Damn it, but computers have become really complicated

[Architecture]

  On 1/4/2016 at 12:11 PM, dibs said:

Ah, it will host all my steam installs.

Uh.

 

SSD.

 

Buy the biggest one you can afford.

[Bidiot Bales]

My SSD recently had a seizure and collapsed in on itself in a flurry of 1's and 0's.

Goodbye, film essays.

Hello Google Drive. I need you in the future.

[Brett E]

  On 1/6/2016 at 12:11 AM, Dewar said:

That chip is 7 years old, but a lot of games are getting better at pushing load off to the GPU instead of the CPU, so you might be able to get by? I have a 4 year old i5 processor and I rarely max it out.

 

Yeah I know it's overdue replacing but it's been great at handling a whole bunch of stuff for the last 6 years, I was (perhaps over-optimistically) hoping I could get another 6-12 months out of it.

If it the CPU also needs replacing to get decent frame rate in Fallout 4 then fair enough. I'll just hold off for a couple of months and get the whole lot when a big spend should be less painful.

[Badfinger]

What card would you get?

 

What would you get if you were replacing everything?

[elmuerte]

- an nVidea GTX970

- 3 USB 3 ports and 1 USB 2 port

[Brett E]

  On 1/7/2016 at 7:07 PM, Badfinger said:

What card would you get?

 

What would you get if you were replacing everything?

 

I'm not sure, probably ones from the 'Excellent' section of this site because I don't tend to keep up to date with this stuff:

 

  On 12/16/2015 at 12:44 AM, Architecture said:

http://www.logicalincrements.com/

[Badfinger]

Logical Increments is a cool as heck website that I have started showing people.

 

I have an i5 2500k and a GTX 970 with 8GB RAM and I have to say it's still a rad computer. From my recollection the i7 920 is just a touch behind the 2500k but I would bet your experience would be basically similar to mine. I had an interim GTX 750 Ti when my card burnt out about 18 months ago and that was a totally fine card but nothing special.

[Architecture]

It's been usurped by the 950, which again is a good card but nothing special.

 

I honestly wouldn't buy a card with less than 4GB of VRAM these days, and I'm still leery of the GTX 970's VRAM partitioning. I went with the MSi R9 390 because it was a better price for equal performance with 8GB of VRAM.

[Codicier]

been doing some more digging to try and inform my choice of HDD because it seems to be one of those components that no one actually does many reviews of.

 

managed to find some interesting stuff so i thought i'd throw it up here for anyone else who like me was a bit confused by the lack of info

 

1stly there's this blog post by a cloud backup company about the failure rates of the drives they use its interesting to see that some models seem to have weird anomalies

 

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive-q4-2014/  &  https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

 

also managed to find a site which just seems to review the various kinds of storage

 

http://www.storagereview.com/best_drives

 

both sites are looking at a higher end products than i was initially thinking but its interesting to see brands i didn't even think of like Hitachi doing so well (although now their HD business has been sold off partly).

 

think now  i might consider making the jump to a WD black as a long term investment

[Architecture]

The only thing to shy away from is Seagate and WD Green drives. Everything else and you're pretty much golden.

 

Currently posting from a resuscitated laptop. I have had this old AMD single-core 2.2GHz Toshiba Satellite that's been sitting around for about five years now. In fact, when I built my desktop, I recycled this machine's Win7 key.

 

Anyway, it had been fucked up for some time--some weird corruption of Windows. I could log in to Win7 but the desktop never appeared, just a black screen and my mouse cursor. CTRL+SHIFT+ESC would manage to open up task manager, but something was clearly damaged. Anyway, with the help of my manager, we got the system to perform a clean install of Win7 and when I got the sucker home, I did a clean install of Win10.

 

I put in 8GB of RAM (up from 2GB) and will probably drop a Samsung SSD in the machine in a month or two. Should be perfect as a slightly-oversized netbook with a nice screen.

[Brett E]

  On 1/7/2016 at 9:49 PM, Badfinger said:

Logical Increments is a cool as heck website that I have started showing people.

 

I have an i5 2500k and a GTX 970 with 8GB RAM and I have to say it's still a rad computer. From my recollection the i7 920 is just a touch behind the 2500k but I would bet your experience would be basically similar to mine. I had an interim GTX 750 Ti when my card burnt out about 18 months ago and that was a totally fine card but nothing special.

 

According to CPUbenchmarks.net the i7 920 is about 5000 something number and the i5 2500k is about 6000 something number so yours is a whole 20% better

 

I was ok with waiting for Fallout 4 but with X-Com and Tomb Raider coming out I may have to upgrade a bit sooner, I'm thinking a new card this month and a new CPU (and thus new motherboard) next month. I'm leaning towards the R9 390 and probably a high end i5.

[Dewar]

  On 1/9/2016 at 5:31 AM, Architecture said:

The only thing to shy away from is Seagate and WD Green drives. Everything else and you're pretty much golden.

 

Currently posting from a resuscitated laptop. I have had this old AMD single-core 2.2GHz Toshiba Satellite that's been sitting around for about five years now. In fact, when I built my desktop, I recycled this machine's Win7 key.

 

Anyway, it had been fucked up for some time--some weird corruption of Windows. I could log in to Win7 but the desktop never appeared, just a black screen and my mouse cursor. CTRL+SHIFT+ESC would manage to open up task manager, but something was clearly damaged. Anyway, with the help of my manager, we got the system to perform a clean install of Win7 and when I got the sucker home, I did a clean install of Win10.

 

I put in 8GB of RAM (up from 2GB) and will probably drop a Samsung SSD in the machine in a month or two. Should be perfect as a slightly-oversized netbook with a nice screen.

 

If this ever happens to you again, bring up task manager, application tab, New task button, type in Explorer, and hit OK. That should at least get you to your desktop. Most likely there was something setup to run every time the computer starts that was broken in some way. MSconfig can you help you track that sort of thing down.

[graddy]

Anyone else having trouble with the steam controller playing nice while also having an Xbox 360 controller linked? There doesnt seem to be a good way to choose which I want to use and more often than not it seems the steam controller will take precedence.

I've had a little luck closing and reopening steam then not pairing the steam controller at all, but this is annoying if I have to do it every time.

I also don't like how you pretty much have to use big picture. The right pad is great for simple scrolling around, I don't need a big simple console interface!

[Brett E]

I just got a steam controller and I wasn't too keen on using big picture but I realised you can set it to use specific screens which is real helpful for me as I have my PC near my TV but still want to use it as a PC on my monitor, so I just hit the steam button on the controller when I want to play games and all games I launch through steam will default to the TV. It doesn't sound like a big deal but I found positioning windows perfectly on the TV a pain.

[graddy]

Please explain to me how to do this. I've looked around and had no luck

[Brett E]

In big picture mode, got to settings > display > resolution > target monitor.

[Spenny]

I just need to throw a general request for help out there. My girlfriend needs a new video card to boost up Maya's performance. Maya's website contains a very short list of what are real top end cards that they say will work for sure, and they are all very high end. I'm hoping to get a better idea of what level of card I need to get Maya running buttery, so if you have any experience on the matter I'd be happy to hear it.

[jdawgitup]

  On 1/16/2016 at 6:15 PM, Spenny said:

I just need to throw a general request for help out there. My girlfriend needs a new video card to boost up Maya's performance. Maya's website contains a very short list of what are real top end cards that they say will work for sure, and they are all very high end. I'm hoping to get a better idea of what level of card I need to get Maya running buttery, so if you have any experience on the matter I'd be happy to hear it.

 

Autodesk previously only recommended professional cards for use with Maya, but they've become much more friendly toward consumer/gaming cards in the past few years (especially with the new viewport and DX11 support). I expect this trend will continue given how much they're investing in the Stingray engine and inter-op with Maya and Max.

 

With that in mind, I don't think it's worth the money to purchase a Quadro or FirePro. For that matter, I don't recommend any AMD cards whatsoever. We have to use them at work and they're very capable at running the game engine, but every year it seems like we run into driver issues with apps like Maya. For that reason, I'd stick with a GeForce card.

 

What kind of work is your girlfriend doing? Lots of high-res modeling? Animation? Any GPU rendering with stuff like Octane or V-Ray RT that would require tons of CUDA cores and memory on the card? Maya is a tricky beast in that throwing hardware at the problem won't necessarily improve performance. For example, slow animation playback can be the result of Maya's poor multi-threading for rig evaluation, or because the environment geometry needs to be baked into an Alembic cache. So many variables :/

 

That said, I'm running a 660 Ti 3 GB at home and don't have any issues. If your budget allows for it, something like the GTX 970 is probably a good fit (especially if she plays games or needs to run UE4/Unity). I don't think spending any more money will have tangible effects in most people's Maya workflows.

[Spenny]

My girlfriend is finishing up an animation degree. There's a bit of everything. The renderer she uses is called Arnold. Thanks for your response, it definitely contextualizes the problem better.

[Dewar]

FYI, certificates on a Mac are strictly case sensitive, but Windows doesn't care so much.

 

You know, just in case you spend months trying to figure out a problem that ends up being a capital W

[Architecture]

  On 1/11/2016 at 5:05 PM, Dewar said:

If this ever happens to you again, bring up task manager, application tab, New task button, type in Explorer, and hit OK. That should at least get you to your desktop. Most likely there was something setup to run every time the computer starts that was broken in some way. MSconfig can you help you track that sort of thing down.

It ended up being--you'll never guess--a failing Seagate HDD in that laptop. With the SSD & 8GB of RAM, the machine actually manages Win10 pretty well.

[Patrick R]

So I guess my Windows license is going to expire soon? I've never dealt with this before, I've only ever had whatever version of Windows comes on my laptop until my laptop fails.

 

The problem is, it's not letting me "activate" Windows, whatever that means. This pop up comes every ten minutes

 

 

So click Go to PC Settings and it goes to 

 

 

But then when I click "activate Windows online" it just pinwheels and then stops. Nothing ever happens. Sometimes the "Your Windows license will expire soon" pop-up even happens in that part of the control panel.

 

What is any of this? I don't understand it. Is this just a sneaky way to get me to upgrade from Windows 8 to Windows 10?

[Dewar]

Hmm, this is the OS included with your laptop from the manufacturer?

On Windows 7, I'd recommend opening a command prompt and running "sfc /scannow"

[Patrick R]

  On 3/8/2016 at 8:05 AM, Dewar said:

Hmm, this is the OS included with your laptop from the manufacturer?

On Windows 7, I'd recommend opening a command prompt and running "sfc /scannow"

 

It is. It's Windows 8.

[Professor Video Games]

I don't know how successful this will be, but it might be worth getting in touch with the laptop manufacturer.