Shoplifting in the Marketplace of Ideas

September 17, 2023

She's ALIVE! Say Hello to Purah!

There is still a lot of work to do. The build went pretty well. The one issue I had were some bent pins in the header for the front panel USB3 connector. That really should have been sticking up out of the board (Along with the SATA connectors) because sticking straight out from the edge runs into the drive bay rack. I also had to dig out the extra cables from my power supply because the MB wanted a second 12v cable.

Even the Windows Install went well. I made sure I left the ethernet unplugged so it created a local account. Ran some updates, and along the way MSI ran a mass installer that only runs once (where does it come from?) that put in all the drivers and support programs. I only refused the third party apps.

I have not installed the graphics card yet, just using the built-in, simply because it works well enough for now.

First round of Windows updates took longer than the install!

Getting FireFox installed was a bit of a pain. I had saved a VERY out of date installer. (Ugh, version 48! it was SO ugly!). Trying to copy my profiles over from the other SSD didn't work until I found that it had AppData in all three folders.

Some of the really old shit still works. The Eudora installer worked, and so did the C S 2.

Samsung Magician said the SATA SSD had a read speed of 406 MB/sec. The M.2 drive reads at 7002 MB/sec. Although I guess some of the zippiness gets tempered by the bloat of the OS.

I even installed uTorrent without an issue, although I haven't migrated the data or hooked up D: yet. A security scan didn't complain about it, oddly enough, but I put an exception on the .exe anyway. It didn't handle the UI scaling very well, so that may take some fiddling.

So far it's very quiet. The fan on the cooler isn't quite a Noctua, but that's the only moving part. Since this board doesn't have a digital temperature display, and I haven't seen any software the colors the fan LEDs with temp info, I may just disable them and finally put the sound-insulated side back on this case. (Once I finish loading in the other drives.) And hey, I still have slots for two more M.2 drives....

Next task is getting WoWS loaded up and see how well that runs (considering it didn't run at all on the old system as it decayed) (I mean, it USED to run great, for years. I don't understand what went bad, but something did, and I could never find out and fix it. I guess I did finally take the "Just get a new computer!" advice....)

Now to see if I can watch you Tube without crashing. I will be VERY upset if I do.

Posted by: Mauser at 07:21 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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1 ...and there was much rejoicing! (in the first picture only...)

-j

Posted by: J Greely at September 18, 2023 04:36 AM (oJgNG)

2 Very peculiar choice of artist...

Oh yeah, YouTube test passed. I still need to connect the D and H drives. That might be complicated by the automatically added Recovery partition on the C drive that might be D.

Posted by: Mauser at September 18, 2023 06:45 PM (BzEjn)

3 I chose the bunnygirl, not the artist, whose obsessions I do not share. It's the classic "very well done but not something that toggles my switches".

-j

Posted by: J Greely at September 19, 2023 02:19 PM (oJgNG)

4 It is actually the DVD drive that slotted itself into position D, so that will be addressed soon enough.

I've set the monitor/TV to 1440p, and the UI to 100%, which works out to be pretty damned comfortable on a 52" TV.

YouTube passed watching a Jingles video at 1440p, a first for me.

In the process of installing all my Wargaming titles overnight tonight, this will show if I even need a video card or if the onboard graphics are capable of handling it. I mean, I can start by putting the 1070 back in, but I'm thinking next month something beefier is on the agenda.

Posted by: Mauser at September 19, 2023 06:57 PM (BzEjn)

5 WoWS gets me 71 FPS in the lowest graphics mode at 1440p. Which will do for now. It's more than double what my laptop was able to do at 1080p.

Posted by: Mauser at September 21, 2023 05:57 PM (BzEjn)

6 Feeling validated. The box in the hallway my computer case came in that's been sitting there for years has just yielded a cornucopia of hard drive screws and an extra SATA cable that I needed for this rebuild.

My case has a slot in the top that can accept bare drives. That's where my old SATA SSD (now known as F: was.) That I connected to the two SATA ports that apparently are run by the chipset on the MB. I decided to move that drive inside into one of the four drive bays (hence the need for the screws). After that, I attached it to #1 of the other four SATA ports that apparently are driven by the CPU instead of the chipset. The drive speed went from the previously reported 406 MB/sec to 563 MB/sec.

I put the D and H drives back in and hooked them up. uTorrent already had its preferences moved, so it started up with only one single file needing to be rechecked. H is causing me fits only because Windows decided to re-index it very aggressively. While I was gaming. The temp really shot up.

Moving the SSD from the slot to the drive rack meant I ended up pulling the two drives I was using for backup. (Leaving me with an empty slot still). That means I can use the slot for its intended purpose, temporary installation of drives for backups. I'll just have to get into the habit....

I found the setting to make the fan color reflect the CPU temperature. But frankly, the heatsink fan is telling me with noise. Even with 10% utilization, things are getting loud and hot. I may need to change the thermal paste. Supposedly it was pre-coated, but who knows. OTOH, installing a video card should take some of the load off too. But I'm wondering if I need to go back to water cooling to keep this silent.

Posted by: Mauser at September 23, 2023 10:08 PM (BzEjn)

7 I got rid of a lot of stuff before the cross-country move, but I still had the original shipping boxes for all the computer gear and large kitchen appliances, which protected them nicely, and they went into my huge basement when I unpacked. The boxes of screws and cables went into my office. The one thing I couldn't find was the rack-mount kit for the switch, and the vendor sent me another one for free.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at September 28, 2023 07:50 AM (oJgNG)

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Build Progress

Saturday was spent just making sure everything was backed up, and then some. I turned out to have more drives laying around than I thought so not only did I run the Macrium backups of my C and H drives (C being the SDD, and H being a legacy drive that has a ton of stuff on it), but I've been able to clone off C just for suspenders. And I am FINALLY cloning D, which is all my video, which I did not have a backup of....

Lesson learned, sometimes Macrium can leave that 100 meg system partition exposed, and it will get a drive letter assigned to it, which will make that clone unbootable. Few things seem smart enough to fix it. But the ACTUAL fix is to fire up Disk Management and remove the drive letter.

Ran into a couple of issues related to this machine being made before everyone was fully committed to UEFI, It's not really a problem that the C backup (2 TB SSD) went onto a 3 TB HDD, but it just wasted some unallocated space, but really, there was only about 500 gig on it anyway. I did have a 2 TB Seagate laying around, but the note on it says it's unreliable.

Maybe the old Motherboard knows the jig is up, because it's been behaving itself all day, no crashing. But then, I'm not doing anything really taxing like opening a browser window....

One of the drives laying around contained nothing but a clean Win 7 install. I'm not sure what the genesis of that was. It's getting the D backup on it. I have to remind myself I have a new computer to build, and I don't need to see if I can still make a clean Win 7 install work without the crashes.

The scratch drive I tried putting Windows 10 on though, that was almost a write-off. The failed install left it in a bad state. Half the time I could hook it up and the system wouldn't detect it was there. But it might also be a SATA cable going bad. (But that would be very new, since I wasn't having any issues with the drive it was normally connected to.) Trying to use the Win 7 install disk to repartition wasn't very helpful, see the UEFI note above. Even manually choosing the UEFI CD Rom reboot didn't always work. What finally DID work was going ahead and let it format the drive to 2TB, MBR, and then Drive Management came to the rescue. I deleted all the partitions and it gave me the option of making it GPT. Of course, once all that was dealt with, Macrium was used to overwrite the partitions anyway....

So, a lot of puttering around avoiding the main issues, I guess. But I learned my lesson when a SCSI drive failed on my old Mac and took most of my stuff with it. Copies, and copies of copies, before I commit to something I can't go back on.

Posted by: Mauser at 01:35 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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September 10, 2023

The naming of Computers

So my laptop is named Etna. My desktop is named Himawari. But Himawari is just about dead. I mean, when you're running the Windows 10 installer on to a formatted hard drive and you're getting the equivalent of bluescreens and other system service exceptions, something is clearly wrong with the hardware that isn't showing up on conventional tests.

Thus I've finally gotten out the crowbar to pry open my wallet. Himawari is going to get a Motherboard transplant with a new AMD 7900 cpu, a nice fast 2 TB M.2 SSD, and 64 Gig of DDR5 ram. Oddly, the sum of that is pretty close to the cost of Himawari's initial construction, if you wanna go WAY back and figure out when I posted that. I'm still too penny pinching to spring for a new video card yet. If I can just get a stable system that will run without blowing up unexpectedly when I scroll the mouse in a browser window, I'll be happy. If I can get World of Warships running on it so I don't have to run it on Etna (it surprised me that that worked!) I will be ecstatic.

I might even finally buy a proper desk.

Anyway, the point was to think of a new name. Himawari was named for the computer expert in some anime, Vividred IIRC. So who would be a good computer expert from a more current show?

Posted by: Mauser at 12:58 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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1 If you're making Himawari more powerful, isn't that just Vivid Yellow?

If you like Space Mercenary, Mimi might not be an expert, but she's a fast learner with massive... storage capacity. I gather there's a super-enhanced robot maid pilot arriving at some point, although perhaps Mei is too generic a name.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at September 11, 2023 04:38 PM (oJgNG)

2 Hmmm, a hot robot girl might be a good choice.... Although 2B is a terrible name.

I expect delivery on Monday, so there's time. I'd ask for other people's suggestions, but I think it's just you and occasionally Pete coming here.

Posted by: Mauser at September 12, 2023 06:32 PM (BzEjn)

3 Not recent, but Aiko from Magipoka?

Honestly, I can't think of many recent computer babes, and I just skimmed the season listing back to 2019. Hermit Mio from Edens Zero is a possibility. Monster-maker Miss Kuroitsu is more of a mad scientist than a computer expert, but very cute. Dungeon haremette Roxanne has no technical skills but great I/O ports. Quirky vampire Nazuna is at least a gamer.

Completely abandoning the computer-expert theme, if I were building a new machine right now, I might go with Meigo from Endro, Grea from Manaria Friends, Tanya the evil, Mamako or Medhi from two-hit-multi-target-mama, Funi-chan from Astra, or Tirana from Cop Craft.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at September 13, 2023 02:33 PM (oJgNG)

4 Ooh, what about Purah?

-j

Posted by: J Greely at September 13, 2023 02:49 PM (oJgNG)

5 Very interesting possibility! And my parts arrived early today.

Posted by: Mauser at September 13, 2023 05:39 PM (BzEjn)

6 Recent computer geekettes in anime?

Do It Yourself! has a computer geek named Miku Suride, nicknamed Purin. More of a 3D-printer geek than a computer geek, given the "vocational school" nature of the show.

Lycoris Recoil has a hacker loli named Kurumi. Her online avatar is a squirrel/chipmunk thing named Walnut.
Yurei Deco takes place in a Dennou-Coil-like augmented-reality city. The main character is a girl named Berry, but that isn't very anime-sounding.

If online-gamer geekettes count, Kaede or Risa (or any of the girls) from Bofuri could work. Or Runa the NEET gamer from that Lv999 Boyfriend thing.

Posted by: mikeski at September 14, 2023 10:05 PM (DgGvY)

7 I think I'm gonna go with Purah. In part because she's also got that white hair/tan skin thing going on....
Just running my backups now before I take the plunge and gut Himawari. Playing WoWS while it runs on my laptop Etna.

Posted by: Mauser at September 16, 2023 01:55 PM (BzEjn)

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September 08, 2023

So this is kinda fun...

For once, a guy gets Isekaied, but NOT into a middle-ages fantasy world, but into a Sci-Fi Galactic explorer game.
And yes, this is the title: Mezametara Saikyou Soubi to Uchuusen-mochi Datta no de, Ikkodate Mezashite Youhei Toshite Jiyuu ni Ikitai

Posted by: Mauser at 03:46 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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