PC build thread

[Tanooki]

Ahh gotcha. Damn them (and Clevo) because going between instructions it wasn't clear at all.

The motherboard is a beast in itself as it's setup for so much and so much ease of access which is odd for a laptop. There are 2 mSATA slots on this thing and then the HDD primary itself. It's made for someone who does a crap load of work/gaming/creation so they have the out of the box or ease of upgrade to run a RAID setup of 3 HDD/SSDs in tandem with their own assigned letter, 4 if you remove the optical option. When I got this I had a cap, cheaped out and got the HDD as about 4 years ago a 1TB SSD was asininely priced, second on the list of forget its right next to the nearly $1K i7-4940MX and I stuck with a middling 4710MQ version (3.1/4ghz) instead which runs 1ghz less fast in turbo mode (mine is 2.5/3ghz) and I halved the RAM to 16 instead of 32GB as it felt like overkill. I put it into the nvidia 980M GPU with 8GB of RAM on it maxing that out (and it was a first in a new line that only lost 15% vs the usual 50% of capability) which runs like a 970 desktop version. This thing can do amazing stuff, but that damn hard drive issue I keep having has made this an annoyance every little over a year. With the warranty gone that POS HGST is gone for good. I intend to run this thing into the ground given it can still run the really nice stuff out there at max or near max settings in most cases.

[Tanooki]

I just called and got the nicest dude on the phone at Crucial talked for over a half hour.

I ordered both the Crucial drive I said, and also the usb to sata transfer cable. I was going to get it off their site, but even he suggested for speed to use Amazon, and their cable isn't there (got Anker same price) and their drive sold by them through it. I'll have the bundle Friday.

The stupid computer in the last hour has twice now spit up a generic WIndows warning about the HDD fail being imminent. Argh. I'll just leave it open and active until the parts arrive, no way I'm risking a restart.

As I said he was very helpful, gave me links and tips on moving from HDD to SSD and things to change in the Windows 8.1 setup so it trims properly, AHCI and all that, and how to screw with windows disk management if it under reports the drive size due to cloning which sometimes can happen (but I'm going 1:1 for size.) Also gave a link to all sorts of smart tricks to optimize and protect off a forum link one of their admins wrote up.

Fuck plate drives, sick of this crap. Sucks I'm out $200 as that's big for me, but this is dying fast and unavoidable.

[Tanooki]

The old drive choked so hard the cloning software failed to make a copy that would work. I've been at it since last night up until 3am, then back on it again for the last 4 hours or so restoring stuff. And now I'm at a loss what to do about my email from my ISP accounts on thunderbird.

I can't seem to use recovery programs to get at it.

I can plug the drive into a USB port, but windows tells me I'm not allowed to access my old directory, permissions and all that, and I can't seem to google a way around that.

Not sure what to do other than risk throwing the old drive back into the computer at this point and hoping I can limp it to the directory and dump it to my usb hard drive.

This sucks.

Any other ideas?

[isiolia]

Windows would normally say that you don't have permission to access the folder, but then offer to let you give yourself permission to it (if on an admin account).

There may be other methods, but you can ignore the permissions to make a copy with robocopy's /b flag (meant for Backup). So, for instance, you might do something like \robocopy e:\Users\Tanooki c:\restore\Tanooki /mir /b /r:10 /w:1 /log:c:\restore\log.txt which would mirror the folder (copy all subfolders/etc), ignore permissions, retry failed copy operations 10 times and wait one second in between failed attempts, and write progress to a logfile instead of dump it to the console. Plenty of other potential things to use with it (documentation here). Could possibly use /secfix to fix the permissions issues on copy, but I haven't used it before.

[Tanooki]

It was a lost cause trying to mess with permissions, I am the only person as admin installed, but it would pop that box up trying to get an Admin pass that didn't even exist and leaving a blank space didn't work either.

Somewhere around a few reboots and mass updates windows didn't feel the need to do in order or all at once somehow trying yet again earlier ago the drive did read well enough I was able to sneak in and just copy the appdata/etc.../profiles out of thunderbird and got what I wanted out of it by sheer dumb luck.

I was having a hell of it earlier getting these few odd errors around the 2015 redist, but I got that figured out using some weird tactics I saw on a youtube video that the usual MS morons on their forums just went in circles about blaming the end user instead of solving the issue so that got ironed out too. I was about to do another cold reinstall I was fed up with the popping chimes and boxes.

As it is now my primary stuff is all back, GoG Galaxy is done, the few Steam games I have are loading, and I'm slowly picking away as Steam creeps through Wolfenstein and its sequel from a few years back (PS3 era titles) dumping some of my more testy physical media from the 16/32bit era using a methodology of odd patches and tricks I picked up to make things usually hateful still work thankfully. I figure overnight since it's a beast in size I think I'll leave the blizzard battle.net app have its way with throwing my big toys back on here like Diablo 3 and 2+exp packs on both, maybe even let it toy around with Guild Wars 2 since it's large as well in case I want to use it again. Also will need to stuff Arc back on here to get Star Trek online back in business. At least reboots, restarts and cold starts now are faster than watching a powered off iphone turn on.

[marlowe221]

I'm due a "platform" upgrade - by that, I mean CPU, Motherboard, and RAM.

I am currently running a FX-8320 (OC'd to 8350 speeds on air cooling) with 16GB of DDR3.

Unfortunately, my budget is a little low and is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future. I need to stay under $350 total.

I'm thinking maybe i3-8100, Ryzen 2200g or 1500X or something like that.

Any thoughts?

[isiolia]

With that sort of budget limit, I would look more at going lean on RAM to start (since DDR4 is still up in price) and shooting for a better CPU - probably an i5 8400 or Ryzen 5 2600, depending on what you can find a good price on and what your overall priority is. Can likely fit an 8GB DIMM and a budget motherboard with either of those inside your budget.

[marlowe221]

With that sort of budget limit, I would look more at going lean on RAM to start (since DDR4 is still up in price) and shooting for a better CPU - probably an i5 8400 or Ryzen 5 2600, depending on what you can find a good price on and what your overall priority is. Can likely fit an 8GB DIMM and a budget motherboard with either of those inside your budget.

So you're suggesting going with 8GB of RAM at first and adding another 8GB stick later on when finances allow?

I didn't think of that. That's not a bad idea at all.

[isiolia]

Yeah. GPU prices have been stabilizing, but RAM prices are still up. For sake of comparison, when I built my current rig (i7 3770k) in late 2012, the 16GB DDR3 kit I put in it cost a whopping $65, according to my order history. I think a lot of us likely tossed in more RAM than we really needed when building around then, simply because it was so cheap. That continued through about 2016, where DDR4 kits were similarly priced. By the start of 2018 though, the cost of the same kits had more than doubled. They've come down a little since, but I think the cheapest I've seen (from a name brand anyway) is something like $140, with plenty up in the $160-180 range. It's an annoying increase on a larger budget, but very restricting on a tight one as you have.
The expectation is that we're heading into a RAM surplus again in the next year or so, with corresponding price drops. In the meantime, 8GB is fine. If you anticipate keeping it that way for a while, it might be worth going for 2x4GB instead (oddly enough, it may be cheaper as well). Some games seem to really benefit from dual channel, though it's not universally the case.

[marurun]

RAM is expected to start falling again in price, according to a number of tech news sites on-line. Also, if you DO go with only a single RAM stick to start, don't put off upgrading too long. You want the speed boost of having dual-channel memory.