read bytes") in the Details tab of Task Manager to help figure out what's causing so much disk activity. I don't know what the "nVIDIA container" is exactly, but it could be that, or something else. Once I found that it was the Epic Games client that was consuming a ton of resources (although that one might have been CPU?); it no longer is allowed to start with Windows. I just checked, and the Write Cache and Best Performance are checked for my internal hard drives, and if they get super swamped they still slow down... so I could believe that only kind-of swamped could be noticeable without those settings. I'll be curious if there is a culprit identified. I didn't think Second Life was super graphically demanding, 16-32 FPS sounds lower than I would have thought normal (and even more so if that's 32 FPS max in any game).
  10. Sandy Bridge
    Spring, 1552. Tens of thousands of horsemen leave the Timurid border, heading to the Chagatai capital of Urumqi. The old Khan, Abdul-Karim, had died of a hunting accident after more than half a century of rule. As had been custom for centuries, the horsemen returned to their base for the succession. In one last parting gift, Abdul-Kareem had made his intentions clear in that regard, avoiding the succession crises that had so often plagued the hordes. In Herat, there was a collective sigh of relief from the Timurid nobles. They knew the signs of a horde "seeking more grazing land" for their horses, having once been a horde themselves, and they knew they were the likely next target. Why else would the Chagatai Horde have betrayed their alliance ten years ago, or failed to effectively help defend Timurid lands against invaders ten years before that? A year ago, the Timurids had thought there time was up when Chagatai horsemen massed on their border, but they took the last southern lands of the Uzbek Horde instead. When they massed again in the winter of 1551-1552, the Timurids had thought sure they would be finished. Link to map (surely there's an image hotlink option somewhere, right?) And yet, this was a topic of debate among the Chagatai elite. Abdul-Karim had indeed intended to divide the Timurid lands between himself and the Black Sheep Turkomen - the Silk Road for Chagatai, Persia for the Turkomen. But his overtures to the Turkomen had been unsuccessful - instead they allied with the Ottoman Empire, and made clear their intention to rule the entire Caspian Sea some day. As a result, the Horde had made an alliance with the Mamluk Sultanate. Both needed a counterweight against the threat of an Ottoman-Turkoman invasion, which neither could counter by themselves. With that diplomatic failure in Persia, there was thus talk of perhaps reviving the Timurid alliance.
  11. Sandy Bridge
    Dusted off Neo Scavenger. It's a survival game set in post-apocalyptic Michigan. Survived 3 days and change both times... I have an old game where I was still alive after 9 days and I'm not sure how I did it. You will die a lot. But it's kind of fun hunting squirrels, trying to only eat non-poisonous berries and mushrooms, and being paranoid about any humans you encounter. I thought I died due to accidentally eating a death cap mushroom in my most recent attempt, but it appears sepsis got me instead. Maybe the mushroom I ate was actually safe.. they were right next to each other in my inventory and looked the same! After that I fired up Europa Universalis IV. I'm taking the hordes out for a ride, specifically Chagatai. I started at their low point in the 1460s, when historically a young, inexperienced Khan was busy losing his khanate. My goal was to turn things around and become the regional power in the Central Asian steppes (notably eclipsing the Uzbek Horde and Kazakh Horde, and the Timurids), and then grapple with an eastward expanding Russia, hopefully re-applying the Tatar Yoke. It didn't work out that way though, the princes of Rurik fought among themselves and the Kazan Khanate started re-applying the yoke before I even got in the area. But I think there will be a good showdown anyway. I've now established myself as the top horde, controlling much of Central Asia, although working with the Timurids as allies rather than conquering them, and have been borging west. Meanwhile, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth has taken full advantage of the infighting in the House of Rurik to borg east, taking land up to and including taking Moscow. Only one province separates our territories at this point. Resistance has been futile for both empires' enemies; what will happen when they inevitably meet? The year is 1540, so it's still fairly early. It's also been interesting in the east; the Ming dynasty has been collapsing early, perhaps in part due to a lengthy war they fought with the Mongols, who eventually agreed to pay tribute but not before stretching the Ming army thin. I've been a bit paranoid about the Mongols trying their own westward expansion, as they hate our guts, and have allied with the peasant Emperor Li Zicheng of the Shun Dynasty as a counter-weight. The chaos in China would arguably make it a good time to invade, but I suspect it will last long enough that I can take care of priorities elsewhere first.
  12. Sandy Bridge
    Just curious, what is "Aero in the top bar"? I've been using Vivaldi as my main browser for 5 years, which might be why I don't know what that means, but I've used other browsers in that time too, and still only know Aero as the Windows Vista+ theme.
  13. Sandy Bridge
    Most likely it was because it's an older XP/Mint dual-boot system, and FAT32 is natively supported in XP, including in the disk formatting utility for internal drives, which made it very easy to set up. It looks like I probably could have used exFAT.
  14. Sandy Bridge
    I'm past my prime COD4 days when I could set my username to MEGARACER and, on a map I knew well, play well enough to justify it. But keyboards are where it's at, amirite?
  15. Sandy Bridge
    I'll believe it when I see it and take a huge grain of salt for now. WCCFTech is at the lowest rung of reliability for rumors in my book. Sure, sometimes they come true, but when you publish every rumor of course some of them are going to come true. And that's not anything specific about nVIDIA, they were all about the AMD rumors when they were a new site, and sure enough a few of them came true and a lot of them didn't, or were only partially accurate. But even if the "best case" comes true, and the high-end-to-high-end comparison is 2.5 times as fast? One, it's going to cost a small fortune. And two, 450W - 850W of power usage? I don't want that card. Not only the power bill and environmental irresponsibility, but that's a lot of heat to disperse and would not fit in my quiet PC from an acoustic standpoint. AMD and nVIDIA have been chasing the performance crown at the expense of power efficiency for years, and if these grain-of-salt rumors wind up being true, nVIDIA is turning that up to 11 with their newest cards. I've still got 8.5 years of warranty on my 650W Seasonic PSU. No point in putting a video card that blows the whole power budget all by itself in there.
  16. Sandy Bridge
    Vivaldi has been my primary browser since 2017. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Opera Presto was my main browser from 2007 through 2015 (2016 was a year of transition, with Firefox also being a primary browser for part of the year). Opera Presto was king of power user features and customizeability without extensions, and now Vivaldi has taken up that mantle. And truthfully, I don't even use that many of the features Vivaldi has. But the ones I do use I really like. Single-key shortcuts are a must, the History panel on Vivaldi is miles beyond any other browser which is great for finding something I looked up last month but can't quite remember where (especially if I remember it was a Tuesday or a couple days before some event), and I've finally mostly migrated my RSS feeds to Vivaldi from Opera Presto. Second-most these days is Firefox. There are a few sites I try to remember to use there because it blocks auto-playing videos (including non-ad videos). I still occasionally use Opera Presto, but it's a distant third these days. Sometimes I'll pull it up as an alternative to another tab in the same browser, for cases where it's nice to have that visual separation of tabs, and when I know the site will work in Opera Presto in 2022. The nice thing is my muscle memory of shortcuts transfers between Vivaldi and Opera Presto, unlike Vivaldi and Firefox. Chrome was never alive to me due to Google's privacy policies (including the very first one they shipped with Chrome). Opera Blink was initially dead to me because they dropped all the features, but has been more permanently since they sold it to China. China's domestic monitoring of the Internet is far too creepy and controlling for me to want a Chinese developer to be behind my web browser. Never heard of LibreWolf or Epic, didn't know DuckDuckGo had a browser despite it being my primary search engine. I also have a few oddball browsers installed for super niche cases, nostalgia, or just to try them out. These include a 10-year-old version of K-Meleon, SeaMonkey, Netscape Navigator, and Serpent. Netscape is probably my favorite of those due to its non-minimalist UI, but of course it doesn't work with many sites these days.
  17. Sandy Bridge
    The quality is higher. The films are more compressed when they are streamed than when they're on a disc. Now, in practice, with my 48" TV at standard viewing distances, I can't really tell Blu-Ray versus streamed HD video. Maybe if I had a 72" TV, I could, but I don't. However, I can tell a difference between watching a DVD and watching a streamed standard-definition video. Generally, though, you have to get the actual disc to get the increased quality. When I had Spectre on Blu-Ray and it came with a digital copy, the digital copy was much smaller when downloaded than the Blu-Ray, and not quite as high of quality. The downloaded version was nowhere near 35 GB, I think closer to 8-10 GB? Better than DVD (and probably better compression technology as well, which also helps), but not quite Blu-Ray. So if you only have a digital copy, really the only reason to download would be if you don't trust your Internet connection to stay stable while viewing. Probably generally not very worth it, although I recall at least one time a few years ago when my Internet went out on movie night, so we broke out a film on disc instead. So in general, I only go for discs for items I know I'll watch multiple times. It's always good to be able to watch The Office without having to have a streaming subscription to whatever it's streaming on these days. For those items, it can save money or hassle over the long haul. I just watched the Back to the Future trilogy on Blu-Ray again; I paid $8.50 for the set in 2016, and it would cost $12 to stream the series nowadays (it's only available as a one-off, not as part of a subscription bundle). For cases like that, the disc makes sense. And while I did stream the first one directly from the disc, I'd forgotten how much of a pain it can be with the menus and anti-piracy warnings and so forth. I wound up backing them up to my hard drive and playing them from there so I wouldn't have to put up with all that. Isn't a FireCuda also a hard drive? Just a smaller one in this case?
  18. Sandy Bridge
    Well, the closest thing is something that most people haven't had until after they've had sushi... a poké bowl. But aside from that, the flavors are high-quality fish (most often tuna or salmon), high-quality rice, seaweed (not sure what really tastes like seaweed, and it might be the biggest wild card in whether you'll like it, but it doesn't taste like your generic yard weeds), and the other items depend on the type of sushi. Cucumber is common, avocado is common. Sometimes crab (often imitation). Most often sushi is dipped in soy sauce, but I find that whether that improves it depends on the quality of the soy sauce. If it's cheap store brand, I'd just as soon skip it, but if it's a good Japanese sushi place they'll usually have soy sauce that complements the flavor. For the first time, I'd recommend something like a Philadelphia roll (salmon + cucumber + cream cheese), and a straight-up tuna roll. The California roll (crab, cucumber, avocado) is another good starter choice. Skip the spicy options; some places do it well but others overdo the spicy sauce, and the focus should be on the main ingredients. Of course, really, the best option is probably to split a few rolls with your sister as that way you'll have more variety, and if you don't like some or all of them they won't be wasted. I'd also recommend eating out for the first time. Supermarket sushi is usually not as high quality, in part because it's been sitting out. And if you have qualms about seaweed, find a place that serves them American style (with the rice on the outside) instead of Japanese style (with the rice inside the seaweed, which is on the outside); I think American style is more common here in the Midwest, but it's not unusual to find either. Edit: Also the fancy options sometimes have fish or avocado on the outside. They're great, but tend to be pricier since you get more fish. I often include one of those with one or two more traditional rolls. I almost bought some sushi today. Wound up going for a gyro instead though.
  19. Sandy Bridge
    Just re-watched the Back to the Future trilogy; I watched the first one in October of 2015, and the second and third in 2016, so it had been a few years. They stand the test of time! I'd put the first and second about equal and the third one half a step down, but there are enough running themes throughout the films that it's worth watching them as a trilogy in close succession. I'm sure I'll watch them again in a few years. Good to hear about the King's Man. I saw the first one and it was not bad, but not so compelling as to make it a point of watching the second or third.
  20. Sandy Bridge
    On another forum, someone mentioned that they have WinRAR, and it got me wondering... in 2022, is there any reason to prefer WinRAR/WinZIP over 7-Zip, other than having used it forever? 7-Zip is free, and fast, and compresses things really well, and integrates into the Explorer context menu... what could the other ones offer that's better? So I did some DuckDuckGoing, and learned how to set RAR files to open with 7-Zip automatically (cool!), and looked at a few comparisons. Surprisingly, the most informative was from WinZIP's website: https://www.winzip.com/en/learn/tips/7zip-vs-winrar/ It might be the worst "why you should buy our product" page I've ever seen, because I came away from it thinking, "Wow! WinRAR and 7-Zip sound pretty great compared to WinZIP! I should try them instead!" But the only notable feature that 7-Zip might not have was WinRAR having a feature to automatically select the ideal compression method. I could see that being useful in fringe cases, although probably not often enough to switch my default. So what does the forum think? Are there reasons to use one of the paid options, and if so what are they?
  21. Sandy Bridge
    Well-written article. I'd forgotten about the taskbar changes. No un-grouping, really? I always prefer un-grouped if there's enough space on the taskbar. I think it was Windows 98 that added the grouping-when-you-run-out-of-space option? Or maybe ME/2K/XP. Either way it's been an option for a long time. I also agree that there isn't really a marquee feature. Maybe some that normally would be marquee features got shipped in Windows 10 updates? Universal microphone mute is a good idea, but with the negative tradeoffs of upgrading isn't worth it unless that's a major pain point for you. The snap layouts is one where it's about time it arrived in Windows, but I have the exact same functionality on my XP laptop with a third-party application. I suppose that's kind of the point of updates though, integrating things that had to be third-party before. Taskbar re-ordering and virtual desktops are other categories where I have them on my XP laptop via third-party software, but it's integrated nowadays. IMO, Microsoft only really had high-quality releases and a solid architecture with 7 and 8/8.1. Of course after having that, it becomes expected. But Vista was a flaming mess when it arrived, and Microsoft had openly said that they had to relaunch development of it because of the architectural problems. XP was fine I suppose, as long as you didn't connect it to the Internet before SP2. ME was regarded as lower-quality than 98. Prior to that the advances in features were generally great enough that they made up for the rough edges and instability of being built on top of MS-DOS, but it's way easier to get a crash or BSOD on 98 than XP. So, the criticism of the regression is warranted, but it was only really for a few releases that Microsoft had the quality at release sailing smoothly (and maybe NT 3.1 through 2000 on the business side). Performance/requirements... I agree with what you've written. Microsoft should have made TPM a requirement for the "Designed for Windows 11" stickers, like they did with DirectX 10 support in GPUs for Windows Vista, not an impediment to upgrading. I also continue to be mystified by why my 2nd-gen i5 with Windows 8.1 is noticeably more responsive than my 8th-gen i7 with Windows 10. I mean, sure, part of it's on Intel for only having a 5-10% boost each generation. But what's Windows 10 doing that makes it take so much longer to display a context menu when I right-click the taskbar? 7 was regarded as improving Vista's performance, although I wonder whether it didn't rather keep things flat and take advantage of hardware improvements. I would have hoped 11 did the same relative to 10, but that doesn't appear to be the focus. Now that native NTFS driver is interesting news! On my Windows/Linux dual-boot system, I set up the shared folder as FAT32, since that's what both of them natively supported. Which is fine 90% of the time, except when it isn't. Mainly when I want to put a > 4 GB file on it, and I can't, because it's FAT32. Native NTFS in Linux will solve that problem nicely. I did try installing an ext3 and ext2 driver for Windows back in the day as a solution to that problem, too. It mostly worked, but could be a little flaky... I think it was just written by one guy in his spare time so I was pleasantly surprised it worked at all, and that I didn't lose data either. But ultimately it wasn't as reliable of a solution as FAT32, and IIRC it didn't support ext4 or any of the other newfangled file systems so it wasn't a viable forever solution. So it's great to hear that Linux is finally getting full NTFS support, that will make it more viable to dual-boot and thus lower the barrier to entry in Windows users converting to Linux, either partially or fully. I'm still not going to bet on 2022 being the Year of the Linux Desktop, though...
  22. Sandy Bridge
    Personally, I wouldn't pay more for the RTX 2060 over a 1660 Ti/Super, or at least not much. The RTX 2060 adds ray-tracing, but it's the low-end ray-tracing GPU. From what I've read, if you're going to turn on ray tracing, it's generally advisable to have at least a 2070. So the 2060 winds up in this valley where you technically have the feature, but not necessarily enough power for it to be super useful. Either save the money and go 1660, or if you really want it go 2070. This is also partly influenced by having one of the first-gen CUDA and DX10 cards, and a midrange one, in my case the 8600M GT. I could technically run CUDA or DX10, but didn't have the power for those to really be useful features. An 8800, yeah, probably acceptable for both. But there was really not a practical advantage to having CUDA and DX10 support over having the otherwise-equally-performing 7900 GS at the time. As for the actual details of Ti/Super/etc.? I'm not going to pretend enough to say what is the better value, especially as market values are elevated and somewhat volatile. Honestly, with the GPU market the way it is, I'd probably spend the money on an external hard drive as a proper backup system, and do the Windows reinstall and keep using the 1070. Eventually the market's going to calm down, and there's at least a quarter-way-decent chance it might have returned halfway to normal by early next year.
  23. Sandy Bridge
    I'm currently up-to-date on 1883, which I'd definitely recommend. It does align with my outdoors/adventure interests, but it also does a good job of character development and writing. Hoping it gets renewed for a second season, assuming the plot is intended to last more than one, which at this point I suspect it is. Game of Thrones was the last drama I watched; I really don't watch much TV. I liked it right up until the second half of season 8. The geopolitics was right up my alley, and they did a great job for the first 7.5 seasons of the characters almost always having plausible motivations for their actions - not necessarily rational, but consistent with their personalities. Although the Arya in Braavos plotline was weird, not having read the books that one never made a lot of sense and was always the most boring one in an episode where it appeared. But aside from that and almost quitting in season 2 when it looked like it might be 6 seasons of Joffrey's antics, I really liked the first 7.5 seasons. Haven't read the books for that one. I did attempt to read the Lord of the Rings books and found them dreadfully boring, filled with so many adjectives trying to describe every aspect of a place that by the time you got back to the plot two pages later, you'd forgotten what was going on. I made it to about half way through the second book before giving up, so it wasn't like I read 20 pages and concluded it was boring. I've heard the movies are a lot better than the books, but haven't had much motivation to try them.
  24. Sandy Bridge
    Many of the items mentioned fall into the bucket of "lack of upgradeability/worse upgradeability than in the past". This isn't surprising on an enthusiast's forum. What's more interesting to me is thinking about what can be done to improve the longevity of machines. We aren't in an era where a computer is obsolete in a year anymore, but in laptops there are limited options when something does become the limiting factor other than buying a whole new machine. And yet that's very inefficient from a materials standpoint, and inefficient from an economic standpoint in many cases, too. I taught a family member to replace their internal laptop battery last year, which meant for $70 or so they could fix what was broken in a $700 laptop. Even if you pay a shop to do it, you'd often still be saving money - just like it's cheaper to replace a flat tire on a bicycle than to buy a new bicycle. Environmentally, it's also not great to be throwing out a whole laptop instead of, say, one stick of RAM. Even if they get recycled, a lot more effort goes into recycling a whole laptop, and you'll be left with more non-recycleable parts. So there's momentum behind right-to-repair efforts, which I think is a good thing. But there's also a cultural reason for the lack of upgradeability - many people, once they have sufficient wealth, adopt a "if it breaks, we'll replace it" mentality to most items, aside from vehicles, housing, and perhaps items that are difficult to move such as a stove. In part this is due to how inexpensive many appliances have become - it's not economical to repair a $20 toaster - but where wealth allows it, it often creeps up into more expensive categories, including computers. The local Micro Center does a good business fixing and upgrading older computers, but I don't doubt that they also sell a lot of new ones to people who could have repaired or upgraded their old one. Part of it's also on the industry, whether intentional or not. Even when being able to replace CPUs and GPUs was the norm, upgrade options were often limited. You might have one newer generation of CPU, no equivalent of buying an A320 desktop mobo in 2017 and putting a Ryzen 9 5950 in it in 2022, and I don't recall there ever being standardized heatsinks for GPUs, so at least when I looked into GPU upgrades, it was a non-starter even when I did have an MXM GPU. Maybe, with more competition, there would have been a Cyrix offering overdrive-style upgrades for older CPU sockets on laptops in the late 2000's. But as it was, the industry if anything had a profit incentive to sell you a whole new laptop rather than that upgraded GPU. Aside from upgradeability? I'm not a fan of 16:9. Currently replying to this topic on a 10-year-old 16:10 monitor, that still has empty space around the edges of this post reply box. I'm not saying we all have to go 5:4 (although I did use a 5:4 monitor at work in the mid-2010s), but I likely would have upgraded this monitor 5 years ago if there had been a 27-inch 16:10 model on the market.
  25. Sandy Bridge
    In the end I think I prefer NotebookRevival to NotebookTalk. It sounds more... optimistic? Enthusiastic? Less general? But both would work well. EFGXT does roll off the tongue kind of nicely in an XKCD-type way, but doesn't give any hint to what the site's about. I think it's better to stay focused on the notebook niche than to try to have a general appeal. If we go for the general PC hardware focus, they the question, "why join Core-PC.net instead of [insert other PC forum name here]?" has to be answered. Whereas if the focus is on notebooks, not only is that a clear and more distinct focus, but that's likely where the majority of the community's expertise is as well. It's more likely to result in standing out from the crowd enough to have long-term viability. It's true that a decent number of long-timers now use desktops as their main machines; I count myself as one of them. But I think it would be smarter to add another sub-forum or two to desktops, if interest warrants it, than to advertise ourselves as a general PC hardware forum.
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