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Tech treats for Christmas or anytime.


abarbarian

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Decided to treat meself to a tech treat for Christmas.

My Steam stuff is spread across three drives and has been working well. Lately it is not recognising my secondary drives and I have to keep on going into settings and mess around to get them to show up, which is a real pain. So I decided to buy ,

 

Adata XPG SX8200 Pro review: A perfect ratio of power to price

 

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Falling NAND prices have been making it easier than ever to find swift NVMe SSDs at low prices. We've already seen the Crucial P1 get close to the premium Samsung 970 Evo on file transfer speeds for as little as 15.5p per gigabyte, and Adata’s XPG SX6000 also impressed at 20.8p per gigabyte.

The XPG SX8200 Pro, however, might just deliver the best balance of high speeds and pricing we’ve seen yet. Its official performance numbers – 3,500MB/s read speed and 3,000MB/s write speed – match or, in the case of write speed, are higher than what Samsung claims of the 970 Evo, and yet Adata’s SSD is cheaper across all its available capacities.

 

 

I went for the 1TB version which cost £116 inc postage and it will replace my SP 591 which has been running faultlessly since I installed it in 2015. Funnily enough although it is four times the size storage wise it cost less than the SP 591. I doubt I will see very much improvement speed wise, possibly games may load slightly faster, but at least I will get rid of that Steam shenanigans.

 

Also my Cooler Master CM Storm Reaper Gaming Mouse developed a fault in that the middle button press stopped working which is a most useful feature when using linux. So I decided to replace it with,

 

Razer Basilisk X Hyperspeed - Wireless Gaming Mouse

 

It does not have the sniper clutch button but I only ever used that a few times so it is no big loss. Battery life is supposed to be outstanding,

 

Quote

Ultra-long battery life: When gaming, Razer hyperspeed lets you to tap on its ultra-fast wireless performance for up to 285 hours. You can also switch to Bluetooth mode for extended use, with up to 450 hours of battery life

 

We will have to see about that. Also it seems that the Open Razor project supports this mouse but I have not had time to fiddle around with that yet.

 

https://openrazer.github.io/

 

So anyone els treating themselves this holiday period ? 😎

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My latest tech outlay has been the mesh router system (Linksys.) Nothing too sexy but it does help as I need good wifi signals and lots of connections.

I have bought a couple of ADATA SSDs (SATA 3) for systems I upgraded for the grandkids and they worked pretty well.

 

Edited by raymac46
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16 minutes ago, raymac46 said:

My latest tech outlay has been the mesh router system (Linksys.) Nothing too sexy but it does help as I need good wifi signals and lots of connections.

I have bought a couple of ADATA SSDs (SATA 3) for systems I upgraded for the grandkids and they worked pretty well.

 

 

I had never heard of ADATA but I took a chance and bought some memory for me Skylake build in 2015 and it has run with no problems. Hope the new NVME drive is as reliable. The price of drives has plummeted in the last few years which is great for us. 😃

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securitybreach
5 minutes ago, abarbarian said:

The price of drives has plummeted in the last few years which is great for us. 😃

 

Yup :thumbsup:

 

Except a lot of us need much bigger drives. I never had to spend $500 on a harddrive back in the day.... 

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8 hours ago, raymac46 said:

Nothing too sexy

 

If it works for you as you would like then I recon it is sexy. 😎

7 hours ago, securitybreach said:

I never had to spend $500 on a harddrive back in the day.... 

 

I never had £500 to spend on tech back in the day. 😂

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13 hours ago, securitybreach said:

 

Yup :thumbsup:

 

Except a lot of us need much bigger drives. I never had to spend $500 on a harddrive back in the day.... 

Go far enough "back in my day", and it cost $500 just to ship a 10mb harddrive.😁  And before moving the drive, even just across the room, you had to open it up and place locks on the the 14" platter and the head.🙁

Edited by Bookmem
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I never had to spend $500 on a harddrive back in the day....

That's because you are young.

The hard drive on my first computer, an IBM,  went out. I don't remember the size, it was tiny. It cost me $400 to replace it. The replacement was under warranty and it failed before the warranty was up.

I must have had one of these.

The unreliable IBM Deskstar 75GXP product became notorious as the Deathstar

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar

 

If I remember correctly, they ended up dumping all these bad hard drives into the ocean.

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17 minutes ago, securitybreach said:

I am not that young. I am currently 42 and my first home computer was a Tandy 1000 that I got in 1985.

So, you were only about 7 yrs old at the time.  When I was that age, circa 1946, computers were gigantic things made with vacuum tubes.  My father was manager of the IBM Jacksonville, FL office at that time.

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9 hours ago, securitybreach said:

I am currently 42

 

I was 42 25 years ago, yer nowt but a whipersnapper, plenty of time for you to get old mate. 🤣

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securitybreach
Just now, abarbarian said:

 

I was 42 25 years ago, yer nowt but a whipersnapper, plenty of time for you to get old mate. 🤣

 

 Hopefully so but who knows with this world...

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I remember being 42; that was 31 years ago. Yup, you are young based on the ages of most of us around this forum. The computer I mentioned was purchased in the mid 1980's, around the time you got your Tandy. We were using Radio Shack computers TRS-80  (I was teaching) in the schools that used a cassette player and tapes to store programs in the 70's.(nickname of them was Trash 80s). I remember having to erase the tapes by running a magnet over them so my students could re-use the tapes.

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My daughter's school had Commodore PETs back in the 80s. I came in after school once a week to teach the kids BASIC. I remember we did a massive history quiz program for Open House that year. We had subteams program it in modules and then the smartest kid in the class and I had to stitch it together and debug the whole thing before the event stated. Talk about spaghetti code.

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It seems weird after decades of replacing my desktop PC every 4 years or so, but I now have 2 perfectly well functioning desktops that date from 2013. Mind you both have been upgraded, but after checking out the holiday sales I would have to spend between $1500 and $2000 Canadian to replace what I have. Probably could do it cheaper if I reused some parts but I'd have to reinstall all my software and data. Both machines have outdated CPUs and GPUs but they still run fast and reliably. I don't have the latest M.2 tech and on one desktop no USB3 but I can cope with it.

Edited by raymac46
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securitybreach

Well it is much cheaper to just build your own pc instead of buying a prebuilt one. I could build a very high end desktop for well under a thousand, maybe even cheaper if you reused some of your parts.

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Remember I am dealing in Canadian so $1000 US is $1300 or more for me. In my situation I could reuse the graphics card and power supply. I'd probably want a new case.

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I'd probably want to replace the SSD with a 1 TB NVME drive, and my current HDD is pretty old. Checking on Partpicker Canada I could get what I want for around $1150 Canadian. I could afford that but when my old system is running OK and meeting my needs it seems like an unnecessary outlay.

This would be to replace a Windows 10 machine. The need is even less for Linux as I try to stay away from the bleeding edge there. My main Linux driver has a 2012 Piledriver A8-5600 CPU and an R7 360 GPU from 2015. These are dinosaurs if I were gaming but my Linux Mint Cinnamon desktop runs fast and stably for web surfing, video, music. And the drivers are well developed and in the kernel.

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securitybreach

Linux hardware support is great as long you are not trying to use a processor with a new architecture that hasnt been around for very long. I stay current with my hardware on Linux and I have yet to run into an issue,

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When I first got my AMD R7 360 video card I had all kinds of problems at the start because its hardware ID wasn't registered yet and older versions of X could not recognize it. It wasn't really a new technology but AMD Linux support was glitchy. That is when I made up my mind to be a couple of years behind, or at least check with Phoronix before buying anything.

I know you have a recent Ryzen processor without any problems but you are on the bleeding edge when it comes to software.

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One thing I know for sure is that there is no way to upgrade my video cards without a rebuild on the mobo and CPU. I am already bottlenecked using a GTX 1060 with my old Sandy Bridge CPU and it's only because i have relatively low demand train sim games that I get by. My Linux system is pretty well balanced but it doesn't have high graphics/processor demand.

There's an upgrade in my future but for now if nothing breaks I am OK.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Stuck for a last minute present ? This may be just the thing.

 

BIC buys notebook startup that failed on Shark Tank 


 

Quote

 

Rocketbook devices are sold on Amazon for between $30 and $45 depending on features, as well as at the company’s Amazon 4-star retail stores including at The SoNo Collection mall in South Norwalk.

 

Rocketbook has patented its system, which allows users to write on synthetic sheets akin to paper and wipe them clean with a damp cloth. In addition to Google Drive, documents can be uploaded to DropBox, Evernote, iCloud and Slack, among other apps.

 

 

I like the idea but personally would have no use for it. 😎

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Just now, V.T. Eric Layton said:

 

I'd forgotten what an old fart you are. ;)

 

Well me farts are still new and fresh. There might be a few more of them these days though. 🤣

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With the grandkids being here for a few days they monopolized the upstairs machines so I spent some time on my Linux basement rig.

Its specs are:

  • Gigabyte FM2 socket motherboard - well built, but limited upgrade possibilities.
  • AMD A8-5600 CPU - obsolete, bad design markedly inferior to Intel Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge.
  • Toshiba 128 GB SSD and 1TB HDD - OK I guess.
  • AMD R7 360 GPU - value priced in 2015 and hopelessly out of date for gaming now.
  • DDR3 1600 - I have 16GB but c'mon...
  • N based 2.4 GHz wifi - decent speeds but old tech.

The point is, this obsolete machine is an absolute monster for web surfing, playing music, video, photo management and light photo editing. It flies with Linux Mint Cinnamon and is perfectly compatible with any flavor of Linux.

Sure AMD has regained its chops compared to Intel but really I don't need to go there unless I wanted to run the latest games (I don't.) Unless something breaks I could happily use this machine for years to come. (Assuming I stay in one piece as well.)

It seems weird to not worry much about running old hardware but there you have it.

 

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