THE COMPUTER THREAD

[Variety of Cells]

Bought a Surface Pro 4 as kind of a Switch to play PC games on the couch. Yeah, not going to run Doom Eternal, but surprisingly great for 4 plus year old games. Why a 4 and not a 7? Reconditioned 4 was a 6th the price of a 7 with similar specs (yes, older processor etc then a 7, but bought for use as toy and not as my primary PC/laptop).

Yeah not a bad idea.  I bought a 7 to use as my laptop, not expecting to play games on it at all.  But when it's plugged in it can run actually hold its own on a lot of different games, I was very surprised.  When it's unplugged it throttles itself to save battery power and doesn't do so well on more taxing games.

[wihogfan]

I bought a 7 to use as my laptop, not expecting to play games on it at all.  But when it's plugged in it can run actually hold its own on a lot of different games, I was very surprised.  When it's unplugged it throttles itself to save battery power and doesn't do so well on more taxing games.

I had a bad experience with a 2, so was someone reluctant to get another (2 was provided by work and was nothing but problems) but more impressed with this 4 then I was expecting. Will definitely consider getting whatever the latest version is when I need a replacement for my primary laptop.

[RVR II]

Fixed my 100Mbps restricted download speeds
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/9V3QgYEMxgo" target="_blank" class="new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/9V3QgYEMxgo</a>
Also replaced my old Cat5e cable with a new one that seems to have helped as well

[wihogfan]

Ummm...getting 387 Mbps when paying for 500 Mbps service is actually pretty f'ing great. I have one choice for an ISP where I live (not counting satellite which is expensive,  restrictively capped, and has terrible latency issues) and I pay for 100 Mbps and get 30 Mbps. Could upgrade to 300 Mbps service for a hell of a lot more money, but nothing even offered higher than that.   

[RVR II]

Oh don't get me wrong I'm glad this issue is fixed now but my isp is notorious for this..
If I was getting 450Mbps I'd be fine with it but they have been doing things like this to their customers here for far too long

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Comcast over provisions, I'm paying for 300 and get 350.  When I was in my apartment I would have occasional signal issues that caused dropouts, but since I moved the signal and noise levels have been great.

[RVR II]

My Internet speed issues continue ..
Despite a new modem, new switch, new ethernet card, and an new cat 6 cable, my speeds range from less than 250Mbps to over 450Mbps.
Got a ISP tech at my house troubleshooting and he can't determine the exact issue but he did find 'noise' on my cable line from the road to my house so they're in the process of replacing it now. He doesn't think that's the real issue but it is a contributing factor. If they find an issue with my wiring inside my house I could be billed $30 every 15 minutes and we're going on 2 hours  so far

[RVR II]

After 5 hours and all new cables run from the street, in my attic and to the modem, the internet speed issues remain..
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/_uqqjz7nIf4" target="_blank" class="new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/_uqqjz7nIf4</a>

[MartyS (Gromit)]

About a month ago I got the 5 port version of the TP link switch I have in my media room (same one RVR used in his network upgrade).  Today I finally got around to installing it in my PC room, so my all in one printer is now wired instead of on WiFi.  Of course the drivers for printing updated automatically to the new address but the scanner drivers were stuck using the MAC address of the WiFi card in the printer.  Canon FAQ said you have to uninstall all the software and drivers for the printer and reinstall them.  Did that and I can now access the scanner again from my PC.  Scanning is faster now, the WiFi connection worked fine but the device is in the corner of the house farthest away from the router so the signal was a bit weak and not at full speed.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

If you have some old graphics cards lying around and have a PC to put them in you can use them for folding proteins, and if you want to do stuff on your PC while folding but don't want a performance hit you can set up the client so it will only use the extra GPU.  Or set it up to use everything and use the advanced controls to pause your CPU and main GPU when you want to use them for something else.

I now have my old 1070 card installed just for folding.  Funny, I used to think the 1070 card was big, it's tiny when installed next to the 2070.

[Variety of Cells]

Got rid of all my old computer stuff a while back.  Plus, I think my previous GPU was AMD, and now I'm on the NVIDIA boat.  Having both in my computer would probably have made it explode.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Got rid of all my old computer stuff a while back.  Plus, I think my previous GPU was AMD, and now I'm on the NVIDIA boat.  Having both in my computer would probably have made it explode.

Yes, that may have been a driver nightmare, I didn't have to do anything with drivers, that is one great thing about Nvidia, you can shove an older card in and the drivers will just work.

[Variety of Cells]

Got rid of all my old computer stuff a while back.  Plus, I think my previous GPU was AMD, and now I'm on the NVIDIA boat.  Having both in my computer would probably have made it explode.

Yes, that may have been a driver nightmare, I didn't have to do anything with drivers, that is one great thing about Nvidia, you can shove an older card in and the drivers will just work.

Yeah I’m all in on Nvidia. AMD rarely had drivers that worked under normal circumstances, let alone having two gpus that aren’t exactly the same.

[wihogfan]

Well, the great thing about AMD drivers (at least at one time and I'm admittedly a few years out of the loop since giving up on desktops and going all laptop) was the variety of custom drivers tweaked to different needs that were available.
Laptop not as fun in a lot of ways since you can't really build or customize it yourself, but don't have to be in my home office to use it...and my latest laptop is a gaming laptop with a NVIDIA card..

[goflyblind]

huh. copying ~2TB from my old external drive to my new one is taking a long time.