The Computer/Software/Marketing Help Thread

Any good webcam/microphone recommendations? Not trying to become a millionaire streamer, just need something pretty good quality for work, for pitches and recording the odd training video etc.

Needs to be relatively budget friendly but I can probably expense it so not too fussed. I have a focusrite interface for music but don’t have a proper mic yet.

Probably some good stuff that you’d find for podcasting etc? Doesn’t pick up the heavy breathing.

I stumbled across something similar to what you wrote here in Linus Tech Tips, didn’t realise how common place it was. Turns out my mobo is already set up to handle the 3200Mhz RAM already. Got an upgrade to 128Gb in the post.

Couple of questions for you
1 - Pretty sure my old motherboard is dead. Repair place says it boots half the time and will run some more tests over the weekend and see if they can work it out. If not, I’ll need a replacement for an old dual Xeon LGA 2011 like my Asus z9pe-d8. Something with loads of space for 3 x GPU, AIO cooling and 5 HDDs. Anything you can recommend?
2 - The second M2 drive in my new build just vanished on Wednesday. No sign of it in Windows or Disk Management - all my current projects just vanished. Most of it was backed up via Dropbox, but that properly put the shits up me and set me back a couple of days on a critical deadline. It’s only 1 month old, a Corsair MP600, 1Tb. Haven’t taken it out of the machine to put it in an external caddy yet, will do so over the weekend. Ever hear of this happening?

well “dead” can be subjective, i have an x58 board that doesn’t post and by all accounts is dead, when in reality i just have to mash the cmos/memok button to get it to boot, so i’m assuming the cmos battery is dead. could be a whole host of things but i’d def try booting it with a single stick of ram in each bank to rule out memory issues - the board i have now (supermicro x8dtl-if) is one i got from a friend and it wouldn’t post with any ECC memory he had, works fine for me with generic Hynix gear. lot of variables in server parts.

as for a 2011 replacement board, bit of a ropey one. could maybe check out some of the chinese boards where im p sure they’ve reverse engineered intels c602 chipset and produce boards on their own

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001259782942.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.0.0.41515a8cMzcRoc&algo_pvid=4cfcf9b9-1d1e-4507-9a54-04a22f98118f&algo_expid=4cfcf9b9-1d1e-4507-9a54-04a22f98118f-18&btsid=2100bddb16180411332125920e0bde&ws_ab_test=searchweb0_0,searchweb201602_,searchweb201603_

if you wanna be a bit more legit, maybe something from supermicros x9 line.

or just straight up replace the z9pe with the same board - prolly still pay a pretty penny as while 2011 is gone from enterprise usage it still holds weight for home lab usage etc.

as for the m2, disappearing out of the blue sounds strange. is it showing up in the bios? if it is, probably a windows issue - i had a similar thing with an m2 drive on a build for a friend where it wouldn’t show up, and windows had installed some odd RAID driver. from what i recall i used hwinfo to look at pci bus entries, found the m2 drive (itll be named after the controller so something like phison most likely), made a note of the pci address, then went to device manager and found “amd raid bottom device” on the same pci address and changed the driver to nvme - this is all assuming you’re on amd btw.

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Put in a new CMOS battery already, no joy. It was posting to BIOS and I got into Windows when i brought it home from repair, only for it to be dead the next day. Managed to get into BIOS a few days later, but it wouldn’t boot from the new SSD, saying there was no Windows Boot Manager. Ballache. Had looked at a straight replacement for the mobo, but they’re both hard to find and expensive. That Supermicros one would be pretty good though

Yep, new machine is AMD based. Drive showed up in the BIOS somewhere, but been flat out with work and haven’t made the time to investigate properly. Will look at that RAID driver fix and see how I get on.

Thanks for the tips, much appreciated!

Thinking of buying some Toshiba hard drives for my NAS.
I checked Backblaze 2020 and they seem to have decent reliability.

Has anyone got any horror stories of personal experience with Toshiba drives? Conventional wisdom seems to be WD Reds, but I’m stingy and theToshibas are a decent saving.

I run WD Reds but haven’t heard anything bad about Toshibas. That BB drive reliability report tells you all you need to know really

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The portable HDD I use for my footy has been showing a mental amount of active time when nothing is being used on it and it was making clicking sounds at random intervals the other night. So, new HDD time I reckon. (or better yet a portable SSD?)

It’s all backed up, but don’t want the hassle of it going pop on me randomly and get it nipped in the bud.

I can vote up for SSD. I focused filming because I had a hard drive die.

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Ah that is well gash, that.

I got a bit scared it was going to do it after I put all the footy on it and done editing when I heard the clicking and saw the active time shooting right up, even when it wasn’t doing nothing.

Yeah mine started clunking then showing up 3/5 times on the max, then pretty much died. Had no luck with recovery either.

A common fix is to buy a empty shell on eBay then swap the hard drive over to the empty housing. I hear people doing that quite a lot

Maybe I’m just paranoid but SSD’s are really good price wise now I would just buy one before it goes pop

If you’re worried about drive failure I recommend Backblaze. £5 a month for unlimited backup, just runs in the background you never need to think about it. I’ve currently got 3.7TB backed up, much peace of mind

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Random question for the keyboard shortcut heads: do you use your thumb when pressing CMD or ctrl and cutting/pasting or do you use a different finger?!?

Thumb all day, surely any other finger would be pure madness.

Thumb with CMD/alt/Win, little finger with CTRL.

What was that latest Apple rumour news? Just Macbook Pro related?

Kinda want a Mac Mini but dont want the bluetooth issue riddled current one…

Think they are bringing out a few new things like a new iPad pro, ect… really interested in getting one.

I just need a desktop really. Feel like I am killing my Macbook with editing…need something a bit more capable.

Those Mac Minis look solid aside from the bluetooth issue.

Got an IT issue here which is definitely one for the not stoked thread but I’m trying to keep myself in a pro active mindset for the time being.

Yesterday, my external hard drive which has a years worth of work on deleted itself. There is no cloud backup, everything I’ve done since April 20 is on there. It was so bizarre, I had dragged a zipped file onto the drive, unzipped it and then moved the zip folder to the trash. As I did that a warning popped up, which I ignored as I presumed it was the standard ‘thus file will be deleted immediately’. As I moved it to the trash, everything started to delete, file by file, from the hard drive until I pulled the usb out.

None of the files were in the trash and the hard drive is now about 90% empty. After about 2 heart attacks I spoke to IT support and they said it’s unlikely though not impossible to recover the data.

Does anyone know a) what the fuck happened and b) is data recovery at all likely? I’ve been on various forums this morning and have found a couple of similar issues but no resolution. FYI I’m on a Mac and the hard drive is seagate.

I haven’t told my boss yet

That sounds horrible. My understanding with older spinning disk hard drives, is that the data isn’t ‘deleted’ until it is overwritten with new data. So you have 2 options:
Pay for an app and try and recover the data yourself. Or send the drive off to a company that specialise in data recovery.
Option 2 will be more expensive, but if it is work critical stuff, then I imagine it would be worth it.
I’m sure there are others on here that know way more about this kind of thing than me though.

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