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computer ramblings
Oct. 17th, 2025 06:40 amGetting AI-generated search results feels like trying to ask Brainy Smurf something while he's tripping balls and hasn't slept in almost a week. It tries to sound informative but it says nothing and doesn't make any sense.
I got myself a bunch of sockets for computer power supply cables and a crimper for them, so when I happen across a computer build with power cables that are too long or too short, I'll be able to fix that. That said, I also ordered some loose SATA connectors for the same reasons. Wire? SATA drives don't need much current so even if I put half a dozen hard drives on one harness, 18 gauge will be plenty thick enough. Didja know that even though SATA connectors have 3.3V, modern drives don't use it? And 2.5" drives don't use the 12V either for that matter.
The hardest part of opening up most portable Apple devices is removing the display. Well, the battery inside my iPod Touch did much of the work for me by puffing out and pushing the display off enough that I could fingernail it the rest of the way.
I kinda have to accept that even though Windows 7 was the best version of Windows, many 3rd-party programs compatible with it aren't getting updates anymore, and most of the versions that do get updates aren't compatible with W7 anymore. With browsers in particular, whole sites are starting to break as a result. If I want to connect to my phone via Bluetooth, it won't work with W7 anymore. And if I have to do a fresh install of W7, the activation can't even be done online anymore, as Microsoft turned off the activation servers for anything older than W10. On top of that, the process of running updates is completely mangled. But if I need to, I can. I'm clever and sneaky.
Hardware is getting to be in the same situation. Oh, I want to replace the wi-fi adapter? If I want to use Windows 7, it's topped out with 802.11ac. Which is fine by itself but new adapters are AX and faster and will only work with 10 or 11. Motherboard/CPU newer than 2017? W7 ain't it. Video cards? Nvidia and AMD cut off W7 a few generations ago.
How many computers do I have that are still running W7? At least 6, with 4 of them being realistic candidates for W10, even though that too has reached end-of-support. But I figure W10 has some good useful years before it starts to really fall apart the same way W7 is, and by then these older systems will likely need replaced due to catastrophic hardware failure.
Most of these candidates have room for multiple hard drives. It's a matter of getting more SSDs to put W10 on for a dual-boot setup. That way I can take my time with moving files over, making sure core programs work, and so on. For one computer, I already had another 2.5" 1TB, ready to get W7 cloned onto it but I never got around to that, so I used it for W10. Makes that easier. One down, three to go.
There's a difference between NGFF and NVMe that makes them not exactly cross-compatible. Physically, they have a different key but M.2 slots can often take both. Some motherboards and enclosures can do both, some can't. My computer from 9 years ago apparently can do both, but Windows 7 doesn't like booting from NVMe. Windows 10 however, knows what to do with it. Two down, two to go.
For another computer, I picked up a 2TB SSD that was marked down by $35. Seems it was returned for some reason. For $100, I'll give it a chance! According to various utilities, there are no write cycles on it. So someone bought it, decided it wasn't what they wanted, so they returned it. Alrighty. It came with a USB-SATA adapter too. After needing to shuffle cables around because not all 10 of the SATA ports are bootable, the installation went through. Three down, one to go.
The 2010 vintage laptop will be tricky. Not impossible. I'll have to crowbar both versions of Windows onto one drive somehow. It's also the oldest of the 4 candidates, and the maker of it stopped posting drivers on their site. I've put W10 on an older and lower-spec computer so I'm fairly confident it'll work. Quad-core, 16GB RAM. Should be enough. But it'll have to wait because I've run out of valid keys for now.
There's no sense in going with anything smaller than 500GB hard drive these days. Mostly because it's not much more expensive than a 250GB. At 1TB? Yeah you could still get a platter drive at that capacity but an SSD isn't much more and the difference in speed more than makes up for it. Platter drives only start to really pull ahead in value at around 4TB, and by then, those are mostly being used for mass file storage and not the OS. And putting W10/11 on a platter drive is a new level of masochism I'm not into or ready for.
The base install of the OS goes relatively quickly. What really takes time is all the updates, the drivers, the programs of choice, and the customizations. There was one computer where W10 didn't recognize the wifi card right away. After installing the driver for that, it found drivers for everything else. This is a far cry from computers of olde, when the basic act of installing a hard drive meant entering the parameters in the motherboard's BIOS.
A coworker and I were talking about video cards, and the high power consumption of some of them. The RTX 5090 has a peak TDP of 575 watts, which means it can pull almost 50 amps at full power. All that juice is flowing through a bundle of 18-gauge wires. As long as the connection is made properly, each wire can handle its share. Meanwhile people into R/C cars running on LiPo batteries will look at 50 amps and say "that's cute". An EC3 or XT60 connector would be able to handle that much juice easily and safely. But those aren't going to be used for computer graphics cards anytime soon because it's not a recognized standard for computer connections.
Somewhere in Akihabara, there is a store selling old Intel CPUs in a gashapon machine. Imagine popping in a couple 100 yen coins, turning the knob, and out pops a plastic ball with a first or second-gen i5 CPU. That's something I would do for the sheer novelty; I don't think I'd try making a full computer based on it. Then again I wouldn't put it past myself.
I got myself a bunch of sockets for computer power supply cables and a crimper for them, so when I happen across a computer build with power cables that are too long or too short, I'll be able to fix that. That said, I also ordered some loose SATA connectors for the same reasons. Wire? SATA drives don't need much current so even if I put half a dozen hard drives on one harness, 18 gauge will be plenty thick enough. Didja know that even though SATA connectors have 3.3V, modern drives don't use it? And 2.5" drives don't use the 12V either for that matter.
The hardest part of opening up most portable Apple devices is removing the display. Well, the battery inside my iPod Touch did much of the work for me by puffing out and pushing the display off enough that I could fingernail it the rest of the way.
I kinda have to accept that even though Windows 7 was the best version of Windows, many 3rd-party programs compatible with it aren't getting updates anymore, and most of the versions that do get updates aren't compatible with W7 anymore. With browsers in particular, whole sites are starting to break as a result. If I want to connect to my phone via Bluetooth, it won't work with W7 anymore. And if I have to do a fresh install of W7, the activation can't even be done online anymore, as Microsoft turned off the activation servers for anything older than W10. On top of that, the process of running updates is completely mangled. But if I need to, I can. I'm clever and sneaky.
Hardware is getting to be in the same situation. Oh, I want to replace the wi-fi adapter? If I want to use Windows 7, it's topped out with 802.11ac. Which is fine by itself but new adapters are AX and faster and will only work with 10 or 11. Motherboard/CPU newer than 2017? W7 ain't it. Video cards? Nvidia and AMD cut off W7 a few generations ago.
How many computers do I have that are still running W7? At least 6, with 4 of them being realistic candidates for W10, even though that too has reached end-of-support. But I figure W10 has some good useful years before it starts to really fall apart the same way W7 is, and by then these older systems will likely need replaced due to catastrophic hardware failure.
Most of these candidates have room for multiple hard drives. It's a matter of getting more SSDs to put W10 on for a dual-boot setup. That way I can take my time with moving files over, making sure core programs work, and so on. For one computer, I already had another 2.5" 1TB, ready to get W7 cloned onto it but I never got around to that, so I used it for W10. Makes that easier. One down, three to go.
There's a difference between NGFF and NVMe that makes them not exactly cross-compatible. Physically, they have a different key but M.2 slots can often take both. Some motherboards and enclosures can do both, some can't. My computer from 9 years ago apparently can do both, but Windows 7 doesn't like booting from NVMe. Windows 10 however, knows what to do with it. Two down, two to go.
For another computer, I picked up a 2TB SSD that was marked down by $35. Seems it was returned for some reason. For $100, I'll give it a chance! According to various utilities, there are no write cycles on it. So someone bought it, decided it wasn't what they wanted, so they returned it. Alrighty. It came with a USB-SATA adapter too. After needing to shuffle cables around because not all 10 of the SATA ports are bootable, the installation went through. Three down, one to go.
The 2010 vintage laptop will be tricky. Not impossible. I'll have to crowbar both versions of Windows onto one drive somehow. It's also the oldest of the 4 candidates, and the maker of it stopped posting drivers on their site. I've put W10 on an older and lower-spec computer so I'm fairly confident it'll work. Quad-core, 16GB RAM. Should be enough. But it'll have to wait because I've run out of valid keys for now.
There's no sense in going with anything smaller than 500GB hard drive these days. Mostly because it's not much more expensive than a 250GB. At 1TB? Yeah you could still get a platter drive at that capacity but an SSD isn't much more and the difference in speed more than makes up for it. Platter drives only start to really pull ahead in value at around 4TB, and by then, those are mostly being used for mass file storage and not the OS. And putting W10/11 on a platter drive is a new level of masochism I'm not into or ready for.
The base install of the OS goes relatively quickly. What really takes time is all the updates, the drivers, the programs of choice, and the customizations. There was one computer where W10 didn't recognize the wifi card right away. After installing the driver for that, it found drivers for everything else. This is a far cry from computers of olde, when the basic act of installing a hard drive meant entering the parameters in the motherboard's BIOS.
A coworker and I were talking about video cards, and the high power consumption of some of them. The RTX 5090 has a peak TDP of 575 watts, which means it can pull almost 50 amps at full power. All that juice is flowing through a bundle of 18-gauge wires. As long as the connection is made properly, each wire can handle its share. Meanwhile people into R/C cars running on LiPo batteries will look at 50 amps and say "that's cute". An EC3 or XT60 connector would be able to handle that much juice easily and safely. But those aren't going to be used for computer graphics cards anytime soon because it's not a recognized standard for computer connections.
Somewhere in Akihabara, there is a store selling old Intel CPUs in a gashapon machine. Imagine popping in a couple 100 yen coins, turning the knob, and out pops a plastic ball with a first or second-gen i5 CPU. That's something I would do for the sheer novelty; I don't think I'd try making a full computer based on it. Then again I wouldn't put it past myself.
