Ordered My Power Supply For My Puter

Discussion in 'Gadgets & Tech Talk' started by Thomas Stillhere, Dec 14, 2022.

  1. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
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    I've always been a fan of pressurized enclosures. It stops stuff from getting sucked in through all the cracks you could never seal, and gives you the chance to filter the incoming air. I don't know that I've seen one for a consumer desktop application...mainly been in computer rooms with minis and mainframes.

    Regarding monitors: I am on my second "supposed to be a small LCD TV but has a PC input" inexpensive unit from Walmart. I got my first one when my "real" monitor took a poop and found these in stock at my local Walmart, and it worked out well.

    Your comment about streaming music reminded me of when I first got DSL. I immediately found a reggae station that streamed from Kingston. Good stuff.
     
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  2. Thomas Stillhere

    Thomas Stillhere Very Well-Known Member
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    I've been hesitating to buy one of those hand held battery operated vacuum cleaners for computers, I think with the 3 new computers I should go ahead and spend the few dollars and it would help to keep them clean. No chance of not having dust when you live in a farming area. You can't see it until it settles all over everything in the house.
     
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  3. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
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    I got the same issue from having a wood stove.
     
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  4. Beth Gallagher

    Beth Gallagher Supreme Member
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    How about that "canned air" stuff, Thomas?
     
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  5. Thomas Stillhere

    Thomas Stillhere Very Well-Known Member
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    Last time I used it there was a lot of moisture in the can which left water beads so I have not used it again. The small hand held vacuum would be much better I believe.
     
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  6. Thomas Stillhere

    Thomas Stillhere Very Well-Known Member
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    I use Amazon for all my computer components, I have used Newegg but I get much better shipping using Amazon and if I have a problem they have been super good about refunds and replacement. Newegg is a bit slow to take care of their bad products and make you jump thru hoops to delay putting that money back into your account. I just got tired of it and I no longer worry about my orders getting here. They go directly to my Post Office Box. Got a new Full Tower case on the way this morning and it weighs a lot. It is the same case I used for this last build I made. I decided to grab it before it goes out of production which should be soon because the price of this one was cheaper than the one I purchased two years ago.

    Got a new SSD 1TB so I can fire it up soon as I put it together. I now have all I want and they are a 2 mix of processors, two cases alike with all the internals the same and same goes for this last one with the new case, it is exactly the same with all components same same. Only thing left to get is two external large Hard Drives for storage. I could not buy the best or the fastest but what I did assemble is no slouch and a world apart from what I run daily. This win 7 machine is soon to be retired, I had to make some changes today to speed it up a bit, I let windows manage all the performance and set all the graphics to run at less needed horse power. It seems to work better but that has always been an issue with windows 7 after installing a lot of software, it just really kills the speed. No point in buying a new internal hard drive because it would just make matters worse adding more for it to manage. Now I have another win 7 system in an old case from 2007 and it is a 32bit sys, I recently put the dual channel memory from the machine that died into that 7 system and with the fast memory it made a world of difference, it was twice as fast as it has ever been. Since I only use that machine for my scanner and some older photoshop work, it would be just fine to swap that fast memory into this machine and I know it would speed it up. I need to change the fan anyway with a new one sitting in the box on top of one of these other machines on my desk. It will still be retired regardless if it runs faster or not.
     
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  7. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
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    So how do you like those SSD drives? I read an article that claimed that you don't want to use an SSD drive as your system drive because some part of it "wears out" if too many read/write operations are performed on the same address/location (as happens would when booting up the system.) I've mentioned that theoretically downside on other forums, and it generally gets the BS Flag thrown on it.

    Regarding Windows systems and general performance...I miss MemMaker. There used to be an industry publication I subscribed to when I managed purchasing for a computer outfit that sold over 50,000 skus. They had an industry insider column written by Shadow Ram. He had a little spy logo on it. I thought of him every time I manually set my memory allocations.
     
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  8. Thomas Stillhere

    Thomas Stillhere Very Well-Known Member
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    They have improved a lot in a short time, heat being the past killer. I read that you don't want to defrag them but then if you are just using it for a system disc you will have a lot of moving if you download things to be installed because they all go to the C drive. Then after installing the installer remains there unless you delete it. I should look that up about the issues but for the most part I think they have improved a lot. They are widely used for gaming due to their fast speeds. I also used MemMaker with a lot of games, it was necessary for them to run in DOS. One of my all time favorites was Tornado, the Nato Low level bomber that was used to destroy all of Iraqs airfield runways that first night. The game was low resolution but the game play was just incredible and realistic. You setup all your aircraft s targets and time tables and your own arrival and departure times over the target. It was just wild when you made an attack on a runway and another aircraft you setup streaks in across your path making his run on a bunker or another target. Coming out you have SAMs tracking all over the place and finally when you clear the zone you feel relieved you made it. Well almost, you might have used too much fuel keeping your time table synchronized with the rest of the attacking group. You had to constantly play with the throttle to keep things in order. Then you might have to make an emergency landing at one of 4 airfields on your side, if you were fortunate to make it to your own base and reach the approach to find large craters in your runway then you have to turn around and try and make the nearest airfield to land. It was just a hoot to play. So I now have it again and use dosbox to play it on modern machines.

    Great for the operating system and fast loading times over internal drives. My motherboards I purchased all have the slots so I use them for the system. The cost has come down a lot and to me it is just another better technology as all the rest in the past. I always have a lot of stuff to save and I have been using up good hard drive space to keep all that stuff when I should have been purchasing cheap USB sticks. This 2d game engine I use keeps backups and more if I chose to save something with a different name or location to store it, but the fact is I get a heck of a lot of repetitious saves in the process of working on these little games. I deleted a ton of them tonight freeing up space but in the past I have made a mistake and deleted things I should not have deleted. I might be working on a problem and finally find the answer then screw around and delete the code blocks I used. I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, especially at 75. I finally learned enough with this engine to plan things a bit before start naming objects, because it all catches up with you by the time you start increasing the number of objects with the same actions. The engine is very smart but if can't do everything for you. I think I found the missing games I had compiled and will check and see if I can up any of them, all pinball games and I loved doing them. It was a good way to get familiar with the engine. You can make any 2d game, plat former s top down, endless runner etc.
     
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  9. Thomas Stillhere

    Thomas Stillhere Very Well-Known Member
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    I have RAM for the last machine I built, and also two 2TB external SSDs. The externals were 23 dollars per and I have no idea if it will be a good deal or a bad deal but for the money it is a good gamble. If they work as they should it will give me storage to install programs on the new machine and also the 2nd one can remove all those tons and tons of non program stuff on my desktop of this machine. I expect to pickup a tremendous boost in speed once that is done. I saw one review over a year ago on the same drive and it said that the one they purchased only had 64GB of space. I find that hard to believe that amazon would sell something that was anything less than advertised. Most likely the person was a newbie and ran some formatting program that was set improperly. I am not sure just what is inside one of these externals and if one does go belly up I plan on dissecting it take a peek of the externals.

    I believe to have that much free space they must use a small M2 card that you would find in a laptop. It would already be small enough to fit in a small enclosure and all that would be needed is the USB cable. They are not the latest speed USB but the older slow type. I am not interested in speed I want just storage capacity. On the RAM I bought the same brand I bought for the other machine I finished last month. I was not able to get the real 3600 DRAM speed and was only able to get 3554 without making some voltage and other tweaks. I just run it at that speed and it does no harm. This time around I ordered a much faster CL 16 speed and I should see 3600 without any issues as the slower one. I had bought what the msi list for ram certified to work but the motherboard and cpu are supposed to run 3200 speed RAM which of course they do but the RAM will run 3600 with some more voltage and timing settings which I do not want to do since I don't want to overclock the system.
     
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  10. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
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    I'm confused. Don't SSDs have a Master/Slave jumper or switch? Or by "external" do you mean it's in an enclosure?
     
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  11. Thomas Stillhere

    Thomas Stillhere Very Well-Known Member
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    It is external in a nice metal case, slightly smaller than a cell phone. There are no switches just plug and play and they come ready for use so no formatting. I have a 2TB external I have used now for about 4 years but it is full and it is a WD brand in an enclosure about 2 and a half inch height 9 to 10 inch width. It has worked well but sometimes it gets a bit confused and I have to slap it around a bit before it is recognized. I have no idea why it does that but for now it is just a paper weight with a whole lot of important things. If I were smart I would buy a good brand very large external and remove all these things on different drives for safe keeping. You just never know when a drive no matter the cost or brand will just up and die. After that USB flash drive failed last week with 64Gb lost I won't buy any more of those except for installing windows 10 maybe. I have one small USB in a metal enclosure that I keep win 10 Pro on it. I don't want to go to 11 because it is pure crap.

    I could probably reclaim about 50 percent of all my drives if I would just use a new drive and move things to it and when a double tries to install just say no. No need to look at anything because it is the name and timestamp that can see if the file is a duplicate. I have hundreds of 3d models Tanks and Planes Ships and a lot more. They all take up a lot of room but I use them in my 2d games by opening them in a 3d editor and making images of the parts I need, like a hull or a turret for a tank. The game engine does all the animation work and behaviors and actions. You assign a pinning of a turret to a hull at a specific image point that you set when you import the image into the game engine editor. Both become a part of one object but are independent and have the different behaviors. Lots of settings to tune the objects.

    M5A2_Hull.png M5A2_Tur.png
     
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  12. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
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    @Thomas Stillhere

    First, if there's an existing thread for your computer stuff, let me know where it is and we can stop sucking the oxygen out of unrelated topics...or just make one and I'll move the comments to it. We should probably do that so we don't hijack.

    I may have mentioned this before...have you thought of setting up a RAID system?

    The benefits are: automatic backup/redundancy, speed (because the data is spooled to firmware and then written to the drives), and the storage capacity of multiple drives chained together yet seen as a single device.

    You're probably aware that RAID is a set of hard drives driven by a RAID controller card you configure for the way you want it to manage backup/recovery. I think there are 5 RAID flavors, ranging from 100% mirroring so there is a duplicate drive(s), to Striping so that the data is spread out over the drives and when one drive fails, you plug in a replacement and the administrative data on the remaining drives rebuilds it.

    I just took a quick look and there are RAID Controller cards for SSD drives. One of my jobs was Product Manager for a computer reseller, and RAID was one of the lined I helped our sales guys with. Our main RAID line back then was ADAPTEC. I'm sure the technology has changed since, but the concept is still the same.
     
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  13. Thomas Stillhere

    Thomas Stillhere Very Well-Known Member
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    Yes I am familiar with RAID. In my case I have never thought it would be worth the money and time for me. When I left Houston in 08 I had to leave behind an older IBM mainframe server that held 6 drives and hot plug variety. I drove to Dallas from Houston to pick it up and bring it home. It worked well but was nearing the end of the line in speed. I don't have the electrical service to run more than two computers at once. My plans are to run certain software I have that requires speed and RAM on different computers. All my photoshop things on one machine and game engines on another. 3d Editors on another etc. I think I am a bit late to consider storing using RAID. My things are hobby and personal enjoyment not for profiting. Lately I feel a lot worse each day and don't get much done other than go back to bed and sleep. Sorry if I have written too much or subjects that don't fit.
     
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  14. Dwight Ward

    Dwight Ward Veteran Member
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    Speaking of things that don't fit, I'm getting skinnier and my jeans don't fit so well anymore. I think this is relevant.
     
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