Getting a high fibre diet in the SW Ontario regions now, might encourage me to move further into the sticks.
https://swiftruralbroadband.ca/

So I finally got around to testing out the hardware I'm accumulating to upgrade a cousin's computer to Win11. I scored an Asus B550M-A motherboard for free a few months back, the Ryzen 5 3500X was a reasonable deal at $75.00, I picked up 16 gigs of used DDR4 for $30.00 just before the prices went nuts, and I tested everything today and it all works fine. I'll have her buy an M.2 drive (I tested it with an old SSD) and she'll be all set.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2026-06-01, 03:45:

So I finally got around to testing out the hardware I'm accumulating to upgrade a cousin's computer to Win11. I scored an Asus B550M-A motherboard for free a few months back, the Ryzen 5 3500X was a reasonable deal at $75.00, I picked up 16 gigs of used DDR4 for $30.00 just before the prices went nuts, and I tested everything today and it all works fine. I'll have her buy an M.2 drive (I tested it with an old SSD) and she'll be all set.

that sounds good, slowly building up as and when rather than getting all at once, being patient for prices and finds

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-06-01, 02:39:

Getting a high fibre diet in the SW Ontario regions now, might encourage me to move further into the sticks.
https://swiftruralbroadband.ca/

I loved living miles out of town, surrounded by almond orchards, but man the internet access was grim. Dial up only, over very old phone lines to the max speed was only 26.4 k - there was never any need for a dial up modem faster than a 28.8 as that was faster than the best possible connection. I lived with that for years, then finally spent the money for satellite internet. That was expensive while still being slow, but it was better than dial up. Then came a wireless internet service that was initially very good, but then they oversold it (ugh, Netflix) and trees grew up and choked off the line of sight signal.

My mother didn't know how good she had it. She also lived in the countryside, but she was near where the phone service hub was located, and as a result she had the fastest dial up speeds I've ever seen. It would consistently connect at 48 k, and seemed more like DSL than dial up compared to what I was used to.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2026-06-01, 17:24:

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-06-01, 02:39:

Getting a high fibre diet in the SW Ontario regions now, might encourage me to move further into the sticks.
https://swiftruralbroadband.ca/

I loved living miles out of town, surrounded by almond orchards, but man the internet access was grim. Dial up only, over very old phone lines to the max speed was only 26.4 k - there was never any need for a dial up modem faster than a 28.8 as that was faster than the best possible connection. I lived with that for years, then finally spent the money for satellite internet. That was expensive while still being slow, but it was better than dial up. Then came a wireless internet service that was initially very good, but then they oversold it (ugh, Netflix) and trees grew up and choked off the line of sight signal.

My mother didn't know how good she had it. She also lived in the countryside, but she was near where the phone service hub was located, and as a result she had the fastest dial up speeds I've ever seen. It would consistently connect at 48 k, and seemed more like DSL than dial up compared to what I was used to.

This is how things were for me growing up as well. We lived in the woods outside of a small town ~100-150 miles from any decently sized city that anyone has ever heard of.

We had dial-up that would connect at 24.6k usually... but sometimes, on a good day, it would connect at 26.4k. I remember downloading most files at around 1KB-2KB per second, with the rare "fast" connections getting up to 3KB\sec. So, a 1MB download usually took anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes. Getright download manager and other things like it were absolutely required for anything that was more than a few MB in size because it was likely that the download would need to be paused and resumed later due to getting disconnected or having to disconnect the line to use the phone (we had two lines but one was being used frequently by another family member who needed it, so I had to steal the main telephone line to connect my PC to the internet in the evenings).

We dealt with this until ~2001-2002(?) when the local cable company finally provided broadband. The first cable internet package we had was, I believe, 768k down and 128k up. It was like traveling to another planet it felt so fast. Nothing was ever the same after that.

Still... having dial-up in our house was better than having to drive to a relative's house with a pile of floppy disks so we could download things, save them to disks and then bring them back home to find out if they worked or not.

gerry wrote on 2026-06-01, 16:51:

Repo Man11 wrote on 2026-06-01, 03:45:

So I finally got around to testing out the hardware I'm accumulating to upgrade a cousin's computer to Win11. I scored an Asus B550M-A motherboard for free a few months back, the Ryzen 5 3500X was a reasonable deal at $75.00, I picked up 16 gigs of used DDR4 for $30.00 just before the prices went nuts, and I tested everything today and it all works fine. I'll have her buy an M.2 drive (I tested it with an old SSD) and she'll be all set.

that sounds good, slowly building up as and when rather than getting all at once, being patient for prices and finds

She was in a bit of a panic a few months ago until I showed her that she could sign in to her Microsoft account and continue to get updates. But October will be here before you know it, so I have to get this done.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-06-01, 18:39:

Still... having dial-up in our house was better than having to drive to a relative's house with a pile of floppy disks so we could download things, save them to disks and then bring them back home to find out if they worked or not.

At the end of the COVID lockdowns, I did that to download a 75GB software installer for work. The I learned that downloading add-ons from within the program would fail because there was a fixed internal timer that would abort the download if it took too long.

On that note, my Internet is extra-shitty today. I'm getting 3Mbps.

I switched back to my older computer, and the WiFi problems I thought I fixed are back. I'll keep running it and see how much it affects room temperature. Last night, this room was hotter than the non-climate-controlled garage. Also, I see that the chipset is getting hotter (and the heatsink already felt about 10C hotter than the software temperature reading), so I'm going to move my case fan to the bottom front (it was originally in the top front fan mount, but I moved it to the back).

Then I was trying to help my dad set up his new phone after the battery bulged on the old one (you might see why I added a phone rant to my post on laptop disassembly in that other thread). He got talked into buying a new 25W charger, which sounds ridiculous for a phone, but my phone has a 68W charging mode with a proprietary Qualcomm quick charger (I obviously don't do that and just reused the charger from my old Samsung S7). It might actually be good that phones don't include chargers because they'd probably come with the most ridiculous battery-killer option instead of something sensible.

Today I've mainly done online shopping for parts for my retro build, mainly... I wish there was some thrift store for retro PC hardware around here in the UK, closest thing is CEX and they don't really do retro hardware unfortunately.
(okay, I did buy a CF card from there, although only a 32gb 60mb/s one. Should be plenty for XP or Vista at least, and if I need more I can just throw in a flash drive or a USB SSD since I'm getting a USB 3.0 PCI card too for this build in case I need the speed for testing it out with Linux. Still got to buy the fans, I'll probably cough up the money for Noctua's FLX fans, but otherwise... yeah)

Outside of that... I updated FreeTube so that viewing a channel's page works again, I guess that counts as a modern activity? Or swapping out Gboard for a FOSS keyboard on my phone, that's also a modern activity.

I found a nice NZXT H9 Flow Case with AIO at the thrift store for very cheap and am wondering if i should put my build into it or just sell it.

This is my current case. Which I liked for being very plain and not showing much of the internals.

And this is the H9 which is more flashy and more to showcase the guts.

I'm almost leaning towards this as the parts in the PC are very high end why not be able to look at them?

I ran a machine learning model and submitted a report on it for one of my classes.

For those curious, I went back to graduate school last year as part of a career change.

Bought two of these for usage with with my desktop and one of my proxmox machines to free up a pcie slot.
Currently in Proxmox it is running at 5G since the kernel (<7.2) doesn't support it at 10G but in Windows performance is pretty much the same as the 10gb pcie NIC.

Xikestor 10G Realtek RTL8159
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FZBN45S8?ref=ppx_ … _fed_asin_title

Expensive for what it is but at least datacenters don't need them. heh.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2026-04-21, 23:33:

My cousin brought me her sickly PC. Socket FM2, a pair of conventional hard drives, 16 gigs of DDR3, a GTX 650 Ti. Painfully slo […]
Show full quote

My cousin brought me her sickly PC. Socket FM2, a pair of conventional hard drives, 16 gigs of DDR3, a GTX 650 Ti. Painfully slow, and it would sometimes spontaneously reboot. I scrounged up a 240 gig SSD, unplugged the existing drives, removed the video card, and installed Win 10 to see how it did. With the A10 6800's graphics the computer was stable with a fresh install of 10. I began looking into upgrading it to Win 11, but there was a hitch. When installing 10 I used the optical drive, but it wouldn't boot to the optical drive when set to UEFI, but only when set to Legacy/UEFI; you cannot upgrade to Win 11 when set this way, the drive has to be formatted in GPT. So I had to reinstall Win 10, but it had to be from a USB drive since this motherboard wouldn't boot from an optical drive in UEFI mode.

I reinstalled Win 10, then upgraded to Win 11, and everything was working fine. I then plugged back in the two conventional drives. One had the old Win 10 installation on about a one terabyte partition, and the other drive was a one terabyte drive that wasn't accessible and needed to be formatted. I contacted my cousin and asked her if there had been any issues with this drive that she knew of, and it soon became clear that she had no idea her computer had two hard drives. She was only worried about files from her Desktop and My Documents on the main drive. I formatted the one terabyte drive, and it then seemed fine.

I ran CrystalDiskInfo and was surprised to see the the main drive that I had assumed was a one terabyte (since that's all that was visible in This PC) was actually a three terabyte drive! I was puzzled at why it had been set up this way, then I realized that they had used an optical drive to install Windows, it wouldn't boot from that drive in UEFI mode, and Legacy mode couldn't properly handle a drive this size. This also explained why she was complaining that the computer wouldn't boot if her two terabyte external drive was plugged in.

I saved all relevant files from this drive to the now formatted and healthy one terabyte drive, and finally had to use Rufus and put an ISO of Parted Magic on a USB drive and format the three terabyte drive to get all of the space. Both conventional drives were only mounted with screws on one side, so I fixed that as well.

When I finished everything was working well, and she now had almost four terabytes of internal storage. I had a PCIe HD7700 card so I put that in. It gave a significant performance boost over the CPU's graphics, and I gave it a test by installing Half-Life 2 and playing to about half way through Ravenholm. The only Windows 11 issue I encountered was that the PC shut itself down after being in sleep mode for a long time, so I changed it to Always On to avoid that. Barring some new Windows Update policy that won't allow updates on older machines I don't see any reason to not update older machines like this for people low on funds.

I was given a computer today that has an MSI Z87 board with a 4770K CPU and 16 gigs of DDR3, so it looks like the FM2 board (with SATA 3.0 and USB 2.0) can be removed and put in the ewaste bin!

With help of parprouted (and AI), I sorta managed to bridge wired and wireless network adapters on Linux Mint installation in a way that I can plug desktop PC to the laptop's ethernet port and the desktop PC ends up in the same subnet as if I plugged it directly to the modem's (with WiFi AP) switch.

Not technically equivalent of how Windows does it when bridging, I end up having to assign special IP to the wired adapter and an extra IP route must be added to be able to access gateway/modem web interface. Windows or its drivers apparently do some magic behind the scenes that make it more transparent, even though not exactly standard compliant. Apparently there's this 4-addr mode or WDS thingy that is the proper way to bridge wired-wireless, but isn't universally supported, but must be on both wireless ends for things to be able to work that way. But, assigning static IP to the desktop via DHCP by MAC address works. Via Linux's parprouted bridge, it doesn't.

This poor man's bridge I ended up on Linux doesn't seem to work reliably in general, sometimes you're stuck waiting for web pages to load. For some reason, just now, I couldn't ping the modem from the desktop until I pinged it from the laptop. I remember when the Linux driver for RTL8723BE wireless adapter was new, you had to add some parameters to disable power management, otherwise kernel panics would occur regularly.

I confirmed that Android 16 has cut my phone's battery life in half, and that's after disabling all of the new Motorola bloatware that came with the update.

Also, the traditional power hotkey is now either Gemini or nothing.

lti wrote on 2026-06-27, 02:34:

I confirmed that Android 16 has cut my phone's battery life in half, and that's after disabling all of the new Motorola bloatware that came with the update.

Also, the traditional power hotkey is now either Gemini or nothing.

After upgrading (LOL) to 16 I have all sorts of issues with my Motorola too.
Overcharge doesn't work all the time, going to 100% and getting really hot.
Battery life is shortened, not a good sign of progress.

Nexxen wrote on 2026-06-27, 08:44:

After upgrading (LOL) to 16 I have all sorts of issues with my Motorola too.
Overcharge doesn't work all the time, going to 100% and getting really hot.
Battery life is shortened, not a good sign of progress.

I think my phone also charges slower than it used to, but I never really paid attention. I only needed to charge it once a week, and it was down to about 45% by then. Now it's at 20% after six days.

Also, there's a piece of Motorola-installed malware called Glance that keeps re-enabling itself after I disable it. It keeps giving me notifications asking if I want to install even more bloatware and terrible games, and the only choices are "Yes" and "Remind me later." Now I need to either find a custom Android ROM for a 2024 Edge or replace the phone.

I took my computers outside blew the dust out with an air compressor, inspected them and replaced the
power supplies because they were starting to fail.

I am all set for another 5 years of use.

I tried to clean the scroll wheel encoder in my mouse again, and I broke the clips that hold the encoder together. I forgot how to take it apart, and the plastic had probably been weakened by the number of times I've had to clean the contacts before. It still works, but it feels stiff and mushy now. Also, the detent side of the encoder is full of green slime like the metal spring is being corroded by the factory grease. Microsoft (before they were Microslop) really screwed up by using an encoder with physical moving contacts (I don't know the official term for it) on a $50 mouse and making it a custom part. Even the cheap Logitech M310 has an optical encoder.

I just want a mouse that tracks well and has thumb buttons. Why is that so hard? Instead, it's either the RGB "gamer master race" bullshit or a cheap mouse that is horribly unresponsive and makes precise control impossible. Either way, the switches on any mouse made since 2017 only last nine months, and the "solution" is expensive optical switches instead of figuring out why every switch manufacturer has such poor contact plating now.

Now my monitor brightness is fluctuating.

The solution for something doing weird stuff is usually to start looking for a replacement. Fortunately, it's easy to only look for business-class monitors, which are at least common enough to not require me to dig through a sea of either ultra-low-end garbage or ridiculous gaming nonsense. Unfortunately, 24" 1440p monitors are hard to find and expensive, and I don't think I have the space or seating position for a 27".

At least I have a disassembly manual that was freely available from Dell's website for some reason (and also has instructions for desoldering the primary filter cap from the power supply) and an old 22" 1680x1050 monitor.

Edit five hours later: It's Firefox, not my monitor. Why did it suddenly start in the middle of the day? I'm running a Linux distro with no automatic updates at all, and Firefox updates are handled by the package manager.