/baw/ - General Discussion

>>421721
Nearly any of those will do the job since they can't really do too much to begin with, unless the laptop specifically has venting holes at the bottom, or you use them with those aluminum unibody laptops where the frame can actually conduct the heat somewhat.

>>421722
There are laptops that DON'T come with vents on the bottom?

>>421723
I wouldn't know, laptops suck. Use a desktop. Even a mini pc will do better than a laptop, unless you absolutely need portability.

>>421724
There's nothing wrong with laptops, you don't always need the biggest e-dick to satisfy your needs.

>>421725
Laptops are more expensive and have less performance, less connectivity, and less expandability than desktops, for the same price. It's not about having a bigger e-dick, it's about getting more for your money.

>Can I truly call myself part of the Master Race if the new one doesn't have 18 revolving blades and cause me to die of hypothermia when activated?
Misconception: a true PC should invoke hyperthermia from the GPU, not hypothermia from air displacement.

>>421726
It depends on the use case, of course.
Gamer? Renderer? Datahoarder? PC.
Browser only? Programmer? Laptop is a legitimate consideration.
If you need performance, connectivity, and expandability then absolutely. Most people don't.

We've hit the point in technology where most people have more than they will ever need. I think that's a good thing.

>>421732
>browser only
this depends entirely on what browsing experience you like. A laptop wouldn't give you decent screen size and a good keyboard/mouse, unless you hook it up to external screen/keyboard/mouse in which case you may as well get a PC. If you are fine with small screens and hooking up external keys/mouse (or use the built-in shitty keys+touchpad), then I guess laptops are fine.
But keep in mind, most people just use their phones to browse nowadays, so if you just want to browse, you don't even need a laptop.

>Programmer
Again this depends on what you are programming. If you run android studio plus photoshop plus virtual machines (that's what I did when developing mobile apps), then you'll need actual performance and a laptop will be significantly more expensive.

If you go around from client to client making presentations or showing the designs you made in Photoshop/Sketch then sure, a laptop is what you need. But for serious work a PC is simply more efficient.

State the best Operating System

-Go-

>>421738
They all suck.

>>421748
The Critic - It stinks
Why are you such a debbiedowner anon.

>>421846
Is it wrong that I want to eat those white pebbles? My mind instantly thought sweets when I looked at them

IMAGINE BEING AT COMPUTERS

>>421877
That's a question of fashion, isn't it? The styles the companies put out change over time, "tempered glass RGB bullshit" is whats in with them at this moment.

Why is an SSD superior to a regular drive?

>>421991
No speed penalty on parallel transfers, significantly lower random access time. The higher sequential read/write is a bonus too, but not what makes a real difference (I had those old old Intel X25 SSDs, with 40mbyte/s writes, and even those made normal HDDs feel like a C64 tape drive).

>>421993
Are there any downsides for all this speed?

>>421994
SSDs have finite write cycles. In reality, these are set so high in consumer devices that you'd likely buy an entirely new PC by the time they die. It's not a dumb idea to check the SMART data for total data written every once in a while, but usually this only allows you to extrapolate how long the device will last, or what kind of specs you should look for in your next upgrade.
For example, my current SSD has ~10000 hours uptime and ~25TB written, meaning that it writes an average 22TB per year, so a Samsung 980 256GBB with 150 TBW life expectancy would last me six-seven years of daily usage. And that's on the real low end of things, 500gb or 1tb drives have double and quadriple the lifetime due to having more NAND cells to use. So a 1tb drive would last me 24 years at this rate. In other words, the finite write cycles is not much of a big deal.

Also SSDs cost more.

That's about it.

>>421998
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201210/09131845861/not-this-again-senator-tillis-tries-to-slide-dangerous-felony-streaming-bill-into-must-pass-government-funding-bill.shtml

He's literally being paid off to push this insane bill (which should be no surprise to anyone).

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-covid-19-stimulus-bill-is-full-of-copyright-enforcement-laws/

It passed.
Americans your political system is total bullshit, where anyone can just slip a totally unrelated rider into any bill getting passed.
Its basically admittance that the entire thing is corrupt.

>>422087
Is that the one that makes streaming a felony, or the one that requires all pornography to have written consent from all participants?

>>422089
The streaming one.

>>422087
>>422090
Pushing in something unrelated into a bill is a simple act of misdirection. And yeah, the entire American political system is corrupt. Bills are passed either based on how much "support" the senators get, or if there's a big enough crisis that they need to look like they are doing something.

Well, unless my sources are full of shit, the "Moar Online Censorship But You Get 600 Bucks" bill did not technically pass in the US of A.

Something seems fishy in my server. On the two slots that use the Marvell controller, one of the drives has been reporting recurring errors. After switching the drive out, the new drive put in its place SOMETIMES reports errors. And also the other drive on the same controller started doing this too.

The drives don't have bad sectors - I've ran multiple full zero writes. However when I do this on the server side, it SOMETIMES returns errors. That is, I do a full zero run + verification and on one check I get a bunch of bad blocks, on the other one I don't. Sometimes it just hangs up.
On Windows, the drive has zero errors.

So now I either have to deal with bad SATA cables, a failure on the PSU (unlikely, 5 other drives have no problems), on the Molex to Sata power converters (possible but not likely), or FreeBSD having problems with the Marvell ATA controller. Or perhaps the PSU just not having enough amps on this specific rail to keep both drives running, as it is quite an old PSU.

>>421998
Someone should hack Washington.

>>422339
wat?

I've been thinking of putting a full watercool loop in my PC. I have some experience with them, but I never built a full custom loop before.

>>422405
Just how much better is watercooling a machine justifying the extra work?

>>422406
Very. With air cooling, the hardware shoots up to maximum temperature in a few seconds. With water cooling, it takes a long time to heat up all the water in the tubes as they flow around, so it can take minutes for the hardware to get significantly higher temperatures or any higher at all. And depending on your setup you can get your hardware to below 50C on load and within a few degrees to room temperature in idle. Simply put, it is very hard to move back to air cooling after you have used decent water loops.
Not the AIO CPU coolers though, those are terrible.

Right now I have a semi-AIO on my gpu (it's an AIO but built out of shelf parts and quick release fittings so it is expandable), which is not the most efficient thing, and takes a lot of space, and I want to replace this with a single-slot proper GPU water block. However for that I need an external pump/reservoir, at which point I may as well get a CPU block too. The question is to whether to go for the semi-AIO for the CPU that has a pump/reservoir/CPU block combo, or go for the full custom set with the external pump/reservoir.
The latter would require me to cut my own tubes, the former means that I may not have enough space for the long tubes they include by default.

I oughta make some pictures of the current setup and case so I can measure and plan things better.

>>422407
The kit I was about to buy ended up having its price raised literally the next day I was about to buy it. And now it's not that good priced anymore to be worth buying. fucking hell.

I might just blow the money on extra HDDs.

What antivirus setups would anons suggest for a PC?

>>422511
Common Sense.

>>422511
GNU/Linux or similar.

>>422533
Part of common sense would be using protection even if you aren't sticking your dongle in the worst ports.

>>422655
There are some real cuties out there.

Could do with a new computer, can't be bothered with the setup and transferring all my games across though.
Last time my friend offered to do it and messed things up so bad had to take it to a shop.

>>422697
>Could do with a new computer, can't be bothered with the setup and transferring all my games across though.

Why not just put the old computers boot drive into the new computer? At worst you have to reactivate windows, but if you have a legit key then that takes like two clicks, if you don't then there are some tools on github to do it. And you have to install new drivers but that's not a big deal either. I've been using the same windows install since, I dunno, whenever win7 64bit came out (it has been upgraded to win10 since).

>>422698
Think I've still got the key lying around.
What though if my current computer is a laptop?

>>422701
On a laptop it is possible that the key is tied to the hardware and you'll need to use one of the activators. I had a MSDNAA key, despite being 10+ years old it still worked - my old machine was active since its win7 days, my new computer defaulted to being inactive, but I could just tell Windows to check the activation status and it activated it by itself.

This is the activator I think I used the last time (MAS 1.4):
https://gitlab.com/massgrave/microsoft-activation-scripts

I would just like to express annoyance at the fact that social media sites in particular make a point of overriding middle click's usual function of "open in a new tab" with "just a second left click", because it means "open this in another tab so I have that set aside to work on later while I read the rest of this page" becomes "open this in the current tab, possibly putting whatever I was reading behind several minutes of scrolling through a now-refreshed list of messages".

>>422719
I am a filthy trackpad user and have not pressed the scroll wheel for years.

>>422719
Try using ctrl + left click instead. I found that as long as the link is an actual link (and not just a pure javascript trigger), it works more often than middle click.

Printer ink cartridges are a fucking scam, like the way companies jack up the price of insulin despite it being far cheaper in cost to produce (the only upside is you don't need to inject printer ink to survive).

>>422723
True.

>>422723
This is well known. I've heard some people being able to buy new printers cheaper than ink cartridges.

Thanks, big centralized government!

>>422859
Uh... what for?