i should also add i build my own computers and built some for my friends and i use to make my own Irc Scripts for Dalnet etc, and released them to the public, i had my own website using my ISP webspace, using Microsoft frontpage, and banner maker pro for making banners and buttons for my website ... i never used flash as it slowed down access to webpages for people using dial up 56K modems
and i did a lot of weight lifting and other gym work in my younger years 15 to 22 and 28 to 33 years old
Godric wrote:i should also add i build my own computers and built some for my friends and i use to make my own Irc Scripts for Dalnet etc, and released them to the public, i had my own website using my ISP webspace, using Microsoft frontpage, and banner maker pro for making banners and buttons for my website ... i never used flash as it slowed down access to webpages for people using dial up 56K modems
Nice!, seems we do have quite a few of I.T handy guys around here. When it comes to PC building, you got any favourite parts?, or style.
Like some go nuts with Aorus and Corsair like me. Other's might prefer MSI, ROG or the likes.
Some people go for like minimal builds the size of an Xbox. others go for large open cases, etc.
But what we all encounter is, that PC parts prices suck at the moment. RTX3090 alone is around 2300 euro's. what the hell?. global chip shortages..jay...
Im guessing tough when you have to build for friends you go for most value for buck of course. 1080P gaming is still an pleasant experience. I got an older ASUS GTX 1070 in my 2015 machine and it still can run most games with an fine framerate at that resolution.
In a year or two chip prices should come back down as new production capacity comes online. I am a big fan of ASUS motherboards (I do not use their ROG branded hardware but it should be good). I also use a lot of Corsair components. Bought an AMD graphics card not that long ago. NVIDIA was just too expensive. But it is a problem for me as I used to write CUDA code and I lost that ability basically. It works just fine for gaming and it was much cheaper.
The Chinese are currently trying to get into the graphics and NAND chip manufacturing business. Fingers crossed as that would possibly get them into a new price war and bring prices down. But even if they get the hardware right I expect sanctions down the way.
lancelot wrote:In a year or two chip prices should come back down as new production capacity comes online. I am a big fan of ASUS motherboards (I do not use their ROG branded hardware but it should be good). I also use a lot of Corsair components. Bought an AMD graphics card not that long ago. NVIDIA was just too expensive. But it is a problem for me as I used to write CUDA code and I lost that ability basically. It works just fine for gaming and it was much cheaper.
The Chinese are currently trying to get into the graphics and NAND chip manufacturing business. Fingers crossed as that would possibly get them into a new price war and bring prices down. But even if they get the hardware right I expect sanctions down the way.
It should....but you never know. i certainly hope so I never had myself any Asus products, they got an good reputation tough. Love their bright aluminium prime Z690 Motherboard. The bright aluminium with RGB looks great.
I ended up loving corsair because i was actually looking for an RGB headstand. I could not find anything i liked untill i saw these LT-100 towers at someone's desk during an review. After setting them up and installing icue i loved the ease of use of the software. you can create your own collours, motion patterns and movements. even lay across them over eachother and all.
so ever since then i take a look if Corsair has something good to offer before i search elsewhere.
I know about the pricetag of Nvidia GPU's at the moment. its crazy. I bought my RTX 2080TI extreme for about 1499 euro's at the time, it was just before the whole chip shortage crisis and the revealing of the RTX3000 series. it is not just GPU's but motherboards, handhelds,phones, cars and all as well.
Speaking of handhelds, made my reservation for the Steam deck a while ago too. But if im lucky ill get it ..somewhere after Q2 2022.. #firstworldproblems.
The video card pseudo-monopoly (AMD vs Nvidia but they are not really interchangeable like different potatoes) is going to retire models like the RTX 3090 before you see it going down to $500. It is a racket where new models are used to keep the price high. You are not really getting that much value increase from one generation to the next. I am still running a GTX 970 and games like Doom which perform poorly on it can wait for some later date when I can get a new card. The vast majority of other games (FPS, Open world FPS, etc.) still run well on the GTX 970.
Lets just say everyone has their own budget when it comes to computer's. Money goes first to an roof over your head, food, insurances, mortage, etc. Then maybe if there is something left you can put it away to save up for an PC.
I fully agree you dont need an high-end GPU to be able to enjoy games. If an slightly older card can do the job, why not?.
I really did not woke up one-day and decided: "yeah lets spend a shitload of money on an PC".
I had gaming laptops for a long while to game on. My first gaming PC in 2011 was about 700 euro's i believe. It was nothing near last-gen. But it played Skyrim really well on 1080P and i was really happy with it.
It was the start to get really into PC desktop gaming for me. i upgraded the RAM, replaced the GPU with an bit stronger one. Then replace the thermal paste after a few years, as it started to dry up and the CPU began thermal throttling. you get more confident and learn more and more doing maintenance and upgrading your PC.
In 2015, i bought an bit more powerfull PC with an GTX 1070 with an good CPU and more RAM. I again really enjoyed the performance with heavier (war) simulation games i used to play on low settings. I also began investing into better peripherals, Again...not neccesary. But you do feel an improvement in user experience.
I got an 144HZ gaming monitor, and played this colony management game called Surviving Mars. There are these wind turbines you can build. I stared at the spinning turbine blades and it was such an detailed, smooth motion at 100FPS. It was more pleasant on the eyes as well.
With the covid and lockdowns, i knew i was not going anywhere soon. i live alone, work a lot overtime so i save up an decent ammount over the years. And i love videogames and PC's, so for me it was an conscious decision to go all out on an high-end PC.
It is nice if you can put your PC together exactly with the parts you want. I think i spend about an year on keeping an document with the parts i wanted. And create in MS paint and graphic representation of how i wanted it all to look. Researching if the parts all would work together, connections on the MB, power draw, other PC builder's reviews on said parts. it was really fun.
Now i have it, it really feels something i picked and created. and not factory-assembled.
You are right there is generally not much performance increase between generations. It is usually wise to hold out a bit to wait for the next one after that.
Godric wrote:i should also add i build my own computers and built some for my friends and i use to make my own Irc Scripts for Dalnet etc, and released them to the public, i had my own website using my ISP webspace, using Microsoft frontpage, and banner maker pro for making banners and buttons for my website ... i never used flash as it slowed down access to webpages for people using dial up 56K modems
Nice!, seems we do have quite a few of I.T handy guys around here. When it comes to PC building, you got any favourite parts?, or style.
Like some go nuts with Aorus and Corsair like me. Other's might prefer MSI, ROG or the likes.
Some people go for like minimal builds the size of an Xbox. others go for large open cases, etc.
But what we all encounter is, that PC parts prices suck at the moment. RTX3090 alone is around 2300 euro's. what the hell?. global chip shortages..jay...
Im guessing tough when you have to build for friends you go for most value for buck of course. 1080P gaming is still an pleasant experience. I got an older ASUS GTX 1070 in my 2015 machine and it still can run most games with an fine framerate at that resolution.
i like Asus Mobos i tend to go for deluxe or Pro models dependent on the features ... there quality is un matched used to love MSI boards until they had issues with there transistor chips and i like Towers with windows i like to have RGB lighting i use Corsair Vengeance RGB LED 16GB 2x8GB DDR4 2666MHz Memory CPU is a Ryzen 5 2600X my graphics card is a Radeon Sapphire RX 480 8GB ... i want to replace my graphics card but they are as scarce as anything accept for top of the range cards ... but i prefer a balanced system thus i get very few bottle necks in performance but the RX 480 is still a decent card
i like have dedicated sound cards to remove strain on motherboards current sound card is the sound Blaster Z se, i still have my original Sound Blaster Live Pro card and CD software disc from the late 1990s when i built my Vodoo 3000 system with my Pentium 3 500
anyhoo my build has to have two optical drives Blu ray player and CD/DVD burner ... call me old fashioned
i should say i'm not a processor snob just think Ryzen's are best bang for buck CPUs and i have had Nvidia cards on several occasions
Gigabyte used to be good but has slipped as of late. Their power supplies are dangerously bad. The risk-reward balance for degrading quality seems to be always slanted to the bad end. My next board is probably going to an Asus. Asus makes reliable monitors as well based on my experience with two of them.
Godric wrote:i like Asus Mobos i tend to go for deluxe or Pro models dependent on the features ... there quality is un matched used to love MSI boards until they had issues with there transistor chips and i like Towers with windows i like to have RGB lighting i use Corsair Vengeance RGB LED 16GB 2x8GB DDR4 2666MHz Memory CPU is a Ryzen 5 2600X my graphics card is a Radeon Sapphire RX 480 8GB ... i want to replace my graphics card but they are as scarce as anything accept for top of the range cards ... but i prefer a balanced system thus i get very few bottle necks in performance but the RX 480 is still a decent card
i like have dedicated sound cards to remove strain on motherboards current sound card is the sound Blaster Z se, i still have my original Sound Blaster Live Pro card and CD software disc from the late 1990s when i built my Vodoo 3000 system with my Pentium 3 500
anyhoo my build has to have two optical drives Blu ray player and CD/DVD burner ... call me old fashioned
i should say i'm not a processor snob just think Ryzen's are best bang for buck CPUs and i have had Nvidia cards on several occasions
I had the same with Aorus, the Z390 where really good in reviews. the next 400 generation was already out but it got Shredded by reviewers like Jaystwocents,Der8auer and Gaming nexus. So i opted for the Z390 aorus master in combination with an I9-9900K. Dual Bios is awesome .
oof, yeah i know about MSI's issues. there seems to be an drop in quality after the 300 chip series in general when it comes to Motherboards. I dont know why, if it is an lack of quality control in general or because of the component market is disrupted.
Open windows guy huh?. Me as well . I am addicted to seeing running PC components and RGB. I myself have an Thermaltake P5 TG. it is the version with smoked glass on four sides, where the I/O side is open for venting. Its thick glass, so the case almost takes two people to carry. at first i did not want the TG version with smoked glass, but it was the only one available here in europe. In retrospect, i really am glad i got the smoked TG panel version.
Corsair Vengeance looks amazing as well!. to be honest, Aorus RGB software sucks. Corsairs Icue really wins from everyone. I got myself 4 G.skill Trident Z royal silver. I loved the diffuse rough-diamond look of the RGB illumination.
I can type everything, but maybe its easier to show my machine here:
haha my current build is one without any optical drives. it was a small step to figure out how the motherboard like's its windows installation trough USB. but once you done it its easy. thing is, without optical drives you need some more HDD space around to archive things you might have had burned to an DVD otherwise. No worries, no one is judging you for having optical drives.
I am not an CPU snob either, i just wanted the best gaming-CPU available at the time. and it was the i9-9900K. I sort of eyed Threadripper for a bit, but its not as good as an i9-9900K for Gaming. Besides games are not optimised either for Threadripper's cores.
Nowadays Ryzen matches Intell when it comes to performance, so why not opt for Ryzen? .
KVS wrote: Gigabyte used to be good but has slipped as of late. Their power supplies are dangerously bad. The risk-reward balance for degrading quality seems to be always slanted to the bad end. My next board is probably going to an Asus. Asus makes reliable monitors as well based on my experience with two of them.
Haha i saw, they literally blow up. that is one fast way to Brick your PC. I wanted an Thermaltake PF1, because of my addiction to RGB... It came well out of reviews for being an secure, stable and consistent PSU. I had short-cirquits in my house a few times as the PC was running because of an drain leak, and PC is fine. the PSU knows how to take an hit. ...so far anyway..
Papadragon wrote: Asus makes amazing monitors, been using 30" one for years and I don't plan on changing it as long as it keeps running
Crystal clear and razor sharp, perfection
I used an 1080P TV before. When i switched to an 144HZ 4K monitor i was like "so...this is how the PC Master Race feels like?". . An dedicated Gaming monitor just is an whole other experience than an HD TV.
I got myself two Aorus 4K monitors. one flat AD27QD and an CV27Q First one being IPS and the second VS. the Curved VS one has a bit more contrast, making collours more vibrant. But Dark means really dark. The IPS one at least you can make out darkly lit things better.
But i am really happy with both. Nvidia Digital Vibrance to Maximum. Just make sure your HDMI cable supports 144HZ 4K resolution. I had an HDMI cable that could not feed the monitor fast enough with Data. You get this effect that the screen constantly goes to sleep and wakes up again.
It took me a while to figure it out what the problem was. trough windows i put the second monitor to 60FPS 4K and it resolved the issue. I use the second monitor mostly for work/watching youtube/video's/Modding anyway.
i should have added my current tower is Corsair's Graphite Series 780T White Full-Tower
my previous one was a Cooler Master Cosmos 2000 full tower ... i like full towers as i find them better for cable management ... and they are more airy and less likely to cut my self when building my PC ie no sharp edges
my monitor is 32" Benq they claim it's a full 4K monitor ... it is a decent monitor whether it's full 4K or not is a entirely different matter .. it does the job i want of it
When I have some spare time I do 3D archery with an English longbow or fishing with dead bait on Northern Pike together with some trapping on American craw fish which is a plague here in the local waters.
Is it like Archery Golf where you have big circles on the ground around the "pin" where you loft your arrow up into the air and try to get as close to the pin as you can... a bit like darts, but more like rifle shooting with scoring rings?
Shooting on a parcour at life size animal targets made of durable foam. Most of the time it are 32 animals varying from rats to Moose at different ranges up to 60 - 70 meter. A first arrow hit in the kill zone (hart and lungs) will get you the most points.
So it is like golf in that you fire from fixed ranges... like firing from a tee?
Looks like fun.
The game I was thinking of has a bullseye painted on the grass and a series of circles around it worth different points... so maybe a 2 metre circle with 10 points and then a 5 metre circle for 5 points and a 10 metre circle for 1 point, and you have a few of these around the place and you stand at a firing point and fire at each of them by launching an arrow into the air and trying to get as close to the centre as possible... different distances offer different challenges.
You could do it on a full sized golf driving range and have games either with arrows and bows or golf clubs and golf balls... or just go for range like normal with either.
The circles on the ground don't need to be painted... a simple calculation you could work out how much rope each circle would require and lay out circles of rope to the scoring circles that could be laid down and picked up afterwards on any open field.
You could even shape the ropes into animal shapes... like dinosaurs or anything, but the fun is in going for range... and learning the ballistics of your bow and your arrows.
I'm very fond of Russian literature, alas forcefully translated into English, French, Portuguese or Spanish. It's a real shame, but despite knowing some words, I must confess to not being fluent in Russian language, although I can read in Cyrillic.
Now reading Andrei Andreevich Voznesensky's An Arrow in the Wall. Admirable in every sense!
Why doesn't a Russian literature organisation invite this year's Nobel Literature laureate French writer Annie Ernaux to a series of lectures in Russia?
I would think the west would use such an opportunity for a public snub... either for her to snub Russia or for the west to snub her for not snubbing Russia when she was supposed to.
I would say the quicker Russia realises its future does not include the west who currently hates them, the better for Russia.
The west seems to be loving having someone to blame for every little thing but that is not good for Russia at all.
A couple of winters and years separated from direct trade with Russia might make the west realise good ties with Russia are valuable and worth a bit of basic respect they have thus far refused to show to any country outside of the west.
People with functional brains in the west must already be realizing that Russia hate is very costly and the costs are amplifying. I agree that the west needs to stew in its own shit for a few years for this realization to penetrate into more smug, hubris-filled brains.
But Russia cannot go back to any "partnership" with western psychopaths. This is too bad since normal relations are better for everyone.
GarryB, flamming_python and Werewolf like this post
Annie Ernaux is a leftist, anti-dumbwit Macron in the French political spectrum. She has supported both opposition leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the yellow vests movement. For the first time in many years, this one has been a non-politically motivated Nobel Literature prize. In addition, she excells in her novels with "aplomb".
If they approach her on the quiet to see if she would be interested in the idea then why not...
BTW to those who like to build your own machines I thought you guys might be interested in this...
First of all it is free... and rather cool and interesting.
A programme called Ventoy.
From the Ventoy page, "Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files".
So you can download it from here: https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html
It is free.
You can download it to a USB memory stick, a memory card, an external hard drive... I have it on a 240GB SSD drive.
Once you run it it essentially creates a boot partition, but the remaining space you can put ISO files and other disk image type files on the drive... at the moment I have 104 GB of operating systems in the form mostly of Linux distributions because they are free and can be run from the drive as live disks.
I also have a large number of disk rescue software in a separate folder.
The point is that if you have a machine that is broken and not running or with no OS installed or you want to test a different operating system then you can load ventoy on a memory card (I have used microSD cards with a memory reader plugged in to computers to find and repair the built in hard drive and then test Linux on the hardware before I install it locally).
You can use rescue disks to examine the hard drive installed or use operating systems as live CDs to install new operating systems onto your computer.
It is very important to keep in mind that some Windows programmes mess up you internet connection when you install them so you just fix that like normal, and of course installing Linux on hard drives converts the hard drives to completely different formats that don't allow windows to be installed again without a good reformatting with a low level Hard Drive utility which you can also save on your rescue and testing drive.
So anyway once you install Ventoy on your memory disk or card or stick you can just create folders and fill it with ISO files... most linux OSs are free and there are lots of rescue disks you can also put on there.
Once it is installed you plug that drive into a computer and reboot going into BIOS and changing the boot order to USB first and Ventoy will run and it will list all the ISO and other disk images it can detect loaded on to it.
Pick one and it boots up using that operating system without writing anything to your local hard drive.
Unfortunately it is not sophisticated enough to save settings, so when you start up a new linux OS you have to put up with having to put in all your passwords and find useful pages and activate DRM on websites etc etc... hopefully they will upgrade it later on to store that on free space on your drive and make it a portable computer system.
Anyway have fun.... I am not involved in its development and do not benefit from you using it... I have found it to be very useful and interesting... the devices you use it on benefit from being big but if you only want two or three different OS then it can actually be small and cheap... a 16GB memory stick would allow quite a few of the smaller OS distributions to fit for a few dollars... so it is very cheap too.
BTW I have a wide range of ISO files including Android and Linux and Windows which can be found online. Linux ISOs are generally free.
GarryB wrote:If they approach her on the quiet to see if she would be interested in the idea then why not...
BTW to those who like to build your own machines I thought you guys might be interested in this...
First of all it is free... and rather cool and interesting.
A programme called Ventoy.
From the Ventoy page, "Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files".
So you can download it from here: https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html
It is free.
You can download it to a USB memory stick, a memory card, an external hard drive... I have it on a 240GB SSD drive.
Once you run it it essentially creates a boot partition, but the remaining space you can put ISO files and other disk image type files on the drive... at the moment I have 104 GB of operating systems in the form mostly of Linux distributions because they are free and can be run from the drive as live disks.
I also have a large number of disk rescue software in a separate folder.
The point is that if you have a machine that is broken and not running or with no OS installed or you want to test a different operating system then you can load ventoy on a memory card (I have used microSD cards with a memory reader plugged in to computers to find and repair the built in hard drive and then test Linux on the hardware before I install it locally).
You can use rescue disks to examine the hard drive installed or use operating systems as live CDs to install new operating systems onto your computer.
It is very important to keep in mind that some Windows programmes mess up you internet connection when you install them so you just fix that like normal, and of course installing Linux on hard drives converts the hard drives to completely different formats that don't allow windows to be installed again without a good reformatting with a low level Hard Drive utility which you can also save on your rescue and testing drive.
So anyway once you install Ventoy on your memory disk or card or stick you can just create folders and fill it with ISO files... most linux OSs are free and there are lots of rescue disks you can also put on there.
Once it is installed you plug that drive into a computer and reboot going into BIOS and changing the boot order to USB first and Ventoy will run and it will list all the ISO and other disk images it can detect loaded on to it.
Pick one and it boots up using that operating system without writing anything to your local hard drive.
Unfortunately it is not sophisticated enough to save settings, so when you start up a new linux OS you have to put up with having to put in all your passwords and find useful pages and activate DRM on websites etc etc... hopefully they will upgrade it later on to store that on free space on your drive and make it a portable computer system.
Anyway have fun.... I am not involved in its development and do not benefit from you using it... I have found it to be very useful and interesting... the devices you use it on benefit from being big but if you only want two or three different OS then it can actually be small and cheap... a 16GB memory stick would allow quite a few of the smaller OS distributions to fit for a few dollars... so it is very cheap too.
BTW I have a wide range of ISO files including Android and Linux and Windows which can be found online. Linux ISOs are generally free.
You can achieve the same by partitioning a USB drive/memory card, and then installing a different OS on each partition. Although you'd probably have to configure a bootloader as well
Your program is interesting in as far as it offers a quicker alternative to doing all that
But personally I don't need so many different portable or rescue OS's. One on my memory stick somewhere is enough for me.
On my main computer I have Windows 7, and I also have VirtualBox running Ubuntu, which I use for Linux-based development of a web app I'm working on. Where i use Docker, Python, Javascript/NodeJS and other things. I'll get around to installing another Linux OS on VirtualBox sooner or later, a more lightweight one that I want for coding C/C++ for an embedded system. This one hobby of mine rather than a way of paying the bills
For those not in the know, here is a video on VirtualBox and Virtual Machines in general:
If you need a programming environment isolated from your main computer and files (and that should be most of the time), without having to use a different computer for that - so then use VirtualBox. The resulting hard drive image file can also be readily backed up onto an external hard-disk or wherever else.
I should probably take my own advice, as my set-up for programming Android and Kotlin is on my main computer as yet. Need to figure out an appropriate Linux OS for it as well.
Ohhh you two c*nts stop arousing me by talking about Operating Systems, Linux, Partitioning while I have to work. That shit is my profession and hobby and I really don't have the time but you both are trying to distract me from work.
I will be later back to this Thread.
PS: Ventoy is what we use to rescue some of our customer's servers if they play around and make it unbootable. We prefer it over partitioning USB drives as it just emulates different block devices, is easy to use but a bitch to get it running on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
The advantage of Ventoy is that you can dump any old OS on there so when you have a computer with an internet connection you can plug in your device... in my case an SSD and boot from it and it brings up the list of all the OSs on the drive... in my case it has about 35 different Linux OSs and rescue disk images.
The advantage of the system is you can boot up any of the OSs and see how they look and how they work on that particular machine without actually installing anything.
You will find very quickly if there are going to be hardware issues without committing to a reformat of the hard drive and install of the OS.
Shutting down and rebooting and try another OS.
If the computer is faulty you can use recovery drives to sort problems... I even have Linux disk images that auto run cracking software... one for XP and one for Vista that will hack the passwords on the C: of the machine in question... so if a friend or customer has lost their password you just boot up in the relevant OS and wait a few minutes while it processes all the passwords used on the system.
My SSD is a ruggedised Adata SSD with a USB cable that I can carry in a bag, but I also have a stick that carried 6 MicroSD cards as well as 2 microSIM cards and a USB C to USB C cable with adaptors to normal USB, Micro USB and Lightining adaptors that adapt from USB C to the respective connectors... very handy too.
BTW I had my hard drive partitiioned into about three parts because the size of Hard Drives increased faster than I was updating my operating systems... I had one system go tits up and it couldn't find C: amongst the partititions and it really screwed everything up.
It didn't help that it was part of a cold swappable rack mount... I had one for my stuff and one that was kid safe so kids could play on my computer and if they broke it... I just formatted it and reinstalled a disk image from when everything was set up and working.... I would occasionally update that image if new software they liked was installed, but it kept my games and work stuff separate and unaccessable to even the most clever little buggers because it physically was a separate disk. (I had two racks mounted in the same tower but only one was actually connected to run so I could swap them over when they arrived and swap them back when they left.)
BTW Werewolf... if you are a professional in Linux... what do you know about Caspar... from what I can find it seems to be the equivalent of Ventoy but with the added advantage of saving settings making all the changes and preference you set when you boot up an OS saveable on the device so if you shut down you don't have to set everything up again making each OS a portable computer on a drive...
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. I am addicted to seeing running PC components and RGB.
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