Random thoughts.... [Tech Edition]

Possible £££ solution:
 
I know. It's the "year of Linux on the desktop" of the GPU world. And my particular complaints are my fault entirely. it is especially egregious because I was recommending @Punisher Bass NOT to purchase an AMD GPU precisely because the drivers are dogshit at around the same time I was planning this build.

However, I got a 5600XT NIB for just over $240 (this is pre-shortage, they retailed for $289, IIRC). That one was a double whammy. Not only were the drivers shit, but I also had to get that particular one RMA'd A port decided to fail, and then it began showing small artifacts that evolved into full-blown "my screens are now abstract art" ones. Shipping from Honduras alone was like $200, let alone shipping it back. And, of course, now that I have it, I find out more and more that the drivers are utter bullshit.

I've had my 5700XT for closing in on a year now and have had zero issues with either the hardware or AMD's drivers. In fact the only time I ever had a problem with their drivers was well over a decade ago when I had my 5850, and it was cleared up with later updates.
 
Facebook Marketplace win! It pays to be punctual...

I needed a stand for my monitor, because I lost the desk-edge clamp for my adjustable arm, and I'm not allowed to drill a hole in the desk top to use the grommet/bolt-through mount I was using on my old desk. I found someone online giving away a stand for free that matched my exact monitor model. I arrived when I promised I would, and we started talking about how annoying "Craigslist Flakes" are. He waited home all last night for someone who never came by to buy the actual monitor that was attached to this stand he had listed for free, assuming the monitor was sold. As he grabbed the screwdriver to remove it, he said, "You know what....this guy was gonna give me $40 for this monitor, but never came, and wasted my whole night. Want it for $20?" I said, "How 'bout $10? I don't actually need it, but would absolutely use it!" "Deal." he said. $10, for a like-new Dell U2412M 1920x1200 monitor. For my use-cases, dual-screen is much better than a single ultrawide, since nearly everything I do is multitasking, and not a single task spanning the full width.

So now I have a two-monitor setup. This is going to be so great for school! Have the lesson/teacher/lecture/reference material on one screen, while still being able to do whatever work or notetaking I need to do at the same time on the other screen.

Oh, who am I kidding...it'll have YouTube full-screened on the left, and the interwebs on the other.

Amusingly, I still need a stand for the other one so I don't have to hold it up using my woodworking clamps. Ha!


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I do need to figure out how I can hang my PC under my desk, though, so i can get the speakers out from behind the monitor...and if only wireless printing wasn't so buggy so I wouldn't need it physically connected to my PC...
 
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I've had my 5700XT for closing in on a year now and have had zero issues with either the hardware or AMD's drivers. In fact the only time I ever had a problem with their drivers was well over a decade ago when I had my 5850, and it was cleared up with later updates.

This is the story of my AMD ownership across two GPUs (And how I was received this morning)

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The only tweaking I do is change the fan curve. The unexpected system failure was a crash. it is always a crash

So no. I shall be going team green for my next purchase...which will happen as soon as I get decent employment and are no longer in the throes of the worst shortage in my lifetime.
 
So no. I shall be going team green for my next purchase...which will happen as soon as I get decent employment and are no longer in the throes of the worst shortage in my lifetime.

I wasn't telling you to stick with AMD, simply that my experience this go around with team red has been fine. I'm sorry you got a lemon of a card and have had nothing but nightmares.
 
Oh, it didn't read that way at all! Sorry if I gave you that impression. Just adding more to my original statement. I've had other people mention their positive experience with their AMD cards. And, of course, I am running a 3600X on this rig and I have absolutely zero complaints about that one.

If my failures can be traced to hardware, it would mean I have gotten two consecutive defective GPUs. My original, and the RMA'd one. It would be unprecedented for me.
 
I'm definitely going team red with my next CPU, the Ryzen 9 5950X just crushes anything in that price range. Team blue would have to pull a big one out of their arse to sway me. The 6800XT is tempting as an RTX 3080 alternative but it's no more available.

Anyway the Netgear 5-port switch I bought a few weeks ago shit the bed during a work meeting this morning, any time it's connected to the network it takes the whole lot down. It's the main one that feeds the house, I swapped with the 1 year old equivalent from a year ago that handled a few things and all is well again, except I lose access to my cameras and the car loses Wi-Fi. These cheaper micro switches are annoying hit and miss.

Also I'm trying to deal with shoddy MSIs that call back to older versions of software that aren't installed and have no reference in the registry, a couple dozen machines have installations failing due to this and the removal section of the MSI is looking in different folders on each machine. I'd happily go through and re-populate the folders in advance if I knew what they would be! Grr.
 
These cheaper micro switches are annoying hit and miss.
Well... thanks for playing the guinea pig for us in this regard :D Tells me to buy something reliable if maybe a little more expensive once we actually manage to move somewhere that's big and permanent enough to warrant a proper network*

*cries in wifi everything.
 
Well... thanks for playing the guinea pig for us in this regard :D Tells me to buy something reliable if maybe a little more expensive once we actually manage to move somewhere that's big and permanent enough to warrant a proper network*

*cries in wifi everything.
Well I apparently diagnosed it too soon. I didn't get time to do anything more earlier but during my lunchbreak I got my spare 5-port out (it reboots randomly or something so I just kept it for emergencies) and plugged that in where I had tried the 'bad' switch. The wired network went down immediately.

I noticed that one port was flashing like a bastard, confirmed that it was causing the network to go down and traced it to the second router I use as an AP for the car. No surprises, it was just swamping the network. Rebooted that router and now everything is fine. Wireless connections for everything else goes to the main router so those were fine all along, just really odd symptoms. Almost everything is wired.

I've actually had few issues with these little switches, I have 3 in the house serving little areas. They just aren't smart so can't handle loopbacks or anything flooding the network.
 
I’ve posted this before but…

I found out that one of my switches default to 192.168.0.1 if there’s no DHCP available when it boots up. It boots a lot faster than the modem, which also is on 192.168.0.1. Or was. It isn’t anymore. And that little 8-port Netgear bastard is on a static IP now.
 
How would I check to see what's causing the bottleneck with my network at home?

I get a weird slow loading into things sometimes, such as my smartTV loading up or getting a youtube or netflix show loaded up where previously before my router started taking a dump this wasn't the case? I have changed routers to the last gen Apple Airport Extreme, the tall thing. I do network tests with fast.com and others and the speeds show up as fine, so what gives? Once in a while I need to reset the modem, but the router never fucks up. So I guess modem is at fault?
 
There does seem to be an issue with EVGAs design… the Card shouldn’t be able to fry itself, no matter what the game (menu lol) demands :bangin:
 
This should not be necessary to say but:


Freedom Phone? And it's just a rebranded Chinese cheap-o phone? They should have just called it the MAGA-phone... :ROFLMAO: Made in China, just like the MAGA-hats...
 
Cleaning/rebuilding flood PC part 1:
 
I can google how to do it, but I'm not sure what it's called so I'm not getting any helpful results....

In Excel, let's say I have a cell where I need to running average of every package's weight I ship. So far I have 3) packages recorded, and my "average" cell's foruma is "=(A1+B1+C1)/3".

Now...let's say I want to just enter a new packages weight to be factored into this average.

Currently, I have to manually change it to "=(A1+B1+C1+D1)/4". This leaves open the possibility of error if I mis-count the number of cells, or forget to do that part of the equation once after I've input the package's weight into D1, for example.

Is there a way Excell can automatically add a new cells information into the total, and then divide by the new quantity of populated cells?

What would the name of this task be? I know it's not "rolling average", but I couldn't figure out what it would be called.
 
Average(insert cell range here) if I’m not mistaken

Or just click the fx button and search for the formula there
 
There is an AVERAGE function in Excel. Which can be setup to work on for example a column A1:A20 I think it does not include empty cells in the calculation.

Edit: Typed to slow on my phone.
 
Ladies and gentlemen an update on my second GPU:

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Saw a listing on FB marketplace for the printer model my family had in the late 90s. It was a Canon BJ200e ink jet ("BubbleJet") printer.

The listing was titled "vintage computer printer/typewriter(?)"
 
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