What hardware are you using?

Discussion of hardware related issues
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tlmiller
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Re: What hardware are you using?

Post by tlmiller »

I like the USFF if you don't need anything beyond integrated graphics (which with some of the newer Ryzens actually isn't even that bad. SFF is kinda my least favorite as it's still rather restrictive in hardware expansion. But I'll use them. Not like I dislike them, just my least favorite of the 3 sizes.
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crosscourt
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Re: What hardware are you using?

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In the somewhat older hardware I like the SFF better with Dell as you8 can still upgrade some but with newer hardware for basic use the USFF is a sweetspot.
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crosscourt
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Re: What hardware are you using?

Post by crosscourt »

Donated a bunch of laptops so Im down to these,
Dell 7470
Dell 7370
2 Dell e6440
Dell e6420
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crosscourt
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Re: What hardware are you using?

Post by crosscourt »

Time to do some donating with my other Dell pcs. Ive got 3 7010 SFF and 4 USFF which arent being used.
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Re: What hardware are you using?

Post by crosscourt »

I was on an older HP SFF with a Pentium D 3.2ghz, 8gb ram and what a painful experience it was, even using Q4OS Centaurus to help improve performance. Online pages were slow and difficult to get them to render quickly. If ads showed up on a site it got even worse. Tried a lighter browser like Midori but the system simply wasnt able to handle even the simplest tasks without being really patient, waiting for content.
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tlmiller
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Re: What hardware are you using?

Post by tlmiller »

Yeah, the days of single core processors (even with hyperthreading, which I THINK the D's had, right?) being capable of even day to day usage is essentially over. Doubly since many of the earlier single cores can't even INSTALL modern browsers if you wanted to, as modern browsers require SSE2, and will soon extend that to requiring SSE3, which I don't BELIEVE any single core processors made (Core 2 solo maybe, actually) support SSE3.
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crosscourt
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Re: What hardware are you using?

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Pentium D in 2005 was a dual core processor(2 Pentium 4 Prescott cpus) but its design(sending data across the front side bus instead of the two cores communicating directly) didnt improve performance very much. Given software hadnt caught up either, many times older Pentium 4s with higher clocks outperformed the Pentium D. Yes Pentium D did have hyperthreading even though it wasnt worth much at that time. The Conroe processor based on Pentium M was really the first well designed dual core processor Intel came out with in 2006.
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crosscourt
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Re: What hardware are you using?

Post by crosscourt »

Enjoying the heck out of my Dell 7370/7470 laptops, with their nice design and excellent performance.
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wove
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Re: What hardware are you using?

Post by wove »

I picked up a Microsoft Surface a couple months back. I have not yet been able to find a Linux distro that supports the camera out of the box, and my attempts to sort out getting the cameras working have not been successful. So I took it with me on the tuning trip with Windows installed.

In a church in Nebraska the machine picked up that a Toshiba network printer was in range and then Windows went and downloaded and installed the Toshiba printer driver package. Part of me thought it was kind of "cool", but mostly I was just annoyed that a big package of driver software that I have no need to have was downloaded and installed as an "updated driver" without asking me if I actually needed it.
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Re: What hardware are you using?

Post by crosscourt »

Go to control panel, then network and internet, then click on network status and tasks. Click on change advanced sharing settings upper left then turn off network discovery which should solve the issue. Id also go into windows update and pause updates while youre traveling to prevent any issues.
What do you think of the Surface so far?

I tested a Surface with Ubuntu 20.04 and the touchscreen and wifi had some issues but not the camera. Using a newer kernel such as 5.10 or newer generally works better.
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