Post here when you buy computer/tech stuff

[Dr. Zoidberg]

To my great annoyance, some dark stains have appeared out of nowhere on my old Dell monitor. Like the plastic is degrading or something. No idea if it can be fixed, and I don't know a good technician who can find it. So for now I decided to do a little upgrade and got this.



Samsung UR55, aka UR550, aka LU28R550UQLMZD. Or whatever. Anyway, this is pretty great: 28", 4K, IPS, HDR, Freesync. Only the stand kinda sucks, so I plan to get a VESA stand later. Sadly, quality monitors are stupid expensive here in Brazil, this one sells for a very stupid $400 (versus $250 in the US). But I got it for a somewhat less stupid $345 as it was a floor model.

That's a very cool monitor.

[ian]

I TRIED to buy myself an Asus ROG Ally. I saw it was in stock at JB about 10KM from me, so I went on my merry way.
Get there and they didn't have any. BAH!!! Now the closest store is showing as Geelong. I'm not driving to god damn Geelong to pay full price for a toy, if they took $100 off for petrol, and another $100 off for the million years it'll take me to get there I'd go for it!

BUT! I got myself a Motorola G53 5G. If the build quality is only 1 10th as good as my last phone, I will be very happy. even if this new one was more than twice the price, and I'll TRY take better care of it this time.

I've been using my current Motorola e7 for 2 years now, and aside from being the cheapest phone I've ever owned (even cheaper than my prepaid Nokia 3315 in highschool.) the cheapest phone I've ever had has proven absolutely indestructible over 2 years... I've dropped it from my pockets onto roads and footpaths more often than I can count, I've ran over it with my chair, I've stood on it, I've slept on it, I've sat on it and the screen is cracked and broken, the plastic on the back has all cracked around the sides, the buttons have fallen out and the battery has swelled to double size and pushing the rest of the case out and making the cracks on the side even worse and it's on its 3RD charging cable and once I threw my jacket into the dryer after being out in a rain shower and forgot my phone was in the pocket for a full 10 minutes... AND IT STILL FULLY WORKS!

Despite the swollen as fuck battery, it still holds a charge all day.
despite the big black spot along the bottom of the screen from the 19th drop the function buttons work perfectly.
despite the shattered top of the screen and the yellow spots in the corner where the screen is all cracked, the touch screen works perfectly.
The only thing I can't say about my Motorola e7 that I can about my Nokia 3315 is that the e7 hasn't fallen out of a moving train and survived. I won't go into how my Nokia 3315 fell out of a moving train further than the adventures of youth. but once I hopped off the train, went back to where it fell and found the phone, battery and back cover I put it back together and still had a working phone.

I think I'll take my E7 onto a special train trip and drop it out a window just to see if it's more indestructible than the king. The e7 was so cheap I honestly wouldn't have cared if it died in like a month or 2, the fact it lasted 2 years of my not giving a fuck about it told me I'd only be buying another Motorola.. Didn't even consider another brand of phone at all.

Only thing I don't like about my new G53 so far is the fingerprint reader is on the side on the power button. I liked my back mounted finger print reader right under the central camera.

[Dr. Zoidberg]

Guess what? I bought an ASUS ROG...

ASUS ROG Strix G513 (Ryzen 7 5800H, NVIDIA 3050 Ti, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD)

Laptop! Not the handheld.

I screwed up my other laptop, so needed another one. I wanted one with just a Ryzen APU, because besides Football Manager and some other smaller games, I won't be gaming on it that much, but there was nothing that good around the A$800 mark, so I got this one which is decent for the price.

[ian]

Old school X58 gear. I'll play with it for 20 minutes and get bored, but it came with a noctua D14. I've used D14s before, and if you're not worried about the sheer weight warping your board long term, they are still absolutely amazing coolers.

[melancholy]

An Amazon returns resell shop had a Retroid Pocket 3+ priced at $110. I decided to look at it and found that whoever returned it to Amazon retuned the 3 in the 3+ box. Look absolutely brand new, though, so I talked them down to $70 for it. Won’t be good enough to run GameCube sadly, but I figured it would at least make a nice portable Dreamcast for $70. And it was in GameCube purple, so that was a bonus.

[Skynet]

Gutted my gaming PC and added some bits...

• AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

• MSI MPG B650 EDGE WIFI

• G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000

• Corsair RM850x (2021) 850 W 80+ Gold

• Corsair iCUE H100i RGB ELITE

• Asus TUF Gaming TOP Radeon RX 6900 XT (I kept my case and GPU from my last build)

[Roofus]

Upgraded my Emby server. Added a 18TB drive bringing the total storage up to 50 TB. I also migrated it to Debian from Windows

[Stormwatch]

Built a new PC. Well, new-ish, some parts are used. But I think it's a very solid budget gaming rig.

• Xeon E5 2680V4
• 32GB RAM ECC
• RTX 2070 8GB
• 650W XPG PSU

All in all, it cost me about $375. (As I had case and SSD already.)

[Dr. Zoidberg]

Macbook Air 2017 8gb 128gb

eBay had a 22% refurb sale last week, so I grabbed that for a massive A$233. Not exactly a powerhouse, but still a good price. Looks like people don't care too much about Intel Macs anymore.

[Stormwatch]

Looks like people don't care too much about Intel Macs anymore.

Because macOS 14 may be the last version with any Intel support. In fact, from what I read, your machine is stuck on 12 (unless you do a little hacking.)

[Dr. Zoidberg]

Looks like people don't care too much about Intel Macs anymore.

Because macOS 14 may be the last version with any Intel support. In fact, from what I read, your machine is stuck on 12 (unless you do a little hacking.)

My one is on Monterey, which is fine. I'm mainly just going to use it for surfing/Youtube, and playing around with MacOS. It doesn't need to be the latest version.

[pixel]

Linux is always an option too, but that's a lot less fun than MacOS.



I've been scourging for any G3/G4-era hardware to relive 10.4 and OS 9. I think I'm having a mid-life crisis. Someone had a free Apple CRT Studio Display and G4 tower on FB Marketplace, but I was too slow and someone else scooped it up.

[pixel]

I also migrated it to Debian from Windows

Any tips? I'd like to do the same thing and run Docker on Linux.

[Roofus]

I also migrated it to Debian from Windows

Any tips? I'd like to do the same thing and run Docker on Linux.

Can't help you with Docker but I can tell you migrating several terabytes of media and rebuilding the library takes for-fucking-ever. Days. It's worth it for the stability though. Haven't had to reboot once since I got it set up

[pixel]

I also migrated it to Debian from Windows

Any tips? I'd like to do the same thing and run Docker on Linux.

Can't help you with Docker but I can tell you migrating several terabytes of media and rebuilding the library takes for-fucking-ever. Days. It's worth it for the stability though. Haven't had to reboot once since I got it set up

Good to know, I wondered about that. That'll be the hardest part for me, that or if I decide to use Unraid instead. I'll be so happy to be off Windows though, it gets worse with pop-ups and such even time I remote in.

[Skynet]

4TB m.2 drive

Believe it or not I still have some mech drives for just storage in this new PC build from a couple months ago. I'll finally get around to moving that crap onto my NAS and hopefully soon move to all m.2 drives in this. Right now it has a 256 for boot and the new 4TB, but it's still got some old sata SSDs as well

[ian]

Don't be ragging on mechanical drives!

Having a Random assortment of drives is fine, and nothing wrong with mech drives.

I've got NVME SSD's on my board and and PCIE adaptors.
(256GB boot, 512 game storage) SATA SSD's (2 1TB for More game storage) and SATA HDD's (2 5TB for media).
In the main desktop.

There's 2 8TB and 2 4TB HDD's in the NAS I haven't used for like a year+ now, it's essentially an off-site backup at this point in time. It has more media and games I'm not currently playing.

Hard drives aren't dead yet. I know I can dump them in a wardrobe and come back to them a decade later and they still 99.99% have data on them, whereas SSD's often die for no reason just sitting around. Stupid SSD's!

But if you aim to have 20+ 1-2TB drives just sitting around, for gods sake label and date them when you decommission them. Otherwise you'll end up in a living nightmare trying to find a specific one for a specific file that can't be obtained anywhere else in the world and you'll feel like such an idiot!
You will think to yourself, if only I'd put the date and the system that drive came from I would have been fine!

Aside from the 2 8TB's in the NAS, all my drives are like 6+ years old so I probably should think about replacing them... But I'm lazy and cheap, the data is mostly backed up (properly and sitting on old drives as well) and if there's a catastrophic failure, I can use an old drive till new ones are justified.

[Skynet]

Oh for sure, nothing wrong with them I agree. My NAS is all mechs, but when they're as loud as they are and they're right next to me in my gaming PC, I want to move away from them

[ian]

How loud are they, or how close is your head to them?

Most of the time I can't hear mine unless one is on the way out.

Using an 80GB from 2003 is noticeably loud as shit, but any new enough drive in combination with good mounts means in a somewhat decent case I can't even hear them over the sound of a case fan, which are also quiet enough.

[Skynet]

Right now one of my side panels is off because I'm too lazy to put i back on, so loud enough