Random Tech Questions you want answered.

TheGameguru wrote:

Mesh network handoff is a combination of the wireless hardware and the device. It’s sometimes the devices fault.

This is a possibility. It's my s8 plus. The weird thing is if I restart wifi near one of the other nodes, it will connect to that node for a little while, but always ends up back on the base node eventually. And it always kicks down to 2.4. so it's hard to diagnose unless I try a different mesh

Unfortunately, there's a *lot* of stuff that goes into that phone's roaming algorithms... Of the three rules at the top of article, it strikes me that the second one will always favor the base station, since the other mesh nodes will have more latency. When the network is slower, the device will be reluctant to leave the node with the lowest latency, even if its overloaded. And if you have other S8 phones or similar working at the same time, it may be a magnet for them too.

Wow great find, Robear. I just have one Samsung device but I'll keep an eye on the other devices we have to see if they exhibit similar behavior.

My suggestion is to not worry as much about the phones as other devices, since their focus is not on performance but rather on reliability (it seems to me).

Robear wrote:

My suggestion is to not worry as much about the phones as other devices, since their focus is not on performance but rather on reliability (it seems to me).

My computer is located in a spot where the phone's bandwidth all but dies if it gets stuck on the base node. And since I'm working from home I spend most of my time there, so it is a bit frustrating, but yeah I won't lose too much sleep over it.

Kick the phone over to LTE backhaul instead?

Robear wrote:

Kick the phone over to LTE backhaul instead?

t mobile pays me 10 a month to keep my data usage under 2gb a month, and I'm a frugal b... Appreciate the tips though!

Unifi access points specifically have extra code to attempt to stop broadcasting to devices that don't roam properly specifically because 802.11r isn't implement well (or at all) in plenty of things. I've found their handoff to actually be pretty good.

During the lockdown, I refurbished an old Win 7 laptop from my mother in law, so that one of the kids in my wife's class could follow classes online. I was looking for a new purpose now that the school year is over, and thought of foldingathome.org.

My question: is this safe from a security standpoint? The laptop would be permanently connected through the wifi, be running Windows 7 to the last update before it went EOS. There is zero personal info on that laptop, it's pristine apart from Firefox and a teaching app, but I'm worried it might be an easy entry point for external attacks that scan the internet for vulnerabilities.

dejanzie wrote:

During the lockdown, I refurbished an old Win 7 laptop from my mother in law, so that one of the kids in my wife's class could follow classes online. I was looking for a new purpose now that the school year is over, and thought of foldingathome.org.

My question: is this safe from a security standpoint? The laptop would be permanently connected through the wifi, be running Windows 7 to the last update before it went EOS. There is zero personal info on that laptop, it's pristine apart from Firefox and a teaching app, but I'm worried it might be an easy entry point for external attacks that scan the internet for vulnerabilities.

If the laptop is behind a router and has security software installed, those plus the lack of any personal info on it reduce risk. However, using a Linux variant that's kept up to date would be much safer over time.

If you're just talking about using it for folding, having it behind a router would be enough IMO. Nothing is going to be scanning it from outside your network. However, Linux would be far more flexible without compromising security.

Windows 7 isn't getting free security updates any more, right?

As far as I know, it is not. I would not let a Win 7 device on my network, at this point. Get a student copy of Win10 instead. (Unless of course it doesn't have the specs, in which case, Linux.)

As far as I know, the W10 Media Creation Tool will still upgrade W7 licenses to 10 at no cost. Officially this ended years ago, but as early as March it was still working without any hitches or guilt.

I am looking to "stream" my desktop to my laptop.
Essentially I want to use my laptop as a dumb terminal for my desktop.
Is there any software that does this aside from the likes of teamviewer? I want performance that is primarily for gaming. (my laptop has great battery life but playing even just diablo 3 will cut battery life to about 2.5 hours as opposed to 7-9.5 with youtube and browsing.)
I also want to be able to use some of the CG creation software I have accumulated on my desktop to be usable on my laptop.

I guess it seems like I want steamlink but for everything else outside of steam games.
GWJer powers activate!

side note: I bought this lapdesk for $30 and absolutely love it. it has a riser that helps my laptops screen be at a much more ergonomic viewing angle. It has foldable legs and a little side drawer. Plus it is big enough for a mouse but small enough to fit in between my lounge's arms.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...

fangblackbone wrote:

I am looking to "stream" my desktop to my laptop.
Essentially I want to use my laptop as a dumb terminal for my desktop.
Is there any software that does this aside from the likes of teamviewer? I want performance that is primarily for gaming. (my laptop has great battery life but playing even just diablo 3 will cut battery life to about 2.5 hours as opposed to 7-9.5 with youtube and browsing.)
I also want to be able to use some of the CG creation software I have accumulated on my desktop to be usable on my laptop.

I guess it seems like I want steamlink but for everything else outside of steam games.
GWJer powers activate!

side note: I bought this lapdesk for $30 and absolutely love it. it has a riser that helps my laptops screen be at a much more ergonomic viewing angle. It has foldable legs and a little side drawer. Plus it is big enough for a mouse but small enough to fit in between my lounge's arms.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...

For streaming games from one PC to another Moonlight and Rainway are the best these days. I use Moonlight myself. Moonlight requires a modern Nvidia card on the desktop. Both of these technically allow you to stream even if you aren't in your home however I've never used this feature as I'm not interested in it.

For desktop apps (not games) the official Microsoft Remote Desktop protocol is still the best IMHO using the official Remote Desktop Connection app built into Windows. It's a bit of a hassle to make this work if you don't have a Pro copy of Windows on the desktop but if you do this is really nice.

You can use gaming focused streaming for non-gaming use of your desktop if you want. I don't but it can work.

Thanks. I don't have Nvidia so I will look into Rainway for sure

fangblackbone wrote:

Thanks. I don't have Nvidia so I will look into Rainway for sure :)

I’ve heard good things about Parsec as a solution for both gaming and productivity software. Linus Tech Tips had a video about it recently:

Rezzy wrote:

As far as I know, the W10 Media Creation Tool will still upgrade W7 licenses to 10 at no cost. Officially this ended years ago, but as early as March it was still working without any hitches or guilt.

I'm going to try this route. Now that you mention it, I think I've got an old ArsTechnica article bookmarked somewhere that goes through the steps of upgrading to W10 after Microsoft "ended" it officially.

With the second COVID wave hitting Belgium, the laptop might be needed again in September for that same student. With a Windows on there and not Linux, I can just hand the laptop over again without having to reinstall the OS.

I have a coworker that upgraded her PC today because she thought that she damaged her motherboard when she upgraded her CPU. She didn't, I figured out the issue (her Channel A slots somehow shorted to a post that didn't have a screw in it, miraculously without causing any other issues), but she wanted to upgrade it anyway and I managed to score her old one.

Right now I'm on a Gigabyte AB450-Gaming motherboard with 2x8GB DDR4-3200. She was running an ASUS ROG Crosshair VI Hero with 4x8GB DDR4-3000, which she also gave me because she went to 4x16GB of DDR4-3600.

At some point I'll use the motherboard, probably when I eventually upgrade the CPU, but my question is would doubling my RAM be worth the drop in speed? I honestly don't think I get that close to maxing out my RAM now, so the speed seems to be the better choice at the moment at least. That, and I'd imagine the 3200 RAM would play nicer with my Ryzen 5 1600. But overall it feels like splitting hairs.

Ryzen 5 3600's are going for $150 now...

The drop in memory speed will be negligible compared to the ability to store more data in RAM. It's what, a 6% difference? You're not gonna notice it, is my bet.

I guess. My thought was that my system might not utilize the extra RAM though. I just ran a Division 2 benchmark, as that's pretty much the heaviest game resource-wise that I play, and that wasn't able to push my system over 13.4GB. It's just weird because in the past, I could tell when certain parts of my system were well past their prime, and so far the only part in this rig that got retired was my old GPU (was using a R9 270X when I built this one). The CPU and RAM still feel pretty solid in most respects, so it's hard to jump to something else that may or may not actually improve performance. Though, given that it's just the RAM, it'd be easy to switch between them and test them when I do get around to switching the motherboard.

I'll definitely upgrade the CPU at some point, I just haven't really gotten to the point where I need to yet. Even that benchmark was only averaging about 52% CPU utilization. I was thinking about holding out for the 4000 series CPUs and maybe jumping up to that tier once the prices come down, but the 3600 has certainly been tempting me lately.

There are a few games that will detect it and pre-load stuff. MSFS 2020 will probably do that. And you can use bigger maps in Cities: Skylines, too. But yeah, it's mostly insurance for me.

I went from a bigger ram speed difference (2133-3200) and barely noticed. I think I have said before, it saved me 5 seconds on a 4 minute Blender render.

You might be able to overclock that RAM a little bit, anyway. It might run fine at 3200, even 4-wide.

Test it thoroughly if you do this, however.

How about "random tech questions you didn't know you had"? I fell into a rabbit hole watching this YT channel - lots of interesting things I never knew I wanted to know.

Parsec works great! As LTT says it would be much better if it had 2FA but I love streaming WoW and Diablo 3 on my laptop. WoW is especially nice since I don't have to install ~120 GB on my tiny laptop SSD.

The battery gets drained still but a good 50-100% slower drain than actually running D3 locally. And I'd wager that if I got an ethernet adapter and used a wired connection, I bet it would get even better battery life.

I got a new PC after my old one stopped booting up. I'd like to easily "plug in" my old hard drives (one HDD and one SSD) grab all the files I want like my music library, documents, etc., copy them over and be done with the old drives. Is there a way to do this?

Tscott wrote:

I'd like to easily "plug in" my old hard drives (one HDD and one SSD) grab all the files I want like my music library, documents, etc., copy them over and be done with the old drives. Is there a way to do this?

A drive dock like this one should do the trick. Basically an external enclosure minus the enclosure itself.

Or if you have extra drive slots and connectors, you could install them right in the chassis.