General Computer Thread

[Amaris]

Got my cables today, and so this is what I ended up doing.

This is the 4 in 1 charger, in the middle of the desk, it takes up one USB port:

And this is the two out of three data transfer cables, on the right side of the desk, they take up two USB ports:

It's not nearly as elegant as I'd hoped, but it looks like it will get the job done.
Also, sorry for the dust. I wipe this desk down every day, but it's that kind of material that just attracts dust constantly.

 

[Amaris]

I've got a new processor coming, and so I had to update the BIOS on my motherboard. Unfortunately, I didn't need one, but three updates, because there had been some updates prior to the latest one that had to be installed first because of various compatibility issues.

Anyway, I had downloaded the BIOS updates for my B450-DS3H, and was about to start when I couldn't help but feel like something wasn't quite right. So I found the BIOS ID for my motherboard, and looked it up. It said my particular motherboard was version 1.x, and I had downloaded the v2.0 BIOS patches by mistake.

Anywho, so I went ahead and did three separate BIOS updates today, having never actually done one before, and I was sweating bullets the entire time, because I really didn't want a nice, expensive paperweight if anything happened in the updating process. Fortunately, everything turned out fine, but I really don't want to do that again. Too much stress.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Too much stress.

Get a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply).
That should help allay your fears of power outage while updating.

 

[Amaris]

Get a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply).
That should help allay your fears of power outage while updating.

My window unit air conditioner kicked in on the final BIOS flash, and for a second the power flickered and anyone outside would have heard a very high pitched scream.

I've been looking at a UPS, and plan on getting one soon. Our electrical wiring is getting old, and I've already got every outlet in my room fitted with shop grade surge protectors, but yeah, I really need a UPS. We're expecting bad electrical storms this year.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

I've been looking at a UPS, and plan on getting one soon. Our electrical wiring is getting old, and I've already got every outlet in my room fitted with shop grade surge protectors, but yeah, I really need a UPS. We're expecting bad electrical storms this year.

I've been using APC (American Power Conversion) brand UPSes for decades already

I have a UPS for ALL my electronics.
Be it from TV to PC to Networking equipment.

Back in college, during WoW's (World of Warcraft) hey-day, my friend had his PC on the UPS, but not his monitor.

They were mid-raid in a WoW boss fight, and for 5 minutes, the power was fluctuating in our apartment like crazy, but since I had our networking gear on the UPS, our internet connection stayed steady.

Unfortunately, he didn't have his monitor on the Battery Back-up, only surge protection. So he had to continue raiding on literally raw muscle memory. He was so in tune with his game play and character that nobody in the raid noticed that he couldn't see what was going on for 5 minutes. They thought everything was fine. He was playing on Audio & the game running ONLY.

Talk about knowing your role that you can literally play blind for 5 minutes on end!

 

[Amaris]

IT'S ALIVE! IT'S ALIVE!
UNLIMITED POWER!!!!!

The beast herself:

 

[Santaman]

Not bad, a 5600 should go a long way, my gaming rig has a 2600X and that one still runs everything I want/need at a more than comfortable speed, this one will last you a while.
As for the mainboard BIOS thing, well I told ya that Gigabyte LOVES revissions..

 

[Amaris]

Not bad, a 5600 should go a long way, my gaming rig has a 2600X and that one still runs everything I want/need at a more than comfortable speed, this one will last you a while.
As for the mainboard BIOS thing, well I told ya that Gigabyte LOVES revissions..

Yes, indeed. I was like "flashing should be simple. How many revisions could they have possibly have?"

A LOT. The answer is A LOT. FAR too many for a single motherboard.

Still, got it all done, and with everything up to date this system should last me a good many years before I have to start looking to find something newer.

 

[FPAlpha]

Yes, indeed. I was like "flashing should be simple. How many revisions could they have possibly have?"

A LOT. The answer is A LOT. FAR too many for a single motherboard.

Still, got it all done, and with everything up to date this system should last me a good many years before I have to start looking to find something newer.

I have a Ryzen 5600 sytem too with a Geforce RTX 3070 graphics cards, i can play most games at Very High or Ultra settings without a problem and my PC is 2.5 years old. Sure it can't compete with the latest systems concerning FPS an benchmarks but over a certain level it's just numbers without too much benefit, at least not when you factor in what you have to pay additionally to get these extra FPS.

However i ran into heat problems ( despite the mother of all CPU coolers, a real big chonker) so i took the time today and opened it up and blew out all the dust out of it ( i hesitate to say when i did this the last time), disassembled some parts including the CPU cooler to apply new cooling paste and it now runs around 10 degrees Celsius cooler than before - what a difference a little maintenance can do

 

[Noname Given]

Decades ago, I had a full-sized tower with a million slots, all of them filled. It wasn't until Windows 95 and Plug 'N' Play that I was finally able to get everything to work. Back when you had a full-length modem card, full-length fax card, hard drive card...

^^^
As someone who's been building/assembling his own PC since the late 1980s, the above is truer than you know.

 

[Amaris]

Me, using the Linux community's open source code to create my own distro: "Yes, yes! This is awesome, hell yes!"

Me, seeing other developers build their own distros from my open source code: "What? This is bullshit! That's stealing!"


(This is a post regarding Red Hat.)

 

[Malicia]

I've been using AVG Free anti-virus for years but have uninstalled it because I don't trust it anymore. It kept trying to install the AVG web toolbar which would be blocked by Zone Alarm and no matter how many times I tried to block it kept trying to install it until it eventually did but the worst part is when I started getting notifications AVG wasn't working correctly and I wasn't protected but when I hovered over the icon in the system tray it would say "you are protected" so I had no idea what the status was. Repairing and re-installing didn't help and then it suddenly started using 100% of the CPU even at idle. Now it's been uninstalled the CPU has dropped back to 0% and I think the protection built in to Windows 10 pro and regular Malwarebytes scans should be enough.

 

[Amaris]

I've been using AVG Free anti-virus for years but have uninstalled it because I don't trust it anymore. It kept trying to install the AVG web toolbar which would be blocked by Zone Alarm and no matter how many times I tried to block it kept trying to install it until it eventually did but the worst part is when I started getting notifications AVG wasn't working correctly and I wasn't protected but when I hovered over the icon in the system tray it would say "you are protected" so I had no idea what the status was. Repairing and re-installing didn't help and then it suddenly started using 100% of the CPU even at idle. Now it's been uninstalled the CPU has dropped back to 0% and I think the protection built in to Windows 10 pro and regular Malwarebytes scans should be enough.

Indeed, it should be enough. I used Windows Defender and MalwareBytes for years without any issues cropping up. The best protection is defensive web browsing if you're going to use Windows.

 

[Santaman]

Yup, @Amaris is right, that combo should be enough.

A friend of mine gave me computer parts, it was his old PC which he had handed over to his sister who claimed that the thing had gone to the big scrapheap in the sky..
Put the thing away for a few months and a while ago I finally had time to identify the thing..
Mainboard is a Asus OEM board with a FM2 socket and a AMD A8 6500 APU fitted which is a quad core running at 3.5/4.1Ghz
The cooler is a Asus OEM one with a 80x80x25mm fan fitted, it's rather quiet which is good, also plenty for the 65watts of the chip.
It has 8GB RAM which is plenty and it came with a powersuply which was nice, so found a casing and an old HDD, threw the whole thing in there and pressed the on switch, it beeped and it did seem to function normally.
Quite a nice surprise, so I wanted to try Tuxedo OS on a machine anyway so I put it on a stick and tried to install it aaaaaaaaand.. it did so without problems.. so I guess I have a new-ish old test machine..

 

[Amaris]

Yup, @Amaris is right, that combo should be enough.

A friend of mine gave me computer parts, it was his old PC which he had handed over to his sister who claimed that the thing had gone to the big scrapheap in the sky..
Put the thing away for a few months and a while ago I finally had time to identify the thing..
Mainboard is a Asus OEM board with a FM2 socket and a AMD A8 6500 APU fitted which is a quad core running at 3.5/4.1Ghz
The cooler is a Asus OEM one with a 80x80x25mm fan fitted, it's rather quiet which is good, also plenty for the 65watts of the chip.
It has 8GB RAM which is plenty and it came with a powersuply which was nice, so found a casing and an old HDD, threw the whole thing in there and pressed the on switch, it beeped and it did seem to function normally.
Quite a nice surprise, so I wanted to try Tuxedo OS on a machine anyway so I put it on a stick and tried to install it aaaaaaaaand.. it did so without problems.. so I guess I have a new-ish old test machine..

I've been looking at Tuxedo OS as something worth using as a daily driver. I think the only thing that has kept me away is that it's tailor made for Tuxedo computers, but also happens to work on non-Tuxedo PCs. One of the appeals I find of Pop OS, by System 76 is that even though it's made for their systems, they've designed it to work easily with any other system.

So that has always kept me from wholeheartedly switching to it, and I do want to get away from Snaps. Even though I can disable them, Canonical has made it their mission to infest every aspect of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and all of the other flavors with Snap, and while some people like it, I very much do not, and I really don't like being pushed towards it. For me, that's a Microsoft move that says "you'll like this feature, and even if you don't, you'll have to like it."

I've been thinking about Pop OS, but I really prefer KDE, and I don't like adding KDE to distros that were designed to rely on Gnome based environments. I am curious to see the end result of the new COSMIC desktop when System 76 finishes it, but that's at least 6 months away.

 

[Santaman]

Tuxedo works fine except for the Tuxedo panel which is indeed a program specifically for their desktop, so Tuxedo OS is based on KDE Neon, installed that alongside and the two are mostly identical as far as I can see, settings, software manager etc etc etc are identical in any case, as for the Tuxedo specific bit, doesn't do much and isn't in the way either so you can use Tuxedo OS as you see fit.

 

[Amaris]

Tuxedo works fine except for the Tuxedo panel which is indeed a program specifically for their desktop, so Tuxedo OS is based on KDE Neon, installed that alongside and the two are mostly identical as far as I can see, settings, software manager etc etc etc are identical in any case, as for the Tuxedo specific bit, doesn't do much and isn't in the way either so you can use Tuxedo OS as you see fit.

Good to know. I did consider KDE Neon at one point, but they've adopted Snap, too, primarily due to Ubuntu being their base. Canonical is making it difficult to stay with them, and with Red Hat's decidedly frustrating decision, I won't move to Fedora as it's upstream from Red Hat and Red Hat is heavily influentual there. I don't use Arch distros because Arch is way too bleeding edge for me, and requires too much constant updating.

I don't use OpenSUSE because I don't like YaST, zypper is s-l-o-w, and my VPN doesn't work well with it. Also, OpenSUSE gets really picky about what RPM packages it will run without freaking out.

So it's looking like Debian 12, which is currently up to date, has flatpak enabled by default, and is really standing out this release, or Pop OS, even though I'm not a fan of the current COSMIC/Gnome hybrid desktop they've got. Linux Mint is a wonderful distro, the Cinnamon DE is very flexible (inability to change the lock screen background notwithstanding), and I've kept it in mind because that's pretty much where I started, but I really do love KDE.

Tuxedo OS would be a nice compromise, as it would have recent packages, use the KDE UI, and it's based on Ubuntu, but since it's not an official flavor it doesn't require mandatory Snap.

 

[Santaman]

Yeah, it does seem like Tuxedo would be a good choice for your needs.
As for me, Linux Mint, it has been what I wanted, it doesn't do wild changes and it has remained stable and reliable.
But that's the beauty of Linux, there's a Distro for everyone.

 

[Amaris]

Yeah, it does seem like Tuxedo would be a good choice for your needs.
As for me, Linux Mint, it has been what I wanted, it doesn't do wild changes and it has remained stable and reliable.
But that's the beauty of Linux, there's a Distro for everyone.

I'll be going with Tuxedo OS. I ran it in a VM and it's very nice, polished, stable, and with KDE I get the UI I want. It's the best of Kubuntu and KDE Neon but without Snap, which was my biggest hurdle. I despise Snap, and having to cannibalize Kubuntu and then put it all back so that it would update to the next release was just frustrating. So Tuxedo it is!

 

[Amaris]

Oh, that ended up working just fine! Got everything installed, and Tuxedo feels like the best of both worlds: it's stable, but it's up to date for my hardware. It's like having KDE Neon and Kubuntu combined, all without Snap.

At 1.7GB on idle, it's also lighter than Kubuntu, too, and even Fedora back when I ran that (3.1GB of RAM on idle, and a hefty 4.1GB of RAM on idle, respectively).