Snakecharmed

The multi-monitor support in 10 is not great. I have to use a cocktail of PersistentWindows, Dual Monitor Tools, and PowerToys FancyZones to get what I consider good dual-screen management. Those three apps work together really well, but all that functionality should have been native. Oh yeah, and Steam Big Picture mode, which is the most hacky out of all the apps just for sake of getting a game to load on the secondary monitor, but it works. Other than that, add Open-Shell and 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 has been the best Windows I've ever used. I know a guy on another forum who still refuses to use 10 because of Edge. First of all, I like having all my hardware properly supported and fully functional. Second, as far as I'm concerned these days, Edge is far better than Chrome, and I use neither. I never bothered trying to force Edge off my Windows like I might have done with IE back in the day with 2000 or XP. Just don't ever launch Edge, and even if you do by accident, so what? Unless you exclusively use browsers that non-enthusiasts have never heard of, you don't really have room to complain. I understand the concerns about forced Windows Updates and telemetry (why I disabled all the 10 upgrade ads when I had 7 on my Sandy Bridge rig and why have 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC now), but Edge is a terrible anti-10 hill to die on.

To be fair, that was GTA V 1.0 on PS3, wasn't it? It's crazy that the same game was released for three generations of consoles and the PC version even had some creators making HQ texture packs for it not too long ago. It's been around for so long that I'm not even sure anymore whether I had the 980 Ti or 1080 Ti when I played it.

I was doing a lot of bitching in the latest purchase thread about unfavorable deals for even-year Comcast when I have to upgrade to a higher tier to maintain similar pricing to the odd years when my bill would theoretically be lower. New deals dropped in December including a more favorable gigabit download for $65/month instead of 1.2 Gbps for $75/month. A new-to-me refurbished Arris S33 modem later and and off we go, but I'm still waiting for them to deploy the upgrade to the wildly asynchronous upload speed that some markets have already gotten. They're beginning to roll out DOCSIS 4.0 and symmetrical upload speeds in the not-too-distant future, and my area has yet to get a mid-split upgrade to increase upload speeds to 100 Mbps on this plan.

I'm going into an even-year screw job from Comcast, which is when I have to upgrade plans to get better pricing on a new plan over second-year pricing on my current plan. The problem however is that upgrading from my current 400 Mbps ($55/month) to 800 ($70/month) won't trigger a new service agreement. So I have to upgrade all the way to 1.2 Gbps (because I'm not downgrading to 200 Mbps which costs a stupid $72/month anyway) to trigger a new service agreement, but that also means I need to upgrade my DOCSIS 3.0 24x8 TP-Link TC7650 cable modem to a DOCSIS 3.1. I've been reading that Comcast will just push you a neutered generic modem config file that limits you to a small fraction of the advertised speed if you try to use a DOCSIS 3.0 modem with their gigabit plans. The only perk (which it really isn't) of this is that for new service agreements, the 800 and 1200 plans are the same $70/month price for the first year. In effect though, 1200 is cheaper for me because going with 800 would be treated as year 2 of my existing agreement and cause the price to go up to $95/month ($80/month base plus $10 for the 400-to-800 upgrade, plus another $5 for their decreased discount for auto-pay via credit card, because no way in hell am I giving them ACH access to my bank account). So for the next year, I'll be paying $75/month for the privilege of gigabit Internet that I didn't even want. EABOD Comcast. I can downgrade at this time next year, but I wouldn't be surprised if they just eliminate any non-poverty bandwidth options below $60 by then.

So, did anyone get any good deals for Black Friday? I bought a new refrigerator from Lowe's online on Wednesday and it was delivered today and installed for less than 5 minutes before I noticed there was a dent on the right door. They offered an extra 10% discount for the damage, but I already stacked a lot of online shopping/credit card cash back discounts on top of the seasonal discounts from Lowe's/LG, and a couple of other refrigerators I had considered, a KitchenAid and a GE Cafe, would have cost $700-1000 more, so a scratch-and-dent discount wasn't going to entice me. I just wanted what I ordered to be in pristine condition. No deal. Back it went, new delivery date TBD. I joked to my cousin afterward, you can obviously tell I don't have kids. Well, at least I know now all the items in my freezer almost fit in my large cooler. Also, I usually have my large purchases planned out well over a month in advance, so I can't believe how much refrigerator research I was able to cram into less than a week. Fridge shopping is definitely an exercise in finding a compromise between just enough technological innovation so you enjoy your new appliance versus going overboard on tech and having an unreliable POS. They can't all be Sub-Zero fridges, and thankfully can't all be priced like one either.

I would at least attempt to dispute that with PayPal, but the likelihood of it working out probably isn't that great. I have no idea what the payment method options are to a VS forum nor am I curious enough to find out, but for a scumbag organization like that (assuming they had ever provided a valuable service worth paying for instead of the scam or ripoff it is), the only option is to pay by credit card so you can keep the chargeback option on standby.

Here's a personal rule I have: Never trade resolution in either dimension for physically larger dimensions. In this case, you'd be losing physical height as well, and that kills immersion for me. I went from a 34" 3440x1440 ultrawide to a 38" 3840x1600 and the difference in immersion is massive. That was the difference between "The ultrawide FOV is nice," and "Oh, I'm really in the game!" As for some other thoughts, whenever I see a gaming monitor, I make myself consider all the non-gaming uses that will still occur. 5120x1440 would be great for gaming in games that support it, and not very fun to deal with otherwise. What I like about my 38" LG UltraGear 38GN950-B is that the 3840 pixel width perfectly matches up with my 55" 4K Samsung QN85A so moving windows between screens is easier to manage and I don't have to readjust window sizes as much. 5120 is really ugly to work with in terms of window splitting. 2160 for half-screen width is too wide, but you also can't evenly split the screen into thirds. It's manageable with apps like PowerToys, but still a nuisance. Each third would also be less than 1920 pixels wide, which is of course a frequently utilized window width. As for OLED technology, in the TV world currently, LG's WOLED technology does better against burn-in than Samsung's QD-OLED. I've decided to completely skip OLED for any PC use and wait out MicroLED, but LG is significantly better in this regard if you look at the comparison of the two OLED technologies on Rtings. Last I read earlier this year, all the OLED PC monitors coming out now are QD-OLED, so that's less than ideal. I leave static images on screen a lot of the time because I also work from home. I'm not willing to make the behavioral changes to mitigate burn-in and I doubt that's realistically feasible for work use anyway. All that being said, I would go with an LG C3 before I would even entertain the Samsung Odyssey G9. It has too many practical compromises for my liking, whereas LG WOLED technology is very mature and capable of handling almost anything you can throw at it.

That's a nice pickup! My parents have a Sharp CD-BH950 with a CD changer that ate dirt. They don't really care enough to do anything about it, and I wasn't sure what to replace it with if there ever is a desire to replace it, but $250 for another one of those Sharp systems is not something I would personally consider. I haven't done a CD-RW in nearly a decade, a pressed CD (a hard-to-find single that I couldn't find for download anywhere) in about a decade that I promptly ripped to FLAC/MP3, and last messed with cassette tapes when the years started with 19-. Even though I have the means to do so, I have no interest in digitizing their physical music collection. If they had a sense of humor, that would be their definition of a fool's errand.

Yeah, nah.

This is not unexpected for these unbranded or Scrabble hand named devices running an outdated version of Android on a chipset that nobody's ever heard of. If I'm going to use a Chinese-branded and marketed item (of which I do have several, including some that I'll even swear by like my DAC and some that I won't like my soup ladle), it's not going to be an item that can connect to the Internet. Years ago back when I cared about TV, I looked into these types of devices for Kodi. By the time I found one that had a respectable hardware spec, I would have been better off getting an Nvidia Shield TV. I ended up just configuring that stuff to work on an $40 Amazon Fire TV Stick and called it a day.

Meant to post this a while ago and I guess I never did. The thirst for more storage every couple of years continues. I've now exhausted the BarraCuda Pro line and I got this one for only $140. I guess Toshiba N/X300 (Pro) comes next. This one finished WinRoboCopy file transfers rather quickly. It was done overnight, whereas my previous 12 TB BarraCuda Pro took somewhere between 16-24 hours it felt like. Either I have a foggy memory or there could have been something wrong with my 12 TB.

Other than getting lowballed by $50-200 for your trade-in value (which is to be expected), I think the biggest concern with this program today is consumer trust in Newegg. Imagine saying that 10+ years ago.

What's going on with the sequential write speeds? Those are obviously way off where they should be. That also reminds me that I should benchmark my SSDs. I never did that after completing my build.

I've basically been switching between first-year rates with Comcast targeting around $50-60/month for a few years now. My current plan is 400/10 for $55/month. Not bad, not great. The unfortunate thing is that AT&T gave up on fiber in my area and Google and municipal fiber efforts also stalled several years ago not too far from where I live. So what does AT&T offer in my area? A pathetic 25 Mbps down for the same $55/month base and then there's taxes as well, whereas I pay exactly $55.00 to Comcast. That effectively makes Comcast the only game in town, which is not ideal, but it's also not like living out in the sticks either. Gigabit down is available for $70/month and 2 Gbps for $120/month. The problem with them is obviously going to be the comically asynchronous upload speeds and the data cap.

I echo UltraMega on the resurgence bit. What resurgence? I flirted with eGPU setups in the ExpressCard days when the entire concept was conceived in a Notebook Review forum thread, before Thunderbolt became the external port of choice. I never had a working implementation of one because I'm pretty sure the ExpressCard port in my old Lenovo ThinkPad T500 was defective. It had occasional dropouts with my ExpressCard CompactFlash adapter, never mind a GeForce GTX 560. By the time I eventually upgraded to a ThinkPad W520, its GPU was sufficient enough to run the couch co-op games I wanted to play in the family room at the time. While it'll be easier than ever to run an eGPU now, if you're serious enough about gaming, you probably wouldn't have a laptop or NUC-sized rig as your primary machine anyway. My use case back then was not having big enough screens or the right entertainment room setup for my desktop (clearly no longer an issue) and being very particular about features on my laptop that I wasn't willing to move off of a ThinkPad back then. I've since relented on that because these days, I primarily use a laptop to watch YouTube videos while I'm in the kitchen.

At least for the text, Windows has a ClearType tuning tool that should be able to accomodate BGR subpixel layouts. That's my understanding of that setting anyway. I've never used it, so I don't know how well it works and I don't know if that will address the greater problem of eyestrain.

I feel like more info might be needed. What model monitors do you have now, how long have you had them, and do they have a reputation for poor text clarity? No clue here about the subpixel layout's potential effects on text sharpness, and I have to admit I was completely confused because sRGB is a color space, not a subpixel layout. It's RGB vs. BGR, and I've only ever owned RGB monitors, so I have no point of reference for comparison. There are Windows apps/settings that should address that though. I wouldn't rule out physiological changes as a possible cause of the eyestrain either. I'd actually consider that a primary culprit with how you described having prolonged blurry vision and eye irritation.

The only things that iPhones unequivocally do better are a result of their proprietary and/or closed ecosystems that Apple strongarms consumers into using (or get shamed by their peers into using) through raw unit sales. I'm talking about the likes of iMessage, FaceTime, and AirDrop. That's anti-consumer abuse of their market position. It's no wonder Nvidia is looking to Apple's business model as their inspiration for the GPU market. I'll leave the "advanced civilization" nonsense for another day millennium because there's so much presumption and projection going on there that I wouldn't even know where to start. It's a damn phone, not nuclear fusion. $325 mint condition LG V60 (2020) purchased in May 2022 here. I'd rather buy a mint condition Pioneer DEX-P99RS (just give me another year or two, because I very well might) and not come remotely close to using it to its full capabilities rather than doing the same with a brand new flagship phone.

The idea of what it means to "be into tech" is entirely subjective. There are Apple cultists (not the regular users) who would claim to be into tech but they never venture outside of MacRumors. I've mentioned before that I had a former coworker who was "into tech" and a huge HP and Samsung superfan, but wasn't bright enough to realize that the one time it makes complete sense to choose Samsung over HP when they have any competing products (SSDs), he completely screwed the pooch. This was in the SATA 2.5" SSD heyday when Samsung 8x0 Pro SSDs had no equal. Everyone has blind spots. Not everyone will own up to them. Back to the topic, aside from being better than the soft/paper launches that other companies do, these Apple product release announcements are almost always fluff. The only reason I'm even aware of this one is the big deal about the iPhone moving from Lightning to USB-C because it's been discussed everywhere. Thank EU.

As someone in the user experience field but who is also extremely technical, I deal with these conflicting interests on a personal level regularly. My solution is to be familiar with Apple's software ecosystem out of necessity, but otherwise only own their most valuable product and nothing else: their stock. Apple doesn't focus on cutting-edge hardware. Their focus has always been more oriented toward user experience. There are parts that I agree with and parts that I don't, but it largely appears to revolve around reducing the cognitive burden and technical jargon from the hardware that they want people to incorporate into their daily lives. A large part of it is obviously for their own profits, but there is also an effort to demystify technology because your average user doesn't care about the details. Most people just want a product to work because they're not going to spend the time to configure something. The most configuration that a lot of people can handle is setting the darkness of their toasted bread. If that means taking away their ability to choose, so be it. There aren't enough people in the population who care versus those that just want to get on with their daily lives. In reference to the OP, Samsung is a copycat F-boi. I have never owned a Galaxy phone and I don't intend to, especially now. If it wasn't for them trying to copy Apple at every turn one release after lambasting them in ads, we might still have a number of features available on flagship Android phones. Needless to say, screw Samsung and their spineless hypocrisy.

None of the B650E Strix boards have it. The X670E-E and X670E-F do. See column W in this spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NQHkDEcgDPm34Mns3C93K6SJoBnua-x9O-y_6hv8sPs/edit#gid=513674149 The B650E Taichi Lite is in a class of its own. The Gigabyte Aorus B650E boards with external BCLK, including the one you mentioned, are almost impossible to find. Current generation Gigabyte boards in general for both AMD and Intel have been scarce and some have to be imported from Hong Kong or China. I haven't paid any attention to what's been going on with them aside from their recent website and motherboard backdoor security issues, but it's like they're quietly exiting the western market while maintaining the facade of still being a major player.

I've heard good things about Epson EcoTank printers if you need the fine detail and rich color photo quality that an inkjet can deliver. For anything else, laser or LED is the way to go. I print things so rarely these days that it makes no sense for me to bother with inkjets anymore. I most frequently print shipping labels, and even that only happens perhaps once a month on average. If I have photos to print on paper, sending them to my local Walgreens is more economical and I don't need to be the one fine-tuning printer settings and wasting ink and paper with test prints. HP is trying to prop up a dying sector of the computer peripherals market. We simply don't print stuff like we used to and they need to adapt rather than antagonize those who still need all-in-one printers for daily use. Those consumers will have other options if you try to screw them. The bean counters at HP haven't learned a thing from every other DRM scheme that has failed miserably, and they don't even have the market position to strongarm their customers into their walled garden. If you don't want to get dunked on by your device sales, stop offering the hardware at $100. There is too much going on inside of that box for it to be worth so little, no matter how far economies of scale and advancement of technology have taken us in the last two decades. My old DeskJet 560C cost, what, probably $500-600 in 1995? A LaserJet 4 retailed for around $2000 back in its day. ERROR: The request could not be satisfied WWW.CONSUMERREPORTS.ORG

That's my dream B650E board if my Asus B650E-F makes any further difficult to resolve VRM chirping noises next time it tries to step down from a heavy load or I change the standard environmental operating conditions of my rig. The Taichi Lite completely embarrasses the B650E-F in every way at the same price point and Asus should be ashamed.

My second and third printers were the HP DeskJet 560C and 895Cxi. Even then, ink seemed kind of pricey, but that was before the days of ink DRM. I honestly don't remember what led me to get rid of the 895Cxi (probably high ink prices), but I do remember buying OEM HP ink cartridges that had banding and spotty output if they were "expired". After getting 3-4 of them in a row, I took a hammer to the last one of those out of spite and somehow, I still have a photo of it from 2005 saved on my hard drive. I was done with HP after that and done with inkjet printers altogether one printer later (a Canon that pissed away excessive ink every startup and eventually threw me a ridiculous printhead error where a replacement would have, in car insurance terms, totaled the printer). Inkjets suck in general. As for HP, it's not the 1990s anymore which was when they last made a good printer, laser or inkjet. I don't think anything they've made (or rebadged) in the last 20 years was worth owning compared to their competition because of their blatantly anti-consumer tactics. I'm not remotely surprised they would pull this crap with an all-in-one printer when not using a printing function. It's been in their DNA for decades. I'm pretty sure they pioneered ink DRM. Side note: I remember years ago a former coworker was an HP superfan (yeah, they exist) and an even bigger Samsung superfan. He bought an HP for his first SSD, and all I could think was, "You bought an HP SSD instead of a Samsung? WTH is wrong with you?"

Microsoft Natural Keyboard (1.0) This is actually my second Natural Keyboard after my first one yellowed from being under a halogen desk lamp for years and the keycap printings wore out. I finally replaced it after its spacebar broke (IIRC). Anyway, I've had this specific unit since 2017. I don't know the manufacture date on this one, but this Natural Keyboard model debuted in 1994 and had a 4-year run. I'm only learning now that it was manufactured by Keytronic, which may be why this one feels so different from subsequent Microsoft ergonomic keyboards. As far as the layout, I've gotten so used to this split-key layout over the years that I never seriously considered changing it up. I haven't paid much attention to keyboards since getting the second of these, but while shopping to replace the first one, I did look into mechanical gaming keyboards which were more expensive than what I wanted to pay at the time. I also followed the evolution of Microsoft ergonomic keyboards and all the subsequent versions of their Natural Keyboard had some dealbreaker in terms of key layout, feel, or build quality, which is why I also didn't get a newer model.