Random Tech Questions you want answered.

Portability is expensive, so I'm fond of a strong desktop and a cheapish laptop.... you can usually play slower games on those, and there are a million classics out there that can keep you happily occupied in a hotel room, or when you're stuck waiting for someone to show up.

Fast graphics and big compute take a lot of power. Desktops plug into the wall, so being able to devote several hundred watts to the thing is no big deal. (hell, a thousand watts is doable, although the cooling and noise issues get kind of ridiculous at that level.) Laptops generally want to run cool and last a long time on batteries. 45 watts total, for both CPU and graphics, is a fairly normal profile in that market.

You can get fairly close to desktop performance if you're willing to spend a lot of money, but then you've typically got a hot, noisy laptop with a short battery life. And, again, the durability just isn't there. Even a busted key can turn into an expensive repair.

They're getting harder to find, but a laptop with an Ethernet port can make a very nice remote gaming station for a strong desktop, so you can sit on the couch, plug in a wire, and actually play on the monster sitting upstairs. This can also be done over WiFi, but that can be chancier. The new 6E standard should make that VASTLY better, once it rolls out. (huge amounts of new bandwidth available on 6E.)

Definitely lots of options out there to fit each person’s circumstances these days.

Streaming from a desktop to a low power tablet or laptop using something like Moonlight is actually pretty good these days for a lot of games (anything not extremely latency sensitive) and you can even stream at 1440p and 120hz if you have the hardware and bandwidth available. I do my mobile around the house gaming this way. Been playing games while sitting on my new deck this summer. I’m also a heavy user of xCloud and Xbox in home streaming so I’m pretty used to this.

That being said there are things I just can’t play with added input latency and my main game Rocket League falls into that category. I used to play it on a laptop when I needed to be portable but they recently changed it to require a better video card to even hit 60fps (and uh 60fps sucks) so it no longer runs well on any laptops I have.

I did what any crazy person would do and I built a full desktop PC in a cabinet in a relatively central location in my house and ran cables through the walls from there to the two major places I game away from my desk (living room and bedroom). Each location has its own hidden monitor and peripherals that I can quickly pop out or hide away. I’m particular happy with my living room setup because everything is hidden in a wooden coffee table where I just open the lid on the side facing the couch and I’m ready to game. My bedroom setup isn’t quite as nice which is why I was asking on this thread about small monitors a few weeks ago. I’m still looking for a good roughly 15” 1080p gaming display.

If I didn’t already have all the parts to build another decent desktop it might have been cheaper and easier to just buy a new laptop and use that but it would have been a lot less fun.

Spoiler:

The reason I don’t game on the TVs in the living room and bedroom is that the only reason I’m ever gaming in those rooms in the first place is I’m hanging out with a family member who is using the TV already. Technically I did also run cabling from the cabinet computer to the 4k TV in my living room but I don’t think I’ve ever played on it.

Anybody have a simple lightweight go-to app that can crop videos on windows?

Aside: Bizarrely, windows 10 has a full built-in video editing suite that can do bloody anything except crop. Want to add a Minecraft house to your video, and have it rotate in full 3D? No problem!. Just don't ask to crop the output.

fenomas wrote:

Anybody have a simple lightweight go-to app that can crop videos on windows?

Aside: Bizarrely, windows 10 has a full built-in video editing suite that can do bloody anything except crop. Want to add a Minecraft house to your video, and have it rotate in full 3D? No problem!. Just don't ask to crop the output.

Haven't used it in a long time but I thought Handbrake was great when I used it for youtube videos I was doing.

For those who want more than a tease, here's how to get into that video editor. It's inside the photos app, so right-click and select "Edit with Photos" to start.

And, Fenomas, if you open the editor, then select "*Adjustments" at the top, look at the upper left of the top bar and you'll find "Crop and Rotate".

Baron Of Hell wrote:

Haven't used it in a long time but I thought Handbrake was great when I used it for youtube videos I was doing.

Hrm, I'll be damned. I have that installed already from a bunch of batch processing I did back in the day.

Sadly, now that I try it out it's a bit of a nightmare, as you have to specify both the video size and the crop amounts as pixel amounts, and if they don't match up precisely it just stretches everything, so effectively you need another program to measure in. Gah.....

Robear wrote:

And, Fenomas, if you open the editor, then select "*Adjustments" at the top, look at the upper left of the top bar and you'll find "Crop and Rotate". :-)

Did you try it? For me the crop/rotate controls are there for photos but are disabled for videos.

Ah, no, I just tried it for photos. Sorry.

Edit - I do see a workaround. Use Photos to Zoom in on the part of the video you want, then set the duration to as long as you can. Trim the beginning to get rid of the unzoomed part. Not sure if that's good enough for what you want, though.

Robear wrote:

Edit - I do see a workaround. Use Photos to Zoom in on the part of the video you want, then set the duration to as long as you can. Trim the beginning to get rid of the unzoomed part. Not sure if that's good enough for what you want, though.

Unless I'm missing something, that workaround is from a different app that's no longer part of windows. Are you seeing a way to do it in Photos?

I really need to actually try this stuff before posting, sigh. I'll let you know what I find.

Edit - According to the settings, Ctrl-mousewheel should always zoom.

It does not.

Hurm. Okay then, anyone have a go-to app for screen capturing, that supports sound and lets you specify a rectangle to capture?

Built-in capture via the Xbox app works well, but only supports capturing the entire window of a given program.

My pc started getting some bsod and crashing last night. I was playing Nier Automata and it crashed after a few minutes. I thought it was just the game, but then when the pc restarted it kept crashing after a few minutes even when just using the Internet.

Some of the error codes led me to look at the ram. I ran memtest86 this morning, and it reported some errors. I’ve got 4 sticks of 4GB each, so 16GB total. 2 of the sticks are from 5 years ago and 2 are from just a few months ago. They’re the same timings but different brands.

Is it best to run memtest on each stick individually to narrow down which one(s) have the errors? If so, does it matter which slot they’re in? Should I test all the slots individually too?

Any other advice?

I have rarely had any problems with my pc, so don’t have much experience troubleshooting hardware issues.

Thanks.

Yup one stick at a time look at the motherboard manual and plug the one stick into the first slot. Usually the one furthest from the CPU.

I would start with your oldest sticks first.

The good news is ram is pretty cheap, I would go with 2 sticks of ram next time and avoid using 4 unless you are running a threadripper cpu.

So, I’m still in the process of testing the ram sticks individually. But so far, I’ve tested both old sticks in all 4 slots, with no errors. And I’ve tested both new sticks in the first slot, with no errors.

Hypothetically, if there are no memtest errors with any stick individually, what would the next step be? There were initially errors when I ran memtest with all 4 sticks still seated.

I’m inclined to think it might be the psu. That’s easily the oldest part of the system. It’s from when I got the pc about 10 years ago. But then I got a new mobo/cpu/2x4gb ram around 5 years ago. I’ve had a couple cpu upgrades in there, and am currently on a used 1060. And I bought the other 2x4gb of ram a few months ago.

I haven’t used it since it kept shutting down last night, but am not sure what I would test next.

Might check your BIOS/UEFI settings for the RAM. If you have them clocked up you might try to lower the speed slightly. Also try running your system with just the newer memory for a few days. If all is good you might just pick up a new set of the exact same memory, but it could be an issue with your RAM ports and not the RAM itself. Try using the sticks with the new pair in the first set of slots and the old ones in the second slots and then switch them if you have issues. If stuff works fine with just two sticks in slots A1 and A2 (or however your motherboard names them) but not with RAM in all 4 slots you may need to just run two sticks or RMA that motherboard if it is still under warranty.

Gaald wrote:

The good news is ram is pretty cheap

I'm doing 32GB in my upcoming build now that DRAM prices have cratered compared to what they were a couple of years ago. Honestly I'm almost tempted to put 64GB of RAM in, but I just don't think the extra capacity would ever get touched.

By the time I could make use of 64GB, we'll be on to DDR5.

Given the relatively low cost (and on-going utility) of a decent power supply, maybe replace that and fire up the four stick ram test again?

Yeah, I’m kind of inclined to replace the psu regardless. Just given it’s age and for peace of mind.

None of my ram had any errors in single stick tests. I’ll probably try running the pc with just the newer ram next, see if everything’s stable. Would really like to know what’s going on, as everything had been fine since I bought the new ram like 5 months ago. Until a couple nights ago.

Thanks for the tips on RAM prices. The same sticks I bought at the beginning of the pandemic are now $15 cheaper. So I bought another pair to bump my PC to 32GB when they arrive Thursday

A 10 year old PSU is certainly nearing the end of it's life, or even well past it. Certainly worth replacing at this point. It could very well be the issue. Bad power can lead to many other weird issues cropping up and you end up chasing your tail trying to figure out what the problem is.

10-year-old PSUs can be fine, but they won't put out as much power as they did initially. IIRC, they'll typically be down 10 to 15% after that long, so if they weren't overkill to begin with, they might be too weak to do the job now.

A lot depends on how well they were designed, and the quality of the components used. Those old PC Power and Cooling supplies, 25 years later, are probably still mostly just fine, albeit weaker than they were. A Rosewill cheapie, on the other hand, would be an excellent idea to replace after five years, never mind ten. (even better: don't buy them to begin with. They're not bad for cheapies, but they are cheap.)

Aren’t new quality power supplies still massively overpriced right now?

There were no errors on any of my memtest scans, except that very first one right after all the crashes, with all 4 ram sticks still in. I tested each stick individually in all 4 slots, and in pairs, and all 4 together (and switching their channels). No errors.

Right now I'm on that pc with just the 2 sticks of the newer ram, running some scans on the hard drive. If everything seems up to date and stable, I'll probably pop the rest of the ram in and see if I get any more errors.

As far as the psu, it's currently a Corsair TX650, which again, is original to the computer from ~10 years ago. The rest of my build is an Asus H97+ mobo, the 16gb of ram, an i5 4690 cpu, GTX 1060 6gb, SSD, and HDD.

I need to do some research, but really have no idea what to look for in a psu. Or if prices are still super high. I guess my main thing is, would I need to worry about a new psu having all the connections I need for my current setup? Or would I be covered connection-wise by most of the major brands?

There's always the possibility that a couple of the sticks just weren't making great contact with the slots. We have that happen from time to time with the servers we lease to customers. We'll do the full install, send them to the customer, and they'll say they end up on a boot loop. We get them back, reseat the RAM, and it works fine.

Yeah, if you appear to have fixed the problem, I wouldn't spend any more money until you know for sure you still have it.

The Corsair TX line was generally solid back then (dunno about now, their supplies can vary in quality), and a 650 should have more than enough reserve to still be working fine. It may be down to ~575 watts or so, but that's still a great plenty for a 4690 and a 1060.

If the problem crops back up, I'd suggest first pulling out the old sticks and running with only the new ones for awhile. If you see it happen again, then swap to the old ones instead. If you still see the crashes, that would be when to think about replacing things.

Quick question for the smart folks who hang round in these parts:

I have this Lenovo Legion laptop. It's about 2 years old at this point. The problem that I have with it (well, one of the problems, that thing is a PoS) is that sometimes, if I leave it on its own and go back to it, the screen just won't turn on. I can hear the fans, and the keyboard lights up, but the screen stays black. This also applies to the external monitor hooked up to it. I did a bit of Googling, and most of what I found seems to indicate that it's related to the graphics card/motherboard and that it needs to be replaced.

Can anyone think of another possibility?

Are you closing the lid, or are you just letting it go to sleep? If you're closing the lid it could be a faulty sensor not picking up that the laptop is open, and if you aren't, it could be the OS expecting a response from the sensor and not doing anything until it gets it.

I am not closing the lid. Next time it happens, I'll try closing and reopening.

Have your tried removing and reinstalling driver related to the graphics card and monitor? Also I have seen weird bugs with touchscreens (don't know if that is one or not) sometime where you have to touch them in order to wake them up (i.e. moving the mouse or pressing a key won't wake them up).

Hey so me and the GF are a bit concerned that we might have been hacked. While I was sleeping my account apparently face timed her.... I checked my phone and iPad and there was no evidence of me doing so....

I checked my devices that are signed into apple and nothing there as well. No email history of someone signing in with another device.

You should at least change the password on your Apple account ASAP. And then enable two-factor authentication, if it's not currently enabled.

I just checked Apple ID's website (with my own account), and did not see log of logins or attempted logins. You can, however, look at all the devices on which your Apple account has been used and check if there's anything unusual (and remove any device that you don't recognize). You can also do this on iCloud.com.