Those heat sinks are sharp as fuck, I remember thinking “Christ I need chainmail gloves to handle this bastard.” Case edges are dangerous too, for that matter.
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Now I know something new to try for Diablo IV.
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Blood of the servant, willingly given…
Working on cars and computers. If you are not giving blood to the project, you are not trying hard enough.
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Once a tinkerer, always a tinkerer. I don’t build many PC’s these days anymore. (it’s hard to find the time). But I still can’t help myself. I just picked up a beater wintel laptop to do things around the house that I can’t do easily with a mac. Within five minutes of receiving it, I had it open and another five minutes later had ordered the right 2TB 7,000 mb/s SSD, and am upgrading the 16gb 2.0gHZ PC4 RAM with 32GB of 2.7gHZ RAM so that I can… do things like dial into my car and turn off the check engine light or reconfigure my oldest security cameras since the management software will not run on the newest macOS. Ha.
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Well, call it future-proofing. You never know when you’ll need 32GB of RAM.
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The last computer I built was a combination gaming PC / Hyper-V server in 2015. 32GB RAM, a couple of SSDs plus a RAID5 of hard drives for the VMs. OWA ran off of that computer for a good 3 years or so. Then one of the drives in the RAID failed and the machine slowed to a crawl. Gotta love onboard RAID not behaving like a real RAID. I moved OWA to another system, tore the RAID out, and switched from Windows Server to Windows 10 and it was good for a while.
Then the computer started blue-screening with a bugcheck code I’d never seen before, and had no idea what it meant. No problem, google the code… which produced just a single Google result, an MSDN article that simply listed every Windows bugcheck code known to man. No details of what the code meant, no remediation steps. No forum posts or Reddit threads indicating that ANYONE ELSE had ever gotten that code before.
I was too demoralized by that alone to ever go through the rigorous troubleshooting process ahead of me. I put up with the blue screens for about a year until I switched to Mac in 2020, then bought a gaming laptop last year that is plenty suitable for my needs (not sure about Diablo IV). I’m never building another computer ever again.
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So, what blowtorch is the Big Freight Train running on now?
MS Azure
CSP’s FTW!
My agency just crossed 75% of our workloads in the cloud, from a start point of 2% 7 years ago. Mostly in AWS and GCP.
If I may be so bold as to ask for some non-Mac advice:
Mom needs a new desktop. She’s got a ~12 y.o. Dell Inspiron 2330 (all-in-one) and wants something similar. The specs on this one I was looking at are pretty much all she needs (It’s just a internet/spreadsheet/word processor/photo/scanner & printer machine). She has a 4TB Western Digital external drive, so the onboard HD really just needs to be a boot drive, I think:
I’m completely not up on current manufacturers, or the technology in general (yay retirement!), so it doesn’t need to be a Dell. Price not really that important, but I don’t see why she’d need to spend more than $1200 or so. Any thoughts and suggestions?
Looks fine
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We got our last desktop at Costco on the advice of one of my computer savvy friends.
They may have something similar. Look next to the 55 gallon drum of cheese puffs.
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Your Mom may not be interested in making the conversion, but the base model M1 iMac is currently $900. It is, in my biased humble opinion, a far superior (and better-looking) machine to the Dell.
For spreadsheets, the Mac OS comes with Apple’s “Numbers” app for free. You get Apple’s full “office” suite for free - including all future updates - whereas you’re probably going to have to re-buy or subscribe to MS Office on a new machine.
Unless you’re a super-duper power user of Excel, I think Numbers a much more user-friendly program. If you’re already spreadsheet savvy, the conversion is pretty painless. Numbers can import/export Excel files.
Just remember, once you go Mac…
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Yeah, I’ll switch her to a Mac if you’ll do the training and be the on-call tech support 7 days a week.
An ex and I had a Mac Powerbook for a few years (she needed it for work), and it was fine. I have no interest in owning another one…then again I also have no interest in having my computer control the lights in my house so you and I are a bit different wrt that kind of stuff.
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I think you just gave him a semi.
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So at the risk of giving Limey and Waldo stiffies…let’s just say, hypothetically, that I was in the market for one of them ultra-wide monitors. How wide is reasonably useful for a hack like me (I just have two 24-inch monitors)? Are they worth the money? How much money is a reasonable budget for one of them bad boys? I can essentially use it like 2 or 3 monitors, correct?
This is for a non-Apple setup.
I replaced my two 24" monitors with a 44" ultra wide. You get about the same amount of real estate but it’s so much more usable than twin monitors because you don’t have the divide in the middle.
Here’s the one I got, which currently on sale for $480 on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Sceptre-43-8-inch-Ultra-Build/dp/B092KCWLTS
It has a great picture and all the inputs you need. The built-in speakers are fine for basic sound, but for music/movies/games you will want external speakers. Mine came with one dead pixel (I only notice it because it’s pretty-much dead center) and I have never got the USB hub to work. I went back and forth with their support people on the hub but, while it would supply power the devices would never show up as connected to my Mac. I got bored and gave up.
If you plan to mount an ultra-wide on a swing arm, make sure you get a heavy-duty mount as these things are pretty heavy. Also, if you’re going wider than 44", you’ll be better off with a curved screen as the extreme edges can seem a little far away, especially as you can’t angle them inwards like with a pair of screens.
So I notice is has multiple inputs. Can you use two HDMI inputs from say a docking station and have it function essentially as two monitors, or do you still have to do the old “split screen” thing?
So I’ve discovered what I want…a curved 43-inch 32:10 super ultra-wide monitor. And as expected, they quit making those in favor of the 49" jobs. Which I think is simply too big. Such is my life