General Computer Thread

[Ar-Pharazon]

Niiiiiiiiiiice....... Yes lovely ram size there. I don't know why they cap it at 32gig in the specifications, maybe that is what they assume most people would do or some other issue but well done there.

As for those drives have you ever considered putting them all into one enclosure like a Hotway probox or something similar where they can all be accessed at once.

To the upper right is a 2 bay SATA dock. It's served me pretty well. Just drop the HDD in and turn it on.

As far as the RAM specs, they listed each slot capped at 16GB, so even one 32GB shouldn't have worked.

This is my first foray into Windows10 outside of my work laptop, which I can't really customize or install a lot of things. I'm kinda missing Win7 a little, but I'll give it some time. I can't get my S20 Ultra to connect yet.

One weird thing, when I was waiting for the new laptop to arrive, I hooked my work laptop up the the HDD dock, and it would have occasional hiccups and short freezes when playing video from an external drive, which no Win7 machine ever did. And now the new laptop does the same thing on occasion. IDK what it is with Win10 and those external drives.

I have an NVMe to USB adapter coming so I can clone the 256GB SSD onto a 2TB one. 256GB is so 2005.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

To the upper right is a 2 bay SATA dock. It's served me pretty well. Just drop the HDD in and turn it on.

As far as the RAM specs, they listed each slot capped at 16GB, so even one 32GB shouldn't have worked.

This is my first foray into Windows10 outside of my work laptop, which I can't really customize or install a lot of things. I'm kinda missing Win7 a little, but I'll give it some time. I can't get my S20 Ultra to connect yet.

One weird thing, when I was waiting for the new laptop to arrive, I hooked my work laptop up the the HDD dock, and it would have occasional hiccups and short freezes when playing video from an external drive, which no Win7 machine ever did. And now the new laptop does the same thing on occasion. IDK what it is with Win10 and those external drives.

I have an NVMe to USB adapter coming so I can clone the 256GB SSD onto a 2TB one. 256GB is so 2005.

Ha....... Funny you say that my Asus Ryzen 3 laptop does that too when watching DVDs via an external drive every now and then a stutter, same for data transfers with external drives, but overall it just works. This was a surprising budget laptop that only came with 4gig soldered on ram but opening up the back revealed a ram socket that they don't mention in the user guide and 2nd hard drive bay for a 2.5 inch drive, main drive is a 1tb nvme stick drive. I put in a 16gig ram module bumping it up to 20gig internal ram, I might try something a bit bigger ram in the very near future. This thing can run GTA V and all the Lego games reasonably well, which I didn't think it would be able to do.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Have you thought of making your own NAS box?

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Freezing could be related to the speed of the ports

 

[Marc]

Freezing could be related to the speed of the ports

please do some reading.

USB2 has a maxium (according to the specs) transfer rate of 480Mbit per second which is roughly 53MBytes per second.

If I can steam 1080p content from my plex server over a vpn connection using my mother-in-law's 15Mbit ADSL2 connection without hesitation then it's not going to ba problem over USB 2 let alone USB3

I've also played media from standard USB2 thumb drives.

the problem lies elsewhere, could be in the nature of USB but unless you're USB 1.0 nothing to do with port speed.

Try looking in the event log for relates errors (staring with hardware disconnects or interrupts).

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

please do some reading.

USB2 has a maxium (according to the specs) transfer rate of 480Mbit per second which is roughly 53MBytes per second.

If I can steam 1080p content from my plex server over a vpn connection using my mother-in-law's 15Mbit ADSL2 connection without hesitation then it's not going to ba problem over USB 2 let alone USB3

I've also played media from standard USB2 thumb drives.

the problem lies elsewhere, could be in the nature of USB but unless you're USB 1.0 nothing to do with port speed.

Try looking in the event log for relates errors (staring with hardware disconnects or interrupts).

USB 2.0 has ALOT of Protocol overhead and if the controller on either end isn't up to spec or able to handle the maximum potential of the packet options, then there's alot of potential bandwidth wasted.

Spoiler: USB 2.0 Spec, Bandwidth / Performance based on Packet Size

As you can tell from the USB 2.0 spec, 1 KiB = 1024 bytes gives you the Maximum possible Transfer Rate / Bandwidth possible.

Even larger packets of 2 KiB or 3 KiB makes things worse.

If given the option on the controller end, force the connection to be Isochronous and 1 KiB packets should be given priority to Min/Max transfer rate.

 

[XCV330]

First time, I bought an actual new laptop, a Dell Latitude 5501. It’s a 2020 model, and I think one of the last Latuitudes with removable RAM.

I got tired of the older models and old style docks having issues running 2 monitors and generally being junky.

Look how much RAM I was able to shoehorn in, despite Dell saying the max is 32GB.
View attachment 29354

The only problem was, I bought a 2TB standard Samsung SSD to upgrade from the 256GB it came with, but it turns out it has the NVMe “stick” SSD, so I had to go out and get one of those. I guess I have a spare 2TB SSD now to go along with a couple 1TB's.


As far as HDD's, I have just a few for all the ripped TV shows and movies, in duplicate.
View attachment 29355

It might see 64GB but not be able to functionally do much with it. And realistically there's very little non-server software beyond video editing that would make much use of it. But if the system board is accessing it well enough, you could play with virtual machines without affecting your overall performance using that extra RAM.

 

[Marc]

It might see 64GB but not be able to functionally do much with it. And realistically there's very little non-server software beyond video editing that would make much use of it. But if the system board is accessing it well enough, you could play with virtual machines without affecting your overall performance using that extra RAM.

Chrome says "hold my beer"

CAD and scientific/mathematics apps can also chew up a good chunk of memory.

Was reading a few weeks back in about some-one who's working on a system they use with some very large numbers sets. It running an AMD Epyc with 2TB of RAM and that memory gets used!!

Some application developers might also push the envelope.

but for those closer to mere mortals, virtualization came be a way of using extra memory. Probably the only way I've come close to using the 16GB that's in my workstation but when I built I was allowing for that. Plus being an ITX board I've only got 2 slots and didn't want to lock my self in.

Suspect with modem systems, people are probably going to have to overspec themselves (and thus have to pay manufacturer higher prices) because the designs are limiting the expansion capacity.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

It might see 64GB but not be able to functionally do much with it. And realistically there's very little non-server software beyond video editing that would make much use of it. But if the system board is accessing it well enough, you could play with virtual machines without affecting your overall performance using that extra RAM.

I use PhotoShop (a well known resource hog) a lot and PowerDirector, plus there's large stretches of time I'm ripping DVD's and blu-rays that can slow things down a bit.

What I'd love to know is, are the apps that can force other apps to use RAM instead of necessarily tying up CPU? Not that a 6 core CPU should be getting too bogged down, but it's a thought. I know you can force some apps to use drive space (PS I think has this option).

 

[Marc]

What I'd love to know is, are the apps that can force other apps to use RAM instead of necessarily tying up CPU? Not that a 6 core CPU should be getting too bogged down, but it's a thought. I know you can force some apps to use drive space (PS I think has this option).

that doesn't make sense. RAM is just storage - it doesn't have any processing ability so you can't tell an app to use it instead of the processor.

The last part would fall under to the heading of swap space or virtual memory. Program and data information is swapped out from memory to special file on the hard disk to free up capacity for some else and then read back when needed (always found the old freecell card game a useful analogy) It's something you generally want to avoid as it can have a massive performance impact and frequently a sign your computer doesn't have enough ram.

Windows and Linux still make use of but not as much as in years gone by because of modern memory capacities and solid state drives also help take the pain out of it.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

that doesn't make sense. RAM is just storage - it doesn't have any processing ability so you can't tell an app to use it instead of the processor.

IDK, just spitballing

 

[Santaman]

Hmm, freezing and stuttering could be driver related, or you've got some crap running in the background, I had to switch to Windows 10 because I got a more modern graphics card and the first thing I did was installing O&O Shutup 10 to switch off crap I don't need and that doesn't need to run in the background.
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

Also, if you have really old video formats it could be just that the drivers etc aren't optimized for it anymore.

 

[Marc]

Hmm, freezing and stuttering could be driver related, or you've got some crap running in the background, I had to switch to Windows 10 because I got a more modern graphics card and the first thing I did was installing O&O Shutup 10 to switch off crap I don't need and that doesn't need to run in the background.
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

Also, if you have really old video formats it could be just that the drivers etc aren't optimized for it anymore.

Even with the crap win 10 has, a Ryzen processor should have enough oomp to play a video with out stuttering (can do it fine on an 8y.o i5).

Could be other 3rd party software as you say, could be PEBKAC.

Could be a hardware problem with media source.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

Everything I've ripped recently, like Stargate Atlantis (which I'm watching these days), was ripped to max quality mp4. Some slightly older stuff was ripped to .avi and much older stuff to .wmv (though I've re-ripped a lot of these like MASH, Red Dwarf and The 3 Stooges).

The previous laptop might have had USB 2.0. I'm pretty sure both laptops (new one and work) have 3.0 capability. I think the dock only has 1.0 or 2.0, so could that mismatch be causing a freeze?

 

[Santaman]

In theory USB should be backwards compatible but who knows how well that is executed..

 

[Marc]

Everything I've ripped recently, like Stargate Atlantis (which I'm watching these days), was ripped to max quality mp4. Some slightly older stuff was ripped to .avi and much older stuff to .wmv (though I've re-ripped a lot of these like MASH, Red Dwarf and The 3 Stooges).

if you play the same video over, does it the stutter occur in the same place or completely random videos?

Wondering if the was a problem with rip - not enough to cause it to fail but enough to introduce an issue with the resulting file.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

if you play the same video over, does it the stutter occur in the same place or completely random videos?

Wondering if the was a problem with rip - not enough to cause it to fail but enough to introduce an issue with the resulting file.

It usually only stutters when I unpause (on either laptop using either WMP or Movies&TV). And it's not a long pause, like when the external drive goes to sleep, it could just be a few seconds. Weird behavior.

 

[Marc]

It usually only stutters when I unpause (on either laptop using either WMP or Movies&TV). And it's not a long pause, like when the external drive goes to sleep, it could just be a few seconds. Weird behavior.

Check your power management settings just to see if it's spinning the drive down (though you might have to dig down a bit).

Another test would be to copy the file to the internal storage and see if the problem occurs.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

Check your power management settings just to see if it's spinning the drive down (though you might have to dig down a bit).

Another test would be to copy the file to the internal storage and see if the problem occurs.

I'll try copying a few videos back to the laptop and see what happens.


As far as cloning, I was having a trouble with an SSD stick in an external enclosure. EasUs, AOMEI and Windows Disk Management all had problems adding a partition. I took it back to Best Buy and they were able to set a partition, so possibly an issue with the enclosure.

I am giving cloning another shot and it's behaving itself so far. If I do get it cloned 100%, will the drive letter change from D: to C: automatically when I put it in the laptop, or will I need to try changing the drive letter after the fact? It normally doesn't matter when I change the drive letters on all my external HDD's, but I'm not so confident with an OS drive and all the installed apps and whatnot.

ETA: Answered my own question. It did manage to clone correctly this time. I think (possibly) it didn't like being plugged into the USB-C on the dock(?), but was OK plugged into the USB-A on the laptop itself.

Also, I booted into the SSD still plugged into the USB and it sees it as C: now, with the internal drive as D: and bitlocked (no issue there).

 

[Santaman]

Before I forget, Linux Mint 21 "Vanessa" has been released, as usual in the desktop flavours: Cinnamon, Mate and XFCE
https://linuxmint.com/download.php
I'll install it on one of my machines this weekend to see how it runs, I usually pick the Sempron 145 for testing but it has a serious case of single core sadness I think 20.3 will be its final OS.