BitWrangler wrote on 2026-01-16, 01:44:

That's what they say with milkshake/pop/coffee/icecream sizes, the middle only exists to sell the large, because it's like 80-90% of the price for only half to 2/3 as much.

It works that much is undeniable.

Trashbytes wrote on 2026-01-15, 23:37:

And that Injection has since been proven to have been untested snake oil that quite possibly did more damage than the thing it was designed to prevent.

Sounds like AI to me, released into the market with no real testing and is currently causing more damage to society than it was designed for.

Absolutely.

And it does not differ a lot from the current AI disease.

Just as it has been 5 years ago, a certain "product" was not just available for those who decided they needed it based on their own risk analysis and requirements, it was violently deployed and you had to be willing to make sacrifices if it was a matter of principle to you to resist it.

Once again, creepy copilots and advanced spy things are forced upon the masses, which once again, it seems the majority gleefully accepts. Once again, sacrifices i.t.o. what you do for a living must most likely be made to avoid it completely, especially going forward.

I am so tired of all this corporate "nudging" going on.

st31276a wrote on 2026-01-16, 06:58:

it seems the majority gleefully accepts. Once again, sacrifices i.t.o. what you do for a living must most likely be made to avoid it completely, especially going forward.

I am so tired of all this corporate "nudging" going on.

I think the majority accept by default because it isn't something they feel close to or think about much, i'm sure we all pick up on someone's burning issues in other arenas and think 'why does that matter so much?', people just can't encompass everything in terms of the effects potential or actual. Life is a vast unread small print that has to be agreed to get to the next day. that, unfortunately, plays into those in powers advantage - whether a company, politician or whomever is trying to exercise influence over others. It seems to be the case whatever the economic, political, social model to some degree or other and the grass often looks less green on the other side - i.e. alternative large scale eco-social-whatever arrangements seem to just shift the nudging to someone else who is equally not you

meanwhile, RAM is expensive and i'm not buying it, that's it really

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-01-14, 03:42:

Yeah, that's why I asked. I can't think of a single system that could possibly support DDR5 and wouldn't be new enough to suppor […]
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rmay635703 wrote on 2026-01-14, 00:50:

When you look for examples it’s mostly business Intel systems with early ddr5 with a long lived socket type and the oldest cpu t […]
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Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-01-13, 19:44:

Which DDR5 hardware can't be upgraded to Windows 11?

When you look for examples it’s mostly business Intel systems with early ddr5 with a long lived socket type and the oldest cpu that technically works. I was trying to find what combo that could be and think it’s bs or a fringe case.

The other situation is if you re-use obsolete components in a newer board like a gpu. Which should be possible to work around anyway.

It would be interesting to see if anything actually does get blocked by vanilla 11.

Yeah, that's why I asked. I can't think of a single system that could possibly support DDR5 and wouldn't be new enough to support being updated to Windows 11.

The first production DDR5 was announced in October of 2020, so there weren't any platforms actually using it for a while after that. The first were Intel's 12th gen in 2021 and AMD's AM5 in 2022, neither of which could be used with processors from previous generations.

Assuming the board isn't missing some necessary TPM features, anything from Intel 8th Gen or Ryzen 2000 series and newer (2017-2018) should be supported, as well as some others, like the Ryzen 5 1600AF, which is a 2600 with lower clocks, or some of the 7th Gen chips that were used in Surface tablets (hmm...).

So really, only DDR3 and early DDR4 systems have much to be concerned about with regard to updating.

Anyway, I still haven't made the jump personally.

It wouldn’t be a consumer board, Remember that some of the Xeon CPUs were last gen continuing support into this gen but again I’m not familiar enough to know of any cross over situations and TPM flaws have been known to happen.

rmay635703 wrote on 2026-01-16, 16:42:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-01-14, 03:42:

Yeah, that's why I asked. I can't think of a single system that could possibly support DDR5 and wouldn't be new enough to suppor […]
Show full quote

rmay635703 wrote on 2026-01-14, 00:50:

When you look for examples it’s mostly business Intel systems with early ddr5 with a long lived socket type and the oldest cpu that technically works. I was trying to find what combo that could be and think it’s bs or a fringe case.

The other situation is if you re-use obsolete components in a newer board like a gpu. Which should be possible to work around anyway.

It would be interesting to see if anything actually does get blocked by vanilla 11.

Yeah, that's why I asked. I can't think of a single system that could possibly support DDR5 and wouldn't be new enough to support being updated to Windows 11.

The first production DDR5 was announced in October of 2020, so there weren't any platforms actually using it for a while after that. The first were Intel's 12th gen in 2021 and AMD's AM5 in 2022, neither of which could be used with processors from previous generations.

Assuming the board isn't missing some necessary TPM features, anything from Intel 8th Gen or Ryzen 2000 series and newer (2017-2018) should be supported, as well as some others, like the Ryzen 5 1600AF, which is a 2600 with lower clocks, or some of the 7th Gen chips that were used in Surface tablets (hmm...).

So really, only DDR3 and early DDR4 systems have much to be concerned about with regard to updating.

Anyway, I still haven't made the jump personally.

It wouldn’t be a consumer board, Remember that some of the Xeon CPUs were last gen continuing support into this gen but again I’m not familiar enough to know of any cross over situations and TPM flaws have been known to happen.

LGA1200 processors used DDR4, LGA1700 uses DDR4 or DDR5. LGA1700 processors are from 2021 at the earliest (2023 for Xeons). It isn't possible to have a DDR5 based system using a processor released before 2021, which is ~4 years after the oldest processors that are supported by Windows 11.

This current PC hardware debacle is a sheet show of epic magnitude, seriously messed up. I'm counting my blessings as I just happened to get quite lucky in my timing, upgraded my main desktop PC from AM4 to an AM5 7800X3D, finished building my AM4 storage server, and upgraded my laptop to a current model all from late 2023 - 2024, so all my current hardware is no more than a couple years old. I'll be able to ride this storm out and I'm certainly not paying an asinine, over inflated price for anything. The RAM kits I've bought the past couple years are all 400%-500% higher now, including DDR4. I bought my laptop (with 32GB RAM) late 2024 for about $1,300, and the current same model with updated specs is now well north of $3,000.

I read some stuff that said people are starting to trickle all the way down to DDR3 platforms now, which is both hilarious and depressing at the same time. I'm expecting to see all older hardware start to drift up in price on the reseller market, so our little "retro" hobby is going to take another hit it seems. If you've been contemplating a socket 1366 or 775 build for whatever reason, high powered XP or 7 gaming or whatever, I wouldn't wait.

But on the flip side, having been a hardware collector for years now, I have more than enough components and complete systems to carry me through comfortably until I die, and I generally prefer spending my time with the older games anyway, so there is a good amount of comfort in that. Honestly if things were to never return to normally affordable for most, well then I'll just stick with what I've got and call it good. I feel for those who were planning to upgrade lately or this year though, people who are running on quite older hardware, it's going to be a miserable couple of years I expect.

If it goes all the way down to 256MB DDR modules, I'm buying a Ferrari 🤣 got a shoebox full of the damn things.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-01-19, 15:56:

If it goes all the way down to 256MB DDR modules, I'm buying a Ferrari 🤣 got a shoebox full of the damn things.

Getting close

I wonder when Microsoft will suddenly change the Windows 11 upgrade requirements so that all these ancient DDR3 systems without TPM 2.0 will be "supported" again. Lots of companies benefited from MS pushing people to buy new machines, but if those companies are going to scale back or outright quit their operations in the consumer space (due to the hardware costs being too high for anyone to buy them), MS won't be profiting from all of those licenses or from whatever data brokering\advertising money they bring in from people using Windows 11.

Wouldn't surprise me if there was eventually a miraculous new "cheap" upgrade option for older PCs to run 11 without a clean install. Maybe $50 or so.

I think the situation will have to get a little bit more dire before that, but unless things change dramatically we're going to get to the point of retail stores selling 10 year old refurbished desktops and laptops on their shelves for the budget oriented customers, and they'll either have to be running an unsupported install of Windows 11, an outdated install of Windows 10 or some flavor of Linux.

It sounds ridiculous, but the PC market can only handle so much of these rapid increases before people go to into "survival" mode and just use whatever old used device they can get their hands on, supported or not, until this all blows over. And these companies (mainly Microsoft and shareholders) will not let people do this for free if there is a way to profit from it.

My full-on conspiracy theorist side says to expect this to happen some time in 2027 once the free Windows 10 extended updates have ended and a big portion of the "junk" computers have been "recycled" into warehouses where they will be refurbed (blasted with compressed air, OS installed, and put in box) and prepared to resell again with Windows 11 installed... and 4GB of DDR3.

Microsoft doesn't really care about that, because they are driving up the prices too. The bulk of their OS sales is OEM, not end customers.

The Serpent Rider wrote on Today, 05:35:

Microsoft doesn't really care about that, because they are driving up the prices too. The bulk of their OS sales is OEM, not end customers.

What are OEMs going to be selling when 8GB of RAM costs $300 or just flat out isn't available?

HP's stock price is down 40% from one year ago. Dell is just about even with one year ago but is down more than 30% since their peak in late October when the public started realizing how bad this shortage was going to be.

They will continue to tank until they can convince investors that they are going to "lead in AI" like all of the other companies that are doing well right now. And once\if they do that, they will probably work hard to decrease their reliance system sales, at least for a while. Remember, a huge percentage of customers (most decently sized businesses I would say) just replaced all of their computers to beat the big "end of support for Windows 10" date in... late October. Most of these computers will not need replaced for several years (until support contracts are up, at the earliest). So, in that time, Dell, HP, etc. will have to sustain themselves by selling whatever people can actually afford to buy when DRAM and storage prices are continuing to skyrocket... or switching gears to some kind of AI nonsense that ends up being profitable.

Microsoft is also down ~15% since their peak at exactly the same time as Dell's in late October, and they aren't even directly reliant on hardware availability for the most part. You'd think that their value (and the value of the OEMs) would have shot up once the big scary Windows 10 end of support date arrived *, in anticipation of a continued increase in sales to replace millions of unsupported computers, but none of them did. They are all moving in the opposite direction of the stock market in general.

I am not an expert on any of this, obviously, but these companies (unlike nvidia) don't just generate money. It has to come from somewhere, and if no one is interested in buying any of their products because they don't need them enough to pay 3x what they paid last year, the companies like Microsoft, Dell and HP who aren't increasing in value will have to do something different.

This isn't the GPU shortage with a bunch of complaining gamers. This is "I wonder if we can build office computers with just a big CPU cache and a mechanical hard drive, with nothing in between?" kind of stuff. 🤣

*It wouldn't have made as many headlines if they'd just told everyone how to enroll in the ESU program for free.

OEM will have just enough RAM and storage to promote Microsoft cloud services. Just as planned.

This is a pie-in-the-sky impossibility, but:

Wouldn't it be nice if this awful RAM situation would force coders to program less memory-hungry code, less bloat, and leaner programs in general? It won't happen, because the art of lean, mean programming has now been lost to almighty greed and the "Big Six" mindset. Instead of 100-mb "Hello, World!" bloated messes and 100-GB Windows installs, it'd be nice if we'd get back down to XP-level install footprints and speed again. I'm talking about a 1 GB OS (uncompressed) -- at the most -- and even then, XP could be pruned down to about 500 mb of disk space.

Memory footprints could be reduced so that an 8 GB system will fly and a 4GB one will perform very well.

Where does complicity end? The programmers of bloat and crappy non-optimized .DLL and abstraction-layer burdened code claim it's "not their problem". But, it is and it will be very soon if memory and storage can quintuple in a 3-4 month period. Like hyperinflation after WWI in Germany -- But worse, in a way, because of total worldwide effect in 2026.

The dominos are going to come tumbling down soon. This stuff affects people's lives (I mean "little people", not rapacious "Big Six" companies). But, it'll burst even for those paragons of greed, and a lot of blame will go around. No company will accept accountability or learn from this quagmire, though. As we've seen so many times before in similar situations. They won't improve or do better the next time, either.

The Serpent Rider wrote on Today, 08:12:

OEM will have just enough RAM and storage to promote Microsoft cloud services. Just as planned.

This. 100% this.
And Microsoft doesn't care. Their end game is Windows as a service anyway.
If they can somehow manage to "make it make sense" for people to locally use nothing more than a dumb terminal with just enough hardware to connect to their cloud servers.....they will have accomplished their endgame.

Jasin Natael wrote on Today, 16:00:

This. 100% this. And Microsoft doesn't care. Their end game is Windows as a service anyway. If they can somehow manage to "mak […]
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The Serpent Rider wrote on Today, 08:12:

OEM will have just enough RAM and storage to promote Microsoft cloud services. Just as planned.

This. 100% this.
And Microsoft doesn't care. Their end game is Windows as a service anyway.
If they can somehow manage to "make it make sense" for people to locally use nothing more than a dumb terminal with just enough hardware to connect to their cloud servers.....they will have accomplished their endgame.

Just saying... there are millions of currently unsupported computers now sitting around either in e-waste facilities or warehouses. They could easily fill that roll too with a flip of a switch from Microsoft.

Ozzuneoj wrote on Today, 16:07:

Jasin Natael wrote on Today, 16:00:

This. 100% this. And Microsoft doesn't care. Their end game is Windows as a service anyway. If they can somehow manage to "mak […]
Show full quote

The Serpent Rider wrote on Today, 08:12:

OEM will have just enough RAM and storage to promote Microsoft cloud services. Just as planned.

This. 100% this.
And Microsoft doesn't care. Their end game is Windows as a service anyway.
If they can somehow manage to "make it make sense" for people to locally use nothing more than a dumb terminal with just enough hardware to connect to their cloud servers.....they will have accomplished their endgame.

Just saying... there are millions of currently unsupported computers now sitting around either in e-waste facilities or warehouses. They could easily fill that roll too with a flip of a switch from Microsoft.

Absolutely. And I agree that should happen. Just in the company that I work for, both interoffice and those that we support, there is so much waste that gets "recycled". It's horrible to think about.
But it simply isn't going to happen I'm afraid.

Last time I checked there wasn't any max exodus over Microsoft forced online account for Windows 11. Any movement over Linux is still just "cute". Current crisis will move the needle, but not significantly.

The Serpent Rider wrote on Today, 18:29:

Any movement over Linux is still just "cute". Current crisis will move the needle, but not significantly.

Gaming focused Linux distros like Bazzite might change that.

Even now, big PC hardware YouTube channels like Gamers Nexus and others are showcasing those distros to their viewers. I hope it becomes more prominent after the GabeCube ships.

The Serpent Rider wrote on Today, 18:29:

Last time I checked there wasn't any max exodus over Microsoft forced online account for Windows 11. Any movement over Linux is still just "cute". Current crisis will move the needle, but not significantly.

A variety of entities are publicly pushing the need for a viable 2gb/2gb “consumer” configuration.

You won’t see any exodus until delayed replacement becomes significant enough numbers of equipment failures to cause a “haddrlayrdown” boss without a viable replacement.

.gov and mil customers are being affected by delays, in years past that would cause involuntary action. See if that holds true.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on Today, 18:56:

Gaming focused Linux distros like Bazzite might change that.

Even now, big PC hardware YouTube channels like Gamers Nexus and others are showcasing those distros to their viewers. I hope it becomes more prominent after the GabeCube ships.

I've just been sticking with general purpose base system Linux distros and my gaming performance has either been identical or superior to Windows 7.

Wine regressions still hit me extremely hard though.