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About a month ago the motherboard on my daughter-in-law's PC crapped out. They could have picked up a new motherboard easier, cheaper, but instead decided to purchase a brand new PC. And being the online shoppers they are found a reasonably good deal at CyberPowerPC. They do have a really nice customization page.
I've been wanting a new PC myself for about a year and now that the bottom has finally dropped out of the cryptocurrency market the price of video cards has once again become much more reasonable, I decided to do some shopping myself.
I to decided to take a look at CyberPowerPC and found myself a decent rig. Not top of the line but a good rig that should last me several years. And with a bit of customizing should be more than sufficient for my needs, and the most I've ever spent on a PC.
Intel(R) Core™ Processor i7-8700K 3.70GHZ 12MB Intel Smart Cache LGA1151 (Coffee Lake)
240GB WD Green SSD + 2TB SATA III Hard Drive Combo (Combo Drive)
16GB (8GBx2) DDR4/3000MHz Dual Channel Memory (ADATA XPG Z1)
Raidmax Monster II ATX High Airflow Mid-Tower Gaming Case w/ USB 3.0
LG 16X Internal Blu-ray Burner
ASUS PRIME Z370-P ATX w/ USB 3.1, 2 PCIe x16, 3 PCIe x1, 6 SATA3, 2 M.2 SATA/PCIe
850 Watts - EVGA 850W GQ 80 Plus Gold Power Supply
GeForce(R) GTX 1070 Ti 8GB GDDR5 (Pascal)
Windows 10 Pro (64-bit Edition)
With plenty of case fans.
15 days for them to put it together and ship it. Now what really drew me to purchase from CyberPowerPC was their partnership with Affirm. Online loan approval, much lower interest than we could get with a card, 10%, and no late fees. In fact no hidden fees, you can see all your payments online. And then it shipped.
Que the horror movie music. The package was scheduled to be delivered today, a package I have to sign for, and the UPS tracking site indicated it was on a truck and out for delivery by 8:30AM. I was able to get permission from my boss to work from home for the day—no big deal really. My wife is a scrapbooker and we get a lot of packages delivered. Some are delivered before noon, some after, not that unusual.
But no package before noon, so I head to lunch. Before I get three blocks I see a UPS truck, turn around, go back home. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait, no truck, go to lunch anyway. Get back home, it is now 1:30PM. Spend another 30 minutes working...and then my remote session to work drops. This has happened before, no big deal. Wait five minutes, attempt to connect, fails. Wait 15 minutes, attempt to connect, fails.
At this point I've given up and emailed the boss and network services, no response from either. So, go watch TV and wait for UPS. Two hours pass, it is now 4:30PM, the same time my wife gets off work and the time I normally leave work to pick her up. 30 minutes pass, it is now 5PM, I check the UPS tracking site one more time. Still out for delivery, since 8:30AM. I leave to pick up the wife at 5:01PM, she works half-way across town, it will be almost 5:30PM by the time I get to her office.
And the punch line is—after I get to her office I again check the UPS tracking site. Attempted delivery at 5:14PM. But wait, there's more. After getting back home we attempt to change the deliver method from the UPS tracking site. No can do, all options are greyed out. Call UPS, finally get to talk to a person. The shipper has picked the option that only allows for home delivery and someone must sign.
Call CyperPowerPC, they selected this shipping option because we purchased the PC with Affirm and they can't change it unless Affirm says they can. Call Affirm, they do a lot of business with never heard of this before and are highly confused. But they are understanding and willing to have CyberPowerPC change the shipping options.
Can we setup a conference call to CyberPowerPC? WAT? Affirm is wanting us, the customer, to setup a conference call between them and CyberPowerPC? The customer support people can't do this themselves? Nope? At his point the wife was already talking to Affirm while I was ranting at how lame UPS is. I was so hacked I just left the room and went to mow the lawn.
As I was leaving the house to mow I stuck my head back into our office to find my wife with two cells phones, mine and hers, talking to Affirm on one and CyberPowerPC on the other and both of company reps talking to each other through our phones.
However, after everything was all said and done, I can now pick up my PC Monday from the UPS customer center. I'm beginning to think all of the online ordering and payment should be thrown out and we should go back to bartering. I'll give you three cows, two goats and three pigs. Can I now have my PC please.
"...JavaScript could teach Dyson how to suck." -- Nagy Vilmos
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Well serves you right for ignoring the long time honored rules of delivery and installs like landline/cable/anything
1 When they say: "we will be there between X and Y" (typically a 4 - 8 hour separation during which you must be there) it always means 5 minutes before Y.
2. but Murphy adds: "Step out at any time, Z, during the interval X to Y, the time changes to Z + 2 minutes."
3. Murphy's wife also likes to add, "even should you stay home during X and Y, and decide to perform any involved task (messy sticky finger lunches in particular), or dare to sit on your porcelain throne for some quiet contemplation, the time will change to then."
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And Murphy's second cousin's corollary "If it's really needed, the courier will claim he tried to deliver but you weren't in so he gets home early".
And that's ignoring the "delivered" items that turn up at a neighbor the following day. I'm still trying to work out how one delivery got to a bedridden 93 year old lady with dementia instead of me.
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: I'm still trying to work out how one delivery got to a bedridden 93 year old lady with dementia instead of me.
That's easy. She got out of bed, strolled down to your house, and stole it off the porch!
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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I had to wait more than a month after ordering a Dell gaming notebook, something went wrong with the IDEAL payment (which is the most popular way of paying online in the Netherlands) on the Dell side.
But now I'm really pleased with the notebook, setup went flawless, and I got 100 Euro discount because of a discount action during the waiting period.
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Z.C.M. wrote: I'll give you three cows, two goats and three pigs.
Well, the cows can be herded down the road to my farm, but you'll have to tell the mayor that traffic on the road needs to be closed off and you might need a special license. The goats can be delivered by truck to the pen, and could you take the pigs directly to the butcher?
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Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
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I do ordering a lot online, however if it s something local I ask to place it in one of the shops nearby, as I prefer to pick it up at the end of the day instead of playing mouse-and-cat with the delivery guy...
For instance, two weeks ago (one Thursday), wife's laptop dead... Ordered one online the very same night, picked it up Sunday on way home...
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge". Stephen Hawking, 1942- 2018
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Try the Beau Monga's rendition of "Hit the road Jack" from New-Zealand's X-Factor.
It's quite nice.
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Assembling my AMD 32-core CPU beast of a machine!
I've decided to name it: Triacontadicore
Thanks to all those who provided suggestions!
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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sounds like a beast. what are you doing with it all of that?
note: please don't say win10
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Yes, Win 10 Pro.
Lots of virtualization and software development, as well as some personal video encoding.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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You will realize very soon that 32 core is way to little to run Windows as host for massive virtualization...
If you already using virtualization try a Linux host... It worked for me for over 7 years (when I just realized I need no Windows at all)...
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge". Stephen Hawking, 1942- 2018
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Richard Andrew x64 wrote: I've decided to name it: Triacontadicore
Thanks to all those who provided suggestions! Is it too late for suggestions? AMD32CoreCPUyMcAMD32CoreCPUFace?
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The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Install new SSD, install Linux on the ssd, and convert existing win7 instance to a virtual machine (if that's even possible).
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010 ----- You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010 ----- When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote: convert existing win7
Um, converting Windows 7 to anything will cause a rip in the space time continuum. Highly recommended you just bury the Windows 7 in salt mine at a minimum depth of 15,000 feet.
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That's just something Microslop says to scare people that don't know any better.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010 ----- You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010 ----- When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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Well then, do report back on your successful conversion.
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I elected to do a full reinstall of 7 in the virtualbox seeing as I now run browser, email, media player etc in the linux so seemed pointless/wasteful to have the all duplicated in the vm.
yeah it's painful
... still have to install some other items e.g. in my case visual studio ... then the settings (which can be copied over if lazy)
--- but on the other hand I know it's a completely clean setup not filled with old baggage from other long gone / never used apps and libs.
Also helpful in that you might find some of your own projects rely on files/folders or even registry settings (sometimes hard coded and quick fix hacks) you've forgotten about
- you know if it doesn't install on your own "machine" it's gonna have problems elsewhere.
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Mothball my 18 month old Intel NUC w/ Windows 10. It had never been exactly stable but in the last couple weeks had become horrible. A full OS re-install the prior weekend worked great for about 4 days...
Created a 2nd user account on my wife's MacBook Pro and installed the 2 "real" apps that I need a decent computer for.
Connected my Chromebook to the 27" monitor that the NUC used to use.
This weekend's fun... smoking some ribs on the patio while drinking beer and not dealing with Windows BS.
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Intel's botched more than one firmware version for its NUCs when trying to address the Spectre/Meltdown/whatchamacallit vulnerabilities. If the current latest doesn't make yours stable again, go back to one that predates their attempts to fix anything.
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My NUC was pretty unstable with the BIOS it arrived with (which was before any of the SPECTRE madness). Often times it would crash / reboot during Windows boot-up or within the first couple minutes the desktop was active. If it made it past those first few minutes it was solid.
I sent the SSD back to Samsung for testing (they claim it was OK). I tried some different RAM but the issues persisted. Over time a few BIOS and driver updates seemingly made it quite a bit better but never perfect. It would crash about 1 in every 25 boots.
Then a couple weeks ago a particular boot-up failed spectacularly and all subsequent boots made it to the Windows desktop but the "Start" button was DOA. I tried a few things in PowerShell to no avail.
I tried to restore from my Macrium Reflect back-ups but they all claimed to be corrupt. WTF!?
I deleted all the SSD partitions and re-installed Windows 10 from scratch. Everything ran great for 4 days. No boot-up crashes. Everything seemed better, stronger and faster. Woo Hoo!
Then another series of boot-up crashes and finally a desktop with a dead Start button. That was the last straw.
I'll use my Chromebook for the trivial stuff I do at home and the wife's MBP for a couple of the bigger things.
Maybe someday I'll try to resurrect the NUC with Windows or Linux... but for now it's ribs and beer!
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Sorry to hear that - sounds frustrating as hell. Nothing worse than an unstable PC and you don't know what's causing it.
I realize it won't do you any good, but both of my NUCs are running very well - never had an unexplained crash, except when using one of the first BIOS updates they rushed out shortly after Spectre was discovered. Lesson learned.
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I was going to recommend SysInternals' disk2vhd - I've used it to convert an old laptop's drive into a VHD file, but if your host's gonna be Linux, then I'm not sure there's any virtualization host for Linux that can use those files directly (VHD/VHDX are Hyper-V).
That said, I have no doubt there's some tool that can convert VHD/VHDX files to whatever format your Linux virtualization host uses (VMware? Virtual Box? Something else?) But if you're going to go through this conversion step, you might as well first check if your host already has tools that'll do the equivalent of disk2vhd but output in whatever format you need.
The one area to look out for is that, once you're rebooting into your virtualized 7 environment, it'll see your hardware's completely changed and 7 might want to reactivate itself. Or the virtualized hardware might not be automatically recognized by 7. I'd suggest you back up the virtualized disk before you boot from it the first time and let the OS make changes to it, unless you're ready to recreate it again from the original physical machine.
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