I will take a guess that you won’t have any image lag issues whatsoever.

Pretty much all displays have imperceptible lag on actually displaying an image- a lot of consumer flat screen TV’s are terrible at it because of their controller being shite or intentionally lagging the image to do frame interpolation or some other kind of background processing. Older analog screens don’t do any of that, they get signal, display signal.

yeah most all of them are good to -30c easy, as with most electronics, just make sure it stays dry and let it sit inside to acclimate for a few hours before you turn it on.

when very cold rubber and wire insulation might crack if moved, but sitting stationary it’s fine.

I do have radio but I’m lazy and haven’t gone to get a retransmitter. I find the act of burning CD’s kinda fun anyway, and they sound better.

I burned an audio CD just last week. My old Chevy truck has some mid 2000’S radio swapped into it and it doesnt have bluetooth or aux (well, has aux but it’s buried in the back of the dash). So I burn a CD once in a while to pop in and enjoy.

RAMBUS was licensed technology that Intel didn’t make silicon for, only implemented support on their chips and northbridges. It died because it was awfully expensive the onerous licensing reduced adoption to almost nil so it never hit volume economy.

Those adapters supply 5v power from the USB port, but SATA adapters capable of running hard drives usually have an external 12v power brick, as most full size hard drives need 12v for the drive motor.

Now, that said, I think a lot of 2.5inch hard drives do use 5 volt only and might boot up fine from an SSD SATA adapter. It’s worth trying your existing adapter as is and seeing if it starts and recognizes the drive.

Barracuda is Seagate’s basic value line so makes sense everything is SMR. Especially since you’re shopping for 2.5" laptop drives.
The ironwolf drives are more enterprise focused so they’re noisier, might be why it’s cheaper. But they’re a good option all around. (Frankly day to day hard drive prices are random anyway…)

No they don’t typically come with any hardware to hook up, it’s assumed you plug it into your computer. However you can get USB to SATA adapters, with an external 12v power brick for mechanical drives, fairly cheap on amazon et al. I have one from U-Green that works fine and is also a USB hub and SD card reader. They’re great to have around just in case.

AMD has, as far as I understand, been outcompeting Nvidia on value for a good while.

And yet their market share doesn’t increase. Because Nvidia holds a stranglehold on both the software (CUDA, RTX support, frame gen, etc) AND sheer brand recognition- gamers always complain about Nvidia and want better AMD cards, but continue to line up in droves to buy Nvidia cards no matter what.

Nvidia knows they can do whatever the fuck they want right now.

AMD is a puppydog that follows Nvidia around on the open market with 10% or less market share. If Nvidia constricts supply and causes a massive price jump and shortages, AMD will just follow the pricing curve and we will still get no GPU’s.

AMD is also 100% reliant on TSMC and VRAM suppliers, the same exact supply pressures causing Nvidia to turn off the consumer tap will come for AMD too.

1. Mechanical hard drives are a one and done. When they fail that is it, do not pass go, do not collect $200. There is no repair. Replace the drive as fast as you can, because it may stop spinning up at any time with no warning. Once you have your data saved, bin it, don’t use it for anything else.
   If you are waiting on a new drive try to make a backup of critical irreplacable data on literally any media, USB sticks, DVDs, Google drive. Game installs not so much, but documents, pictures, videos, etc. A failing drive WILL leave you stranded at the worst time.

2. Ensure you are buying a CMR style hard drive. Basically there are two different methods of recording data on a magnetic platter. CMR is the traditional method and is fast but less dense (more $). SMR allows denser data and normal read speeds (good for media) but is extremely, extremely slow to write to, and will have bad performance for installed programs or general OS use. HDD manufacturers have sneakily replaced most of their lineups with SMR drives to increase profit margins (drive costs never dropped, big surprise) so you have to be careful which you buy as a general use drive. Any drive by Seagate or WD are going to be fine in this day and age. See which models are safe here:
   https://www.seagate.com/products/cmr-smr-list/
   https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/
   Buy more than you think, extra storage never hurt anyone. The price per gb drops precipitously between the 1tb to 6tb mark then levels off, so the best bang for buck drives typically are around 6-12tb these days.

3. Yes as long as your new drive is same or larger capacity you should be able to plug in both drives and directly clone from the old to the new. Any Linux distro or live boot environment should allow you to do this via the dd command- tons of tutorials on the Google.
   I do recommend doing this from outside your windows install as windows will often deny access to program files actively in use, and the only way to ensure theres no issues is boot from an external OS and copy the drive bit by bit.

Option two is not correct, option one is correct. This announcement is specifically for consumer gaming GPU’s only, it does not affect institutional datacenter customers.

This is Nvidia saying “thanks small fry, you were useful, but we’re leaving you behind now. Fight for the scraps.” Complete cartel behavior.

Also some of us are stuck with necessary stupid software that has no Linux releases and doesn’t run in proton/wine yet.

Screenshots might expose child porn viewers. Makes perfect sense.

A Minecraft server is the classic.

Don’t discount just putting together a basic webpage that can be accessed at home too- something he could put together in a basic HTML editor (drag and drop) and put his favorite things on or whatever he may be focusing on (cars, animals, space, you name it).

Yup. Close to lossless 480 will always look infinitely better than a poorly encoded 720/1080/4k. Compression blocks ruin images INSTANTLY.

Its why NTSC analog tv was always just Enough.

The only file format that pretty much 100% guarantees support on most media hardware is h.264 in MP4 containers. With some encoder tuning you can make them decently small without loss of fidelity; people will notice bad encoding more than they will a slight loss in pixels. I would focus on making a really high quality 720p copy of the shows ans batch encoding them with handbrake (or finding good encoded copies on the usual places)

I hate to say it, but prebuilts are the absolute best bang for your buck that you can get now. At least for another month or two until the shortages start impacting OEM inventories.

Right now you can get decent high end ish machines like this: https://www.costco.com/p/-/ibuypower-element-gaming-pc-desktop-amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d-nvidia-geforce-rtx-5070-12gb-windows-11-home-32gb-ram-2tb-ssd/4000384603?langId=-1 and like 35% of the total machine cost washes out to JUST the memory right now. You’ll need to replace the PSU and likely the water cooler for the long term, but the bones are relatively good.

There are many independent small indie games, many DRM free, for less than $20 on steam. What kind of games do you play if any?

1gb ram is crap. Hardware capabilities aside it’s just not enough to run anything usable for real hosting. Get an old office machine for 50-100 with 8gb or more of memory and it will do infinitely better.

They don’t really have to collaborate though. They’re proving right now that they can price out consumers by just buying all the hardware capacity up and letting the market take care of the little guys. Hardware manufacturers like Micron are obliging.