Hoo boy, this is bad

[Blackhawk]

Actually, I get very few game crashes. I keep a clean system, and I know what changes I make and what they do. I've spent enough years as the gaming poor to have had periods where I was so far behind the hardware curve that I was only able to stay in the game through extensive tinkering and optimizing. In fact, some of the suggestions you've made over the years that I've spoken up about are things that I already do. I just see a big difference between people who have the understanding (not me) or are willing to do the research and make notes for their future selves (that's me) and normal users.

But everyone gets issues from time to time, and when they happen, that's when non-standard alterations to one's system become a suspect. And if you don't either have the background or the research and notes, that can be a problem. Which is why I say that for the average gamer (or as general advice), the foolproof, standard solution remains the safest.

When I do make outside-the-norm suggestions, I make sure to warn people to do the research to understand what they're tinkering with and what it means, and that not doing so could cause them issues.

And as a side note, before I posted about telemetry to begin with, I did some digging into the information that people who actually do packet analysis found out about Nvidia. There isn't much there that isn't in a Steam hardware survey, plus some info on the settings you use for games and crash logs. I'm fine with that.

[RunningMn9]

Maybe, but I didn't mention any specific issues, let along 'fret' over them.

Oddly enough, I’ve quite literally never run into any of the issues that he frets about that has caused him to do whatever dance he’s doing for all these many years.

[Kasey Chang]

Guys?

[Blackhawk]

Guys?

Discussion forums are good places for discussing. Besides, I don't think the two of us disagree on some things as much as it seems we do (we just disagree on implementation and degree.) After all it, was a discussion, not dis cussin'.

[Rumpy]

I've spent enough years as the gaming poor to have had periods where I was so far behind the hardware curve that I was only able to stay in the game through extensive tinkering and optimizing.

I've done much of the same over the years. In fact, when it came time to playing Mass Effect for the first time, I really wanted to play it, but I had a sluggish as hell time with it, and just to get it running properly, I had to go in and play with the config files and disable certain graphical filters that weren't accessable via in-game settings.

[Zaxxon]

Glad your system is up and running again, Kraken.

I'll piggyback on this thread to tell a short story. We were out of town the first half of this month. My PC was turned off for the duration, probably the longest it's been off since I got it back in 2017. It's a CyberpowerPC build, GeForce 1060, awesome proc by 2017 standards, 32 GB RAM, NVMe SSD plus some spindle drives, mirrored.

I went to fire it up Sunday night last weekend, and I got a boot error--my main SSD was not detected. I re-seated the drive and it booted. But then over the next couple of days, Windows would just hang, initially every few hours and eventually every several minutes. The SSD would fail to detect around 50% of the time.

I re-seated it again, and blew out the case with compressed air, as well. It got a little better, but was still bad. I could spend more time on it, and maybe end up just replacing the NVMe SSD, but the bones of this machine are in need of replacement anyway (Spectre/Meltdown, for example, ain't ever getting fixed for this proc).

While contemplating what to replace with (another Cyberpower? Consult the OOverlords?), I started to wonder whether it was time for me to try out ye olde Mac Mini (blasphemy! Is he a witch!?). I've been following the ridiculous lead Apple has had in mobile processors lately, and the M-series is doing something somewhat similar on desktop (especially when measuring performance-per-watt, something I've begun caring about more lately as my PC has become one of my more offending devices from a power waste perspective). And my kids have friends deep in the Apple ecosystem, meaning there's a small amount of pressure to support kid accounts on iPads and the like, to allow for iMessage and Facetiming. Which is easier if a parent has any device in the Apple ecosystem. So I wanted to give it a try, both out of curiosity and to brush up my Mac knowledge (currently dated around 2001) as they are becoming more wanted in my work environment, as well.

I also game far less on my PC lately, having moved almost entirely to the Switch and mobile over the past few years. The games I do play via Steam are also available on Mac now. Microsoft annoyed me with their strict proc requirements for Win 11 (which of course does not support my Cyberpower system, forcing me to work around that and run a technically-unsupported system)--both personally and in my work environment. And various other small-but-annoying Windows issues have bothered me lately. In short, I wanted to see if the grass maybe actually could be a little greener on the other side.

So I started looking more seriously. I realized I could get $100 off plus a $100 gift card via the current education deal. And I realized my existing keyboard/mouse/monitors would work fine, with a couple of cheap adapters for 2 of the 3. So I bit, and went for the 10-core CPU/16-core GPU/16 GB unified mem/512 GB SSD M2 Pro mini.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, I shit you not: this machine is eye-opening. It's dead silent, doesn't get hot, and blows away the Geekbench scores of the old machine (which doesn't suprirse me, given that 7+ years have passed). No Man's Sky runs flawlessly on High settings. All 4 members of my family can be signed in at once, and nothing stutters, ever. The thing uses a small fraction of the power that the old towering beast consumed. Unified memory is slick.

It goes to sleep when it should, and wakes instantly. Every time. Office runs and is about feature-equal to the Windows version, only it runs better. OneDrive works fine, as does its files-on-demand functionality.

Still getting used to macOS Ventura, and to the macOS keyboard shortcut world, but so far it's competent and I've yet to find any show-stoppers. I've still got 10 days left in my return window, but I think I might (gasp) stick with it.

If anyone needs me, I'll be over in the OO Mac users corner, by myself.

[Blackhawk]

I still remember putting in hundreds of hours in Morrowind on a badly dated system that rarely exceeded 20FPS, and was usually in the high teens. The amount of tweaking I had to do with every component - the drivers, the operating system, the game, etc - to get that 20 FPS was insane.

You'd be surprised how many people find decades-old Windows tweak guides written for XP and try to follow them on Windows 10 or 11, adjusting system settings that now work completely differently, or adjusting things for problems that were fixed two Windows versions ago, all resulting in instability and reduced performance. You still find people who will tell you not to use a desktop wallpaper because of the extra RAM it uses, advice that hasn't been relevant since RAM was measured in megabytes.

Other frequently seen out-of-date or out-of-context tweaks I still see include swap file settings for platter drives under old Windows versions (static size to prevent fragmentation, putting it on a separate drive from your OS), and fiddling with CPU parking.

[Kraken]

Glad your system is up and running again, Kraken.

I haven't actually seen it up and running myself yet. Hopefully that happens tomorrow. Then we'll see how it behaves when it comes home.

[RunningMn9]

If anyone needs me, I'll be over in the OO Mac users corner, by myself.

You are not alone brother!

Back in Dec 2021 I bought my daughter a MacBook Air (M1) for XMas because she’s a film student and has to do lots of video stuff. But I knew that I would be jealous of her MacOSness, so I bought an M1 Mac Mini.

My reaction was similar to yours. I have a lot of Java development that I had been doing on my Alienware laptop (which was their most expensive laptop in 2018). One of the projects I was working on runs a few hundred unit tests when it builds. They take about 45 seconds to run.

When I got the Mac Mini, I got the dev environment up and running and built everything. It ran the same set of tests. Instead of taking about 45 seconds, it completed the tests in less than 2 seconds. It ran so quickly that I thought it was broken and not doing anything.

Last year I was getting really annoyed that I had to sit at my desk to develop so I bought an M2 MacBook Air. It absolutely blazes.

[Blackhawk]

Back when I was a Computer Lab Technician in 93-95 (which was really just a fancy sounding name for the guy who sits in the university computer room and tells people how to use a word processor), I was the Mac guy. I was the one that everyone went to with Mac problems, and when it was slow and I'd wander into the 'lab' to fiddle around, it was always on a mac.

When I bought (well, RTO'd - ugh) my first computer in '98, I chose a PC only because the games I wanted to play were only available on PC. If it weren't for that, I'd have probably gone looking for a Mac.

[Zaxxon]

I'm not alone!

[coopasonic]

If anyone needs me, I'll be over in the OO Mac users corner, by myself.

You are not alone brother!

I am typing this on a 16 inch M1 MacBook Pro. It comes in handy for work which is probably why work lent it to me. I know approximately nothing about Macs though, so I'd only call myself a user in the derogatory sense.

[hitbyambulance]

So I started looking more seriously. I realized I could get $100 off plus a $100 gift card via the current education deal. And I realized my existing keyboard/mouse/monitors would work fine, with a couple of cheap adapters for 2 of the 3. So I bit, and went for the 10-core CPU/16-core GPU/16 GB unified mem/512 GB SSD M2 Pro mini.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, I shit you not: this machine is eye-opening. It's dead silent, doesn't get hot, and blows away the Geekbench scores of the old machine (which doesn't suprirse me, given that 7+ years have passed). No Man's Sky runs flawlessly on High settings. All 4 members of my family can be signed in at once, and nothing stutters, ever. The thing uses a small fraction of the power that the old towering beast consumed. Unified memory is slick.

MacOS has Codeweavers' Crossover to run some Windows-only games/applications - it's not nearly as wide-ranging in compatibility as Proton on Linux is*, but you can also go to standard WiNE to fiddle around with settings. the problem is that Apple uses Metal as their graphics API instead of Vulkan, but for old/older games that's not an issue.

https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility

* "e.g. the magic that makes Steam Deck viable" - as everyone here now knows that the Deck is running Linux, not Windows, right"

[Punisher]

Posting this WAY TOO late but did you ever try discharging the PC?
Unplug from power then, while unplugged, turn the PC on and off a few times.
I think I've had that fix weird boot issues before.

[Carpet_pissr]

If it was an issue of driver cruft, I'd recommend using Display Driver Uninstaller to cleanly install a fresh driver set:

If you have not yet done so, try performing a CLEAN install of your graphics card drivers, by following the instructions detailed below by Tom's Hardware. This uses the Wagnard tools Display Driver Uninstaller to thoroughly cleanse prior rogue registry entries and incompletely uninstalled display driver cruft:

Also, if you use Nvidia hardware, you're typically better off using NVCleanstall to install Nvidia drivers sans unnecessary boat, as explained and demonstrated here:

Apologies if you mentioned this in a previous thread (to me!), but you recommend DDU for AMD, and the NVCleanInstall if you are on Nvidia? i.e. there is no AMD equivalent of NVCleanInstall?

Thanks

[Anonymous Bosch]

If it was an issue of driver cruft, I'd recommend using Display Driver Uninstaller to cleanly install a fresh driver set:

If you have not yet done so, try performing a CLEAN install of your graphics card drivers, by following the instructions detailed below by Tom's Hardware. This uses the Wagnard tools Display Driver Uninstaller to thoroughly cleanse prior rogue registry entries and incompletely uninstalled display driver cruft:

Also, if you use Nvidia hardware, you're typically better off using NVCleanstall to install Nvidia drivers sans unnecessary boat, as explained and demonstrated here:

Apologies if you mentioned this in a previous thread (to me!), but you recommend DDU for AMD, and the NVCleanInstall if you are on Nvidia? i.e. there is no AMD equivalent of NVCleanInstall?

Thanks

No problem.

Display Driver Uninstaller will work with any and all types of video card, and Radeon Software Slimmer is what works similarly to NVCleanstall for AMD display drivers.

But as I previously stated to allay Blackhawk's concerns over these tools, caveat emptor, proceed at your own risk, abandon hope all ye who enter, and may God have mercy upon your soul.

[Blackhawk]

But as I previously stated to allay Blackhawk's concerns over these tools, caveat emptor, proceed at your risk, abandon hope all ye who enter, and may God have mercy upon your soul.

And, FWIW, I do recommend DDU for anyone, at least periodically or after changing hardware.

[Kraken]

Machine is home and running fine. Still don't know what the fault was, but if it recurs the guy will take it back for another look-see. A video card fan isn't clattering anymore, but now something's ticking steadily every 5 seconds or so. Ticking is less obnoxious than clattering so that's a win; I'll get used to it.

[Jaymon]

Sorry I am so late to this. Based on the symptom you described.

Fans spin up, no beep sound for post, nothing on the screen.

Its definatly a power issue. Either power not getting to the motherboard, or the motherboard not using the power.

The fans, most of them, are connected to the PSU via different cables than the motherboard is. And the motherboard requires different power rails than the case fans, or the video card (and its fan).


The first troubleshooting step for me, would have been to unplug and reseat the cables from the power supply to the motherboard. Its possible they worked loose. if they were just not quite in right, the recent heat making the fans spin harder could have set up vibration that finally worked the cable loose enough to stop connecting.


Next step (which the tech did) strip the machine down to bare essentials to see what piece is not working. then add each piece back in on at a time until the machine stops working again.


its likely that as he was doing this process, he got all the plugs reseated properly. the Video driver, in my opinion, is a red fish and unrelated.

[The Meal]

Machine is home and running fine. Still don't know what the fault was, but if it recurs the guy will take it back for another look-see. A video card fan isn't clattering anymore, but now something's ticking steadily every 5 seconds or so. Ticking is less obnoxious than clattering so that's a win; I'll get used to it.

If the click...click...click is from a mechanical hard drive, BACK UP YOUR DATA ELSEWHERE ASAP! That's not a long-term viable storage device.

[Punisher]

Machine is home and running fine. Still don't know what the fault was, but if it recurs the guy will take it back for another look-see. A video card fan isn't clattering anymore, but now something's ticking steadily every 5 seconds or so. Ticking is less obnoxious than clattering so that's a win; I'll get used to it.

If the click...click...click is from a mechanical hard drive, BACK UP YOUR DATA ELSEWHERE ASAP! That's not a long-term viable storage device.

As someone with over 30 years of forgotten IT knowledge I at least remember this.

Also, it could be something as simple as a loose cable touching a fan. If you are comfortable with it, open the case and look. If you can't find it, turn the pc on while the case is open to try to narrow it down.

[Kraken]

Machine is home and running fine. Still don't know what the fault was, but if it recurs the guy will take it back for another look-see. A video card fan isn't clattering anymore, but now something's ticking steadily every 5 seconds or so. Ticking is less obnoxious than clattering so that's a win; I'll get used to it.

If the click...click...click is from a mechanical hard drive, BACK UP YOUR DATA ELSEWHERE ASAP! That's not a long-term viable storage device.

As someone with over 30 years of forgotten IT knowledge I at least remember this.

Also, it could be something as simple as a loose cable touching a fan. If you are comfortable with it, open the case and look. If you can't find it, turn the pc on while the case is open to try to narrow it down.

I'll 'ave a butcher's at it tomorrow. D: is a mechanical drive, but it doesn't get used much. I can replace it easily if that's the clicker.

[Punisher]

Just in case.
Don't remove or adjust any components while it's on.
You could safely move a loose wire but be very careful you don't accidentally nudge something else.

[Kraken]

The long-term clatter that I mentioned was caused by one of my video card fans brushing the network card immediately below it. It was short a millimeter or two of clearance. Those fans only ever spin when I power on/off my machine, and sometimes briefly if I'm gaming when my office is especially hot, so it was a very minor nuisance.

The ticking started because the tech reduced that clearance by another millimeter or two, and now the fan couldn't spin at all, but was determined to try.

After some wiggling and tightening I finally managed to create enough clearance for the fan to spin freely. No clicking, no clattering. My machine is now very very quiet and still running fine. Hopefully that's the end of it and this thread is closed.

[Punisher]

It might just be me, but that sounds like a bad tech.
If you hadn't check that could cause your video card to burn out early.

[Kraken]

I'd guess he tested it lying on its side. The fan only hung when the case was upright and gravity could make the card sag a little.

[Punisher]

Keep in mind that I literally lost most of my 30 plus years of IT skills so it may be clouding my judgment. But it still sounds iffy. They should have been able to see the fan sagging.
Can you just move the network card to another slot?
Why do you even need a separate network card in the 1st place?

[Blackhawk]

I'm not a tech, and the last thing I do after working on a machine is still to set it up, turn it on, grab a flashlight, and check all of the fans.

[Kraken]

Keep in mind that I literally lost most of my 30 plus years of IT skills so it may be clouding my judgment. But it still sounds iffy. They should have been able to see the fan sagging.
Can you just move the network card to another slot?
Why do you even need a separate network card in the 1st place?

Unclear if I could've moved it or not. I would've had to remove the video card to get a good look, and even then I'm kind of iffy on what can plug in where on the mobo. It wasn't simple.

I think "network card" is the right term. It's quite little, and the outside has two antennae and a blinky light. It must have been necessary when I ordered my build five years ago. The nice folks at eCollege were kind enough to tell me then that I didn't need the extra fan I ordered, so I'm sure they would've mentioned an unnecessary card if it were unnecessary.

Anyway, I was able to nudge the video card up and the network card down by a millimeter each and tighten them into place, so it's all good now.

I'm not a tech, and the last thing I do after working on a machine is still to set it up, turn it on, grab a flashlight, and check all of the fans.

You'd think.

[hitbyambulance]

I think "network card" is the right term. It's quite little, and the outside has two antennae and a blinky light. It must have been necessary when I ordered my build five years ago. The nice folks at eCollege were kind enough to tell me then that I didn't need the extra fan I ordered, so I'm sure they would've mentioned an unnecessary card if it were unnecessary.

that's the wireless network card. wired network is built into the motherboard.

[Kraken]

I think "network card" is the right term. It's quite little, and the outside has two antennae and a blinky light. It must have been necessary when I ordered my build five years ago. The nice folks at eCollege were kind enough to tell me then that I didn't need the extra fan I ordered, so I'm sure they would've mentioned an unnecessary card if it were unnecessary.

that's the wireless network card. wired network is built into the motherboard.

This is why I don't contribute much to this forum. I'm this guy.

[Punisher]

I think "network card" is the right term. It's quite little, and the outside has two antennae and a blinky light. It must have been necessary when I ordered my build five years ago. The nice folks at eCollege were kind enough to tell me then that I didn't need the extra fan I ordered, so I'm sure they would've mentioned an unnecessary card if it were unnecessary.

that's the wireless network card. wired network is built into the motherboard.

Yep. That makes more sense now. I think my last 2 motherboards both had wireless built into them so I haven't needed an extra card in a while.
If heat becomes an issue due to it's placement Kraken, you can have your tech look into swapping it for a USB based wifi adapter and removing the card.
I'm still not happy about the tech missing the fan issue as that could have caused your video card to fry in time if you hadn't checked ot.

[Blackhawk]

I think "network card" is the right term. It's quite little, and the outside has two antennae and a blinky light. It must have been necessary when I ordered my build five years ago. The nice folks at eCollege were kind enough to tell me then that I didn't need the extra fan I ordered, so I'm sure they would've mentioned an unnecessary card if it were unnecessary.

Just to be clear, are you connecting your PC to the internet wirelessly, or via a cable?

[Kraken]

I think "network card" is the right term. It's quite little, and the outside has two antennae and a blinky light. It must have been necessary when I ordered my build five years ago. The nice folks at eCollege were kind enough to tell me then that I didn't need the extra fan I ordered, so I'm sure they would've mentioned an unnecessary card if it were unnecessary.

Just to be clear, are you connecting your PC to the internet wirelessly, or via a cable?

Wireless

[Blackhawk]

Then, yeah, you probably need the card.