Computer General Discussion Thread

[The Great Warrior Rivers]

I'd prefer a standard, as I'm not experienced in that kind of stuff. My television-
http://www.samsung.com/us/video/tvs/UN32EH4003FXZA

Is there more information you need?

The TV appears to be 60hz,dunno what the max res is. Might be on the link.

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

I'd prefer a standard, as I'm not experienced in that kind of stuff. My television-
http://www.samsung.com/us/video/tvs/UN32EH4003FXZA

Is there more information you need?

So, to start, your monitor is 720p, and as far as I can tell from a little research, it's "Motion Rate 60" is actually 60hz, so is should do 60fps.

So you don't want to build your own. That narrows down to two options. There are a Number of sites that will build you a custom PC, or you can buy an off-the-shelf one if you don't want to mess with learning even what each part does/effects and how "good" it is. While I recommend that (knowing your machine well comes in handy when things don't work), it's not for everyone.

[Minoa]

I remember that PC manufacturers sometimes tend to cut corners when you least expect it. This is why I build my own computer, and dictate what OS or software goes in.

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

I remember that PC manufacturers sometimes tend to cut corners when you least expect it. This is why I build my own computer, and dictate what OS or software goes in.

That said, I've heard decent things about the places that let you pick your parts and put them together for you. It seems to be a decent middle ground for those wanting a more customized, quality machine, but who lack the confidence/ability to try it themselves, with a reasonable charge for labor.

[Lechites]

I remember that PC manufacturers sometimes tend to cut corners when you least expect it. This is why I build my own computer, and dictate what OS or software goes in.

That said, I've heard decent things about the places that let you pick your parts and put them together for you. It seems to be a decent middle ground for those wanting a more customized, quality machine, but who lack the confidence/ability to try it themselves, with a reasonable charge for labor.

Origin is pretty good, you can get a good machine for that price range.

https://www.originpc.com/gaming/desktops/chronos/

[YellowApple]

What I can't understand is Lenovo. I've thought this over a dozen times and it never comes out ahead for Lenovo. Why do they want to shove their software down everyone's throat? It's not like they gain anything from it, and most of their shit is on the Windows Store anyway...

They do gain money. Usually OEMs install shitware because they're paid to do so.

I still can't believe that it's 2015 and HP is still in business.

Indeed. Yet, somehow, here they are, still making shitty PCs.

I still like HP's printers, though.

I'll believe it. Honestly every year now I wonder more and more why POWER isn't catching on as much as it should be. I mean I get it's expensive for servers, but the big names (mainly governments and huge supernational corporations) don't really have to worry about that. I mean of course IBM will never touch home PCs ever again, but...it would be so nice...

Well, it looks like there are some companies that still make motherboards for things like modern Amiga-equivalents. If anyone nowadays is going to make something suitably usable and suitably POWERful, it'll probably be something along the lines of a SAM460EX.

I was using WinForms though

On .NET? I wasn't aware that was possible.

Hey dudes. Lately I've been looking for a new gaming PC, but I don't know exactly what specifications I need. Since you're all MLG pro gamers, I thought you could give me some tips, or even a certain machine I should get. I'm looking for a desktop that can run Far Cry 4 and Cities Skylines (by far the most taxing games on my computer) at 60 FPS on medium graphics settings. My old laptop has recently taken a shitting, and any help is appreciated.

I have a budget of about $1700. Can I use my TV as a monitor? It would be a shame just to buy a monitor when I have my TV in my room collecting dust.

As long as you follow three simple guidelines, no scorn from myself shall be directed toward you:

• Power supply: must be 80+ Gold certified or better. Maybe 80+ Silver, but that's cutting it close. None of this Bronze shit. Especially none of that "not even Bronze" shit. Going cheap on your PSU puts your components at risk of overvoltage and other various dangers due to the more relaxed quality control involved. Going Gold or Platinum doesn't just give you better efficiency, but also requires a much higher degree of build quality to pull off that sort of efficiency and precision.
• Hard drive: Western Digital. No exceptions.
• RAM and SSD: Kingston if you're going cheap. Crucial if you're going un-cheap. Samsung if you're going to sink $20k for that newly-announced 16TB SSD. Kingston's HyperX is overpriced for what it is, though; if you go Kingston, just stick to their normal shit.

Edit: since you mentioned Cities: Skylines, it's worth mentioning that I play it with an EVGA GeForce GTX 760, an Intel Core i7 930 @ 2.8GHz, and 24GB of Kingston RAM on some shitty Gigabyte motherboard I'm shopping around to replace (simultaneously with the CPU) and a barely-alive 750GB Samsung spinny-HDD with few if any problems (other than me having installed too many mods and causing Unity 4 to hit some hardcoded and rather silly 16GB memory cap that nobody on the fucking Unity Q/A site knows jack shit about), so if you can go even slightly better than that (which should be fucking trivial with your budget), you'll be fine there. This is with quite a few of the [ARIS] mods, BorderCities or whatever the fuck it's called now, that one mod that bumps up internal resolution, that other mod that lets you unlock all 25 tiles, etc. A bit laggy sometimes, but whatever. Note, however, that said experience only applies if you're running something Linux-based; IIRC, 64-bit Unity on Windows is still pretty shitty (and I don't even know if Cities: Skylines even bothers with a 64-bit Windows version; they might very well be learning from Kerbal Space Program's woes on that front). No idea about Far Cry 4, since I haven't tried that (nor would I in all likelihood; I don't think there's a SteamOS version of that yet).

So I was looking at laptops in PC World this afternoon and I saw a decent looking Lenovo. I might post the actual product numbers later, because I'm asking about processors.
It was a "Beats by Dre" one so it'll have meh speakers and I assume this is why it retails for £500 (on sale for £350). But it had an Intel i3-5010U (launched early this year?) which is 2 cores at 2GHz or so.
But when looking for it, I found a standard Lenovo of similar model with an AMD A8-6410 which is a quad-core 2-2.4GHz processor that's a little over a year old, for £300

I've only ever owned anything with Intel before, so how would these two stack up against each other?
If it can play the Wargame series, I will be more than happy, I'm just trying to replace my current six-year old dying laptop.

I personally tend to prioritize number of cores over clock speed, but that's because most of what I do (namely, programming and extreme multitasking) benefits more from more cores than higher clock speeds.

However...

Is this the AMD one you're looking at? If so, I'd probably avoid it for the screen resolution alone. I mean, it's fucking 2015; 1366x768 is un-fucking-acceptable, especially when my one-year-old-or-so smartphone pushes 1080p in, like, a third of the fucking screen size.

[New Oyashima]

So apparently Google is renaming itself to Alphabet.
Lol.

http://i.imgur.com/mYGddJu.png

God damn it Windows 10.

>blocking in hosts doesn't work, IPs are hardcoded into their code and DLLs

Or in other words, MS managed to completely redefine how networks work, just so they could spy on their users? Hogwash.

Most of that doesn't make any sense either. W10 recording everything you say, even with the relevant OS modules disabled, makes precisely zero sense - Google's been trying to figure out how to do the whole "always listening" thing for years to get Ok Google working in a not-broken state. No way in fuck Ms managed to pull a working version of that tech out of their ass since 2013.


I'd have to actually look into "that czech guy" to see the source of the BS, but for now this looks like the same as all the other fearmongering that's been circling W10.

Sounds like a bunch of shit.

[Minoa]

I remember that PC manufacturers sometimes tend to cut corners when you least expect it. This is why I build my own computer, and dictate what OS or software goes in.

That said, I've heard decent things about the places that let you pick your parts and put them together for you. It seems to be a decent middle ground for those wanting a more customized, quality machine, but who lack the confidence/ability to try it themselves, with a reasonable charge for labor.

That option was kind of rare back in 2009, when I started building my first computers.

[New Oyashima]

In my newest computer set up, I've put a T gauge train around my keyboard, did not foresee it crashing into my wrist. rip.

[YellowApple]

In my newest computer set up, I've put a T gauge train around my keyboard, did not foresee it crashing into my wrist. rip.

O-gauge or go home, scrub. :)

[Imperializt Russia]

So I was looking at laptops in PC World this afternoon and I saw a decent looking Lenovo. I might post the actual product numbers later, because I'm asking about processors.
It was a "Beats by Dre" one so it'll have meh speakers and I assume this is why it retails for £500 (on sale for £350). But it had an Intel i3-5010U (launched early this year?) which is 2 cores at 2GHz or so.
But when looking for it, I found a standard Lenovo of similar model with an AMD A8-6410 which is a quad-core 2-2.4GHz processor that's a little over a year old, for £300

I've only ever owned anything with Intel before, so how would these two stack up against each other?
If it can play the Wargame series, I will be more than happy, I'm just trying to replace my current six-year old dying laptop.

I personally tend to prioritize number of cores over clock speed, but that's because most of what I do (namely, programming and extreme multitasking) benefits more from more cores than higher clock speeds.

However...

Is this the AMD one you're looking at? If so, I'd probably avoid it for the screen resolution alone. I mean, it's fucking 2015; 1366x768 is un-fucking-acceptable, especially when my one-year-old-or-so smartphone pushes 1080p in, like, a third of the fucking screen size.

I'm looking at a 15.6" laptop, so 1366x768 is the resolution I'm limited to I'm afraid!
Lenovo Intel Beats
Lenovo AMD

[Minoa]

My 15.4-inch Macbook Pro of mid-2015 can hold 2880 x 1800 pixels, but it is because it is mainly for graphic design and web development (as well as this).

[Imperializt Russia]

My 15.4-inch Macbook Pro of mid-2015 can hold 2880 x 1800 pixels, but it is because it is mainly for graphic design and web development (as well as this).

Oh wow, fair enough!
In my price range I'm probably not going to find anything better than that resolution though.

Though I think it technically has better PPI than my 32" TV though...

[Bezombia]

In my newest computer set up, I've put a T gauge train around my keyboard, did not foresee it crashing into my wrist. rip.

lol

Well, it looks like there are some companies that still make motherboards for things like modern Amiga-equivalents. If anyone nowadays is going to make something suitably usable and suitably POWERful, it'll probably be something along the lines of a SAM460EX.

>Amiga OS 4.1 included
>1.10 GHz
>$712

might even be worth it tbh

I personally tend to prioritize number of cores over clock speed, but that's because most of what I do (namely, programming and extreme multitasking) benefits more from more cores than higher clock speeds.

However...

Is this the AMD one you're looking at? If so, I'd probably avoid it for the screen resolution alone. I mean, it's fucking 2015; 1366x768 is un-fucking-acceptable, especially when my one-year-old-or-so smartphone pushes 1080p in, like, a third of the fucking screen size.

I'm looking at a 15.6" laptop, so 1366x768 is the resolution I'm limited to I'm afraid!
Lenovo Intel Beats
Lenovo AMD

I have a 15.6" Lenovo laptop that's 1920x1080.

[Bezombia]

http://www.neowin.net/news/bmw-not-sell ... -to-google

lol

[Bezombia]

Well I've done some testing to see if this "windows 10 is literally hitler" thing has any merit and from what I'm seeing, it doesn't.

I let my computer sit with NetBalancer running, so I could see any and all up/down traffic and sort it by process without going through potentially compromised Windows software.


Surprisingly, the biggest infringer for downloading stuff without telling me was "NvBackend.exe" which is obviously the backend for Nvidia's display drivers.
When I opened up the start menu and searched for something, not a single SYSTEM process uploaded or downloaded anything. Granted I have SearchUI.exe blocked in Windows Firewall, but this completely discredits the idea that MS is bypassing firewalls and whatnot for their special processes.


The only "strange" behavior was from svchost.exe (PID 504, the other svchost.exe with a PID of 6524 never downloaded or uploaded anything) which is, as you can expect, a windows process. It downloaded exactly 208 bytes every three to four seconds. It was constant but not consistent - sometimes it'd skip a second, sometimes it'd do it twice in a row. Every now and then it'd upload a few bytes but nothing big enough that could possibly contain any useful data. They look like pings to me. I'm assuming that whatever 504 is doing, it isn't malicious because there isn't a lot you can DO with 20 byte uploads.

As I typed this, two instances of "OfficeClickToRun.exe" popped up and started downloading MBs of data. Not sure what that's about, but it's easy enough to block.


EDIT: I suppose this is worth mentioning.
The day I upgraded, I was on the road and using my laptop via USB wifi tethering from my 4G-enabled phone. Due to my cheap ass using the freeware version of the tethering software it automatically broke the connection after 10MB downloaded and required you to restart the app.
When I tried downloading some drivers on my laptop, I found that as soon as I enabled the connection my laptop very quickly downloaded at full speed up to the 10MB limit and then was cut off. It was doing this automatically, preventing me from actually getting any work done (because I'd almost instantly lose the connection). Task Manager wasn't displaying any process using any data, but I could clearly see on my phone's internet tethering app's monitoring section that my laptop was downloading something.
That doesn't seem to be happening anymore. I don't know what it was, I gave up trying after about half an hour of fighting with it.



This is more relevant to my initial post. When I blocked svchost.exe outright (including the half-dozen other "svchost.exe"s that popped up after awhile) nothing actually happened. Up/down traffic of my laptop as a whole flatlined, with NvBackend.exe remaining the only process that actually did anything, and it doesn't appear as if any windows services broke.
When I opened up Windows Update I found that it was 6% through downloading two updates (a definition update for Defender and KB3081436, a cumulative update). This explains the pings - Windows was searching for updates. Makes sense.

[Minoa]

I am interested by your observations, but we need more observations form numerous users to prove that Windows 10 is or is not as Orwellian as feared: provided that they’ve not accepted the “express” settings.

[New Oyashima]

I've redone my train and hid the wires. , it's around the base of my monitor, has a special tunnel so the wires from the monitor don't hit it. G2G.

[Lechites]

http://www.neowin.net/news/bmw-not-selling-alphabetcom-domain-to-google

lol

BMW would do that.

[Lechites]

What do those here that run Linux use for their VM'ing needs? I was thinking of just installing VirtualBox as that's what I use on Windows, but wanted to look at the other options.

[Minoa]

What do those here that run Linux use for their VM'ing needs? I was thinking of just installing VirtualBox as that's what I use on Windows, but wanted to look at the other options.

I am a VMware person. I have made references to that software, particularly when testing Windows 10.

[Saiwania]

I have this older laptop that I disassembled and put back together in order to clean the fan. I never was able to get down to the motherboard to take out the fan like I wanted to because there were these four speaker wires that refused to disconnect but were in the way of the top cover assembly if you wanted to remove that.

I tried applying as much careful force as I could over the course of 3 hours and only budged it 1/3rd of the way out before it wouldn't slide out any further and it became clear that I'd break the damn thing if I kept at it. At that point, I already made plenty of minor indentations and wear along the plastic siding and teeth to no avail. There was no mechanism to speak of to help disconnect it, (such as tabs) like there was for the keyboard's ribbon cable.

So it looks like I can't go down any further than below the keyboard for that one laptop. But from there, I could fortunately access the fan blades through the top. I used this anti-static cloth glove and a paperclip to shove it down between all of the blades. It seems to have lowered my normal running temperature by about 20 degrees, so I suppose I was successful.

It sucks though, that if I have a problem at the motherboard for that one laptop, I probably can't get to the part. What would you do about an internal wire connection that simply cannot be unplugged without breaking it because it is so stubborn?

[Soldati Senza Confini]

I have this older laptop that I disassembled and put back together in order to clean the fan. I never was able to get down to the motherboard to take out the fan like I wanted to because there were these four speaker wires that refused to disconnect but were in the way of the top cover assembly if you wanted to remove that.

I tried applying as much careful force as I could over the course of 3 hours and only budged it 1/3rd of the way out before it wouldn't slide out any further and it became clear that I'd break the damn thing if I kept at it. At that point, I already made plenty of minor indentations and wear along the plastic siding and teeth to no avail. There was no mechanism to speak of to help disconnect it, (such as tabs) like there was for the keyboard's ribbon cable.

So it looks like I can't go down any further than below the keyboard for that one laptop. But from there, I could fortunately access the fan blades through the top. I used this anti-static cloth glove and a paperclip to shove it down between all of the blades. It seems to have lowered my normal running temperature by about 20 degrees, so I suppose I was successful.

It sucks though, that if I have a problem at the motherboard for that one laptop, I probably can't get to the part. What would you do about an internal wire connection that simply cannot be unplugged without breaking it because it is so stubborn?

Disassemble the computer down to the bare motherboard or at least where I can see the connection plug and then use something like a dentist's probe to get the wire connection out.

On a laptop you really need fine tools to do the job and have a clear view of what you are doing, otherwise you're going to fuck up something.

Nowadays, with older laptops, there is also no excuse to not find tutorials online on how to disassemble an older laptop. None.

[Saiwania]

Disassemble the computer down to the bare motherboard or at least where I can see the connection plug and then use something like a dentist's probe to get the wire connection out.

Every single finger tool I tried just tore the plastic up more beyond a certain point, so it may as well have been soldered to the board. This was a speaker connector that was supposed to only require a fingernail to pull out but was damned near impossible to move. I didn't risk persisting after most of the plastic shell of the connector was worn from pull attempts.

My hope is that for newer computers, almost all of the connections have some mechanism to make it easier to unplug such as tabs or an eject button. Some connectors don't need this but damn- if a connection might be prohibitively difficult to unplug, it would be better to have and surely wouldn't cost much to implement.

[Soldati Senza Confini]

Disassemble the computer down to the bare motherboard or at least where I can see the connection plug and then use something like a dentist's probe to get the wire connection out.

Every single finger tool I tried just tore the plastic up more beyond a certain point, so it may as well have been soldered to the board. This was a speaker connector that was supposed to only require a fingernail to pull out but was damned near impossible to move. I didn't risk persisting after most of the plastic shell of the connector was worn from pull attempts.

My hope is that for newer computers, almost all of the connections have some mechanism to make it easier to unplug such as tabs or an eject button. Some connectors don't need this but damn- if a connection might be prohibitively difficult to unplug, it would be better to have and surely wouldn't cost much to implement.

What kind of laptop was it?

A connector shouldn't be that impossible to remove.