As I had nothing else to do [other that several plumbing jobs, switching out a couple of air conditioners, dealing with a friend who is taking mini-steps towards using a smartphone… you know, the usual stuff] I took time to figure out PowerShell to open OpenSSH so I could install tls on my sites. Two books and several very wrong articles on the subject I have achieved https. Now I’ll have flashbacks about CP/M, MP/M, RDOS and Ultrix.

Michael’s products were better when he was assembling them in his college dorm. I have a Dell that I bought used because I needed a Win XP box to help a client who was still running ancient software. It served its purpose, but was definitely not a ball of fire. The one time I attempted to buy a new Dell, the salesman tried to screw me on the price by quoting full retail on a machine that was on sale for considerably less on their web site. Having just replaced the motherboard on my box, looking at Dell they tested was stomach turning. You go for vanilla when you build boxes. You one one that you only have to worry about the broken bits if there’s a problem.

Yeah, if video card is available now you would believe it was carved by Michelangelo from a block of lapis lazuli. That was a factor in going for the AMD APU, I didn’t have worry about a graphics card.

I want more proof that Mo Brooks is a sentient being 😈

https://twitter.com/Kryten_42/status/1402129507176181761

AMD Actually Made a Mountain Bike (It’s Terrifying): Review, Safety Concerns, Test Ride

And NEVER buy a Dell prebuilt desktop! And yes, that also goes for their high end (non-corporate ‘consumer’s are suckers’) products.
Worse Than Walmart: Dell G5 5000 PC’s Garbage Parts & Hidden Charges

Good ol’ Le Reg! But it wasn’t as much fun as Steve’s, he posted another vid after the Computex 2021 Keynotes about the AMD roadmap and what’s coming. I’ll be waiting a year or so before my next major upgrade. 😉😎

Another YT tech chan I enjoy (because of Paul’s style, not just the content) is Paul’s Hardware. He did a wrap-up of the Big Three Computex 2021 Keynotes. Two failed. You can feel the satire & irony.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sta2yXa2LxM&ab_channel=Paul'sHardware

“If I didn’t have bad luck, I’d have no luck at all…” You and I both! Though, I guess I did get lucky I broke my arm and my G9 390X died after running full tilt for about 2 Months! If it had died now… I’d be screwed! That ‘silver lining’? 🤷‍♂️🙄

That guy needs to cut back on the energy drinks and slow to warp speed…

I was more interested in this from the Register. If it becomes an actual product, it would be a nice upgrade for my box without buying another motherboard.

I’m working on my ancient Toshiba laptop to prepare for the hurricane season [new battery, max out the memory, and swap the HD for an SSD]. I’m surprised that I can still get parts for it. It’s Win 7, but I have licenses for another copy of Win 10. Speaking of which, didn’t you have a source for reasonably priced Win 10 licenses?

I picked the wrong time [price/availability-wise] to be updating systems. As the song says : If I didn’t have bad luck, I’d have no luck at all… 😉

A friend was desperate to get a GPU card and the minimum useful to him is the 5 yr old RX 580. I checked prices & availablility a few days ago:

“I did a quick check and the RX 580 is around the US$600 mark on eBay (used of course). Amazon have unused (they claim) RX 580’s selling for around the US$775 mark, with RX 570’s for about US$460, and the RX 5700 XT selling between US$1,330 to US1,500 (AU$1,930).” 😲 (I paid ~AU$745 for my AURUS RX 5700 XT April last year)!

I think you might find this news recap by Gamers Nexus interesting! I won’t spoil it further than the title does… 😉 😀

HW News – AMD AM5 Big Changes, Windows “11,” Steam’s Switch Competitor, & PCIe Gen6

It reads faster than my PNY SATA, but is slower on writing. Going back and looking, for some reason the 512s are faster than the 256s. It may be a controller difference. It works and frees up a SATA slot. I’ll probably swap it for a 512 later. I think everyone is scraping the bottom of the barrel at the moment. I’m doing boring office stuff on the Win 10 section of that box. The Linux stuff is more adventurous, the Raspberry Pi is more interesting.

Check reviews before you buy. Especially with SSD’s. They are rarely as good as they claim to be.

Possibly the best place for drive reviews is Storage Review (curiously enough): 😉😎
https://www.storagereview.com/consumer/client-ssd

I’m using ≈256GB as boots and backup for boots. I clone the boots once a week now. I backup the data on ≈512GB hard drive partitions after anything notable happens. I’m testing an ADATA NVMe because of the speed claims [and ‘made in Taiwan’], and using Sandisk and Samsung SATA SSDs. The data is going to WD Black and Blue 1TB spinning rust. I’m using EaseUS partitioning software for cloning. I have EaseUS backup software on one box and Ashampoo on the the other, But cloning is so much easier. The cost of memory is definitely going up. Over here 1TB are U$120 and 500GB are U$65 or more.

As for the food poisoning, I’m not 100% sure what the cause was so I’m avoiding everything I had that day. I’m back to normal and more aware of some bad habits.

M.2 NVMe SSD’s are good for the boot drive. I was looking at prices of SSD’s on Amazon. When I got my first NVMe late 2015, the Samsung 950 Pro 512 GB, it cost a bit less than the new Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB! Just don’t get a really cheap one, one of the QLC drives that don’t have a DRAM Cache. They can be very slow & have a shorter life. Some of the QLC drives are OK with a decent cache.

Still, the cheapest decent one now for typical user workloads is probably the Crucial P2 at the lowest price for a decent TLC NVMe drive. It only has a small SLC cache, which saves money. But it isn’t a QLC drive. 500 GB around $65 or $130 for 1 TB. If you want something better, I’d stick with: Samsung, Seagate, Silicon Power, SABRENT, Crucial MX series, Corsair, Gigabyte, WD.

When I got my 1 TB SATA SSD early 2016, it was over AU$550! Now they are about AU$170! My new 4 TB SSD cost a bit less actually. 🤷‍♂️

Prices are increasing now on SSD’s (and RAM). So check around.

True about the consumer being the beta tester these days. Just have to look at games launched woefully incomplete the past couple years or so! Especially by the major studio’s. But some of the smaller ones still do it properly. I’m actually a tester for King Arthur: Knight’s Tale by NeocoreGames. I joined the crowd funding on Kickstarter early last year, after a LOT of thought. Neocore have had a good History for games, and KA looked so damned interesting! Been testing the Beta since November & they have been steadily adding content & fixing (mostly minor) bugs quickly. It’s been fun to watch it develop. 😀

Also a tester for a couple years now on AI WAR II by Arcen Games. It’s coming along too! A huge Real Time Space Sim/strategy game. There’s 2 or 3 updates every week by the Dev’s! Usually small patches to fix a specific issue we find. I like doing it that way! 👍😎

If curious:
https://neocoregames.com/en/games/king-arthur-knights-tale
https://arcengames.com/aiwar2/

I hope you’re over the food poisoning and back to normal foods etc. Good luck with everything! And take care.

I had a bout of food poisoning, but it finally passed through my system after a couple of days. These days it isn’t the illness, it’s the recovery that’s annoying. I’m back to yelling at the grackles [a noisy black bird with beady yellow eyes that eat cat food] and squirrels. After three quarters of a century, waking up and moving around is a victory.

Thanks for reminding me about DoNotSpy, I bought it to check out my system. I don’t remember being asked about settings on this machine as it came preinstalled.

I’ve been messing around with the various forms of SSDs during the rebuild of the big box. I think I’ll install a NVMe as my Windows boot.

Back in the early days I was a beta tester for a lot of software. The software was free and I gave them my opinion and at the end they gave me a the latest versions of the software. One of my clients for training was a major retailer who got all kinds of samples. These days you are a beta tester for every program/app you buy because nobody does in depth testing anymore – if it runs on an HP and a Dell it will be fine, right?