-hh <recscuba_google@huntzinger.com> wrote:

>> You keep including my monitor or video card or something, those were
>> choice add-ons that I could've trivially avoided with another HD
>> monitor.
>
>Monitor? Nope.
>
>Video Card? Yup: because you said that even though you'd researched
>your gear, you quickly realized that you screwed up as the i5's included
>one was inadequate for your desires. But even if we subtract off the
>$100 you spent here, its still $600 vs your $850 spent

I didn't screw up, I wanted this CPU all along.

>But do feel free to provide a detailed cost list.
>
>Because even the $100 you spent on the video card is subtracted off too,
>your $850 spent is still higher than $600, but now its only by +30%.

Well under $900 including second 16 GB added RAM, not including
software or video. It's better than your mini.

--
Joel W. Crump

Amendment XIV
Section 1.

[...] No state shall make or enforce any law which shall
abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the
United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of
life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal
protection of the laws.

Dobbs rewrites this, it is invalid precedent. States are
liable for denying needed abortions, e.g. TX.

On Thu, 1/16/2025 6:22 AM, -hh wrote:

>
> Of course.  Overall, a challenge with the DIY topic is differences in motivation:  is the DIY because money's tight?  Or is the motivation because tinkering with hardware is an entertaining hobby/pastime?
> Both motivations can & do exist, and can get conflated in discussions.

The motivation, is we don't want to buy shit.

Do I want a Dell with a four phase VCore, when
I can have a twenty four phase VCore on an
expensive motherboard ?

Do I want a 230W power supply on a Dell, when
I can pick up an 850W power supply at Best Buy ?
Now, I can plug in an RTX4090 when I want to.
On the Dell, that's... impossible (even if you
went out and bought the 850W supply, it probably
would not fit in the small Dell case, neither would
the Dell cooling system be adequate for the thermal
load and there wouldn't even be a mounting location
for a fan to be added).

When you do a build, you control everything, and
no screwing around or taking shortcuts.

Let's take an example, Mr.LaptopMan. Take the lady
in the computer store the other day, a salesman
explaining to her that "the laptop with the 4070
is faster than the laptop with the 4060" for gaming.
Well, what the salesman didn't tell the gaming lady,
is that the owner will beat the piss out of the laptop
and it will be knackered after only four years. While you
are having a gaming experience, it won't last.

Whereas, with a desktop, if I wear the keycaps off my
keyboard playing Tetris, I just swap keyboards, takes
about ten seconds. If the video cards burns the
connector off, chuck it on the table, pop in another.

And if I want four NVMe storage, I can pop in a board
with four sleds on it, and boom, done.

With this, I could install twenty four NVMe on six cards.

"Asus Pro WS W790E-SAGE SE"

https://dlcdnwebimgs.asus.com/gain/f8c9b3f4-1a07-4645-aa79-594c48bd4090/w692

(Note desktop I/O style on the left)

https://dlcdnwebimgs.asus.com/files/media/35d86ad4-c99a-49d7-b8bb-09601ad49164/images/swiper_left.png

Same idea with an AMD processor. For a while, only Lenovo made
materials of this class, but now you can build them at home.

https://shop.asus.com/ca-en/90mb1fw0-m0aay0-pro-ws-wrx90e-sage-se.html

You're in control of the build. If something breaks,
you're in control of the repair too. No returning a unit
three times, hearing "no fault found", haranguing tech
support for a replacement machine and so on. Think of
the hair loss saved.

I don't want to use anyones "warranty service".

[Picture]

https://i.postimg.cc/ry0VWG7J/home-build-what-you-want.gif

Paul

Paul wrote:

> -hh wrote:
>>
>> Of course.  Overall, a challenge with the DIY topic is differences in motivation: 
>> is the DIY because money's tight?  Or is the motivation because tinkering with
>> hardware is an entertaining hobby/pastime?
>> Both motivations can & do exist, and can get conflated in discussions.
>
>The motivation, is we don't want to buy shit.
>
>Do I want a Dell with a four phase VCore, when
>I can have a twenty four phase VCore on an
>expensive motherboard ?
>
>Do I want a 230W power supply on a Dell, when
>I can pick up an 850W power supply at Best Buy ?
>Now, I can plug in an RTX4090 when I want to.
>On the Dell, that's... impossible (even if you
>went out and bought the 850W supply, it probably
>would not fit in the small Dell case, neither would
>the Dell cooling system be adequate for the thermal
>load and there wouldn't even be a mounting location
>for a fan to be added).

Yeah the non-standard components in Dells and HPs are a real turn-off,
for those of us who are brave enough to open our PC cases.

>When you do a build, you control everything, and
>no screwing around or taking shortcuts.

I think us DIY guys tend to overspend and overbuild our systems. So
we don't save any money, but they are better-built.

>Well, what the salesman didn't tell the gaming lady,
>is that the owner will beat the piss out of the laptop
>and it will be knackered after only four years. While you
>are having a gaming experience, it won't last.

Gaming laptops are the worst. Hot running, loud, expensive, fragile.

On Thu, 16 Jan 2025 12:10:33 -0500, Paul wrote:

[snip]

> You're in control of the build. If something breaks,
> you're in control of the repair too. No returning a unit three times,
> hearing "no fault found", haranguing tech support for a replacement
> machine and so on. Think of the hair loss saved.

There was one night when I was up, that I discovered that my main computer
wasn't working. I little testing showed it was the power supply that had
failed. I replaced it and everything was OK. That PC was "out of action"
for a couple of hours. If I had depended on a store to fix it, I would
probably had gotten that new PS, along with having to explain a very non-
standard software setup, waiting a couple of weeks (or more), and spending
a couple of days recreating the software configuration they had messed up.

> I don't want to use anyones "warranty service".
>
> [Picture]
>
> https://i.postimg.cc/ry0VWG7J/home-build-what-you-want.gif
>
> Paul

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"SENILE.COM found. Out Of Memory."

On 1/16/25 5:42 AM, -hh wrote:
> On 1/16/25 1:41 AM, Physfitfreak wrote:
>> On 1/15/25 7:34 PM, Paul wrote:
>>> The enthusiast sites have more info, if you need it.
>>>
>>> https://www.tomshardware.com/best-picks/best-pc-builds-gaming
>>
>>
>> $500 computer is a "budget" computer these days? Hehe :)
>
> Sure is.
>
> In 1981, IBM's original PC 5150 debuted at $2,880 for a 64K system with
> one floppy drive.  In today's dollars, that would be a shade over $10K.
>
> Back in that era, PC Magazine's editor Bill Machrone quipped:
> "the computer you want always costs $5,000."
>
> And 1984's price buster of the TI-99/4A started at $525.  What
> percentage of your gross monthly pay was $525 back in 1984?
> Don't know about you, but for me, it would've been around 33%.
>
>
> -hh

$525 was about half of what I made in 1984. Back then I was getting $700
and something per month for TA/RA work in school. I also made money by
tutoring ($75 per sitting no matter how long the sitting lasted - rarely
over 4 hours). I had at least one tutoring session per week, so that was
another $300 a month. So about $1000 per month, and I lived comfortably
(money-wise that is - in reality I was conducting a tough as well as
quite challenging life in graduate school).

But you (and I so far in this post) are digressing from the point I made.

I didn't pay "$525" for a computer in 1984. I had a VAX/VMX minicomputer
in the physics department always available for me. And before that, when
IBM sold its "$2880" computers, I had a PDP-11 in the physics department
at my disposal 24 x 7. A few years later they were asking us "Who wants
this PDP-11?" Student or secretary or prof didn't matter. Nobody in
physics department wanted it. A prof in the chemistry dept took it to
his office.

So how much _did_ I pay for a computer.

I pulled out three Commodore 64 computers together with their power
supplies (just two) and one disk drive, all packed inside a box, from
the garbage dumpster of my apt complex I believe in 1986, or was it
1985. Somebody must've moved and had a "better" computer. Two of them
worked perfectly. I wrote programs on them that I'm still using today!
For one, a calendar conversion program I wrote handled conversions
between Iranian lunar, Iranian solar, the Gregorian and before that the
Julian solar dates nicely. Maximum error just one day! And you could go
back in time even to the days of Darius if you insisted, cause I also
took into account the precession of the Earth's rotational axis. I know
of no calendar inversion software (accessible to public) that does that.
They'll get even the season wrong if you go back that far, let alone the
day.

I wrote it first in BASIC (SIMONS BASIC cartridge - $5), then after
finding some German C compiler for Commodore in the consignment store
($10), I wrote that same calendar Program in C on the Commodore. In
early 1990s I didn't have access to university computers anymore, and
when I had my first XT ($30 from consignment store) I adjusted that C
calendar program to Borland's C ($20 with all the 11 or so yellow-red
books that accompanied the software - same consignment store). So I
created an EXE file for the calendar that ran on a DOS computer, which
last time just yesterday I used to convert calendars when reading a
history book. It runs fine in DOSBox emulator on linux.

I sometimes use other programs too, today, that I originally wrote on
that same Commodore. A two and three dimensional graphing/plotting
software that went through same modifications as the calendar program.
And as lately as the lock down Covid months, I was converting them to
C++ intending to make them fully object oriented. But my laptop (another
near-salvage I don't even remember from where - I think the Chinese
company I worked for were getting rid of them or something) stopped
getting charged and I had to leave that project inside that laptop.

On my XT, early in 1990s, I developed serious scientific programs to
compute various slow changing processes throughout hundreds of thousands
of years. That's how I found out Whites are Cro-magnons! How long it
takes for skin to become transparent by lack of enough sunlight. That
Neanderthals were transparent skinned people. How long the matriarchy
period lasted. etc.

Do you get the picture?

I don't need a $5000 computer for any reason under the sky, not even a
$500 computer. Those who need them must want to do a Jupiter flyby :)

Right now I'm using a computer that I bought last week for $12 in a
_thrift_store.

vallor wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Jan 2025 10:34:01 -0500, Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote in
> <vmb8t8$3id01$1@dont-email.me>:
>
>> On Thu, 1/16/2025 12:03 AM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>> On Tue, 14 Jan 2025 20:05:34 -0600, Hank Rogers wrote:
>>>
>>>> I think people are better off to get some type of imaging software ...
>>>
>>> On Linux systems, rsync works well. It’s essentially a bulk
>>> file-copying utility. That’s all you need to backup/restore Linux
>>> systems.
>>>
>>>
>> With Macrium, I can back up FAT32, NTFS, ExFAT, and ... EXT4. This means
>> when I image a dual-boot disk drive here, it is a *complete* image. I
>> can restore it to a brand new hard drive,
>> and it boots as if nothing had happened.
>>
>> As long as my Linux installs use EXT4 for slash, I'm fine and one
>> imaging tool does everything for me.
>>
>> The imaging is "smart". in that busy clusters and busy inodes are backed
>> up, not white space. If I have 20GB of files on a 1TB EXT4, the backup
>> image is a bit bigger than 20GB but not by much. Similarly, if I back up
>> 20GB of files on a 1TB NTFS, the output is not much bigger than 20GB.
>> And the NTFS and EXT4 can sit in the same MRIMG file,
>> there is no segregation involved and separate files for them. It's all
>> in a single file.
>>
>> Macrium even backs up the 16MB Microsoft Reserved, which has no file
>> system. It does that using the equivalent of "dd", but it does not throw
>> a wobbly and complain about what it has been asked to do. It puts that
>> back on a restore.
>>
>> Details and automation, are the key to push-button success.
>>
>> Paul
>
> I'm sure Macrium Reflect is a fine bit of software, but I wonder
> about the wisdom of imaging a mounted partition. I think the only
> way to do that safely would be to boot to a USB stick -- that way,
> you aren't trying to image mounted filesystems.
>

It works just fine on a running windows system. It uses Volume shadow
service. I'm pretty sure most other backup software can also work while
windows is running.

On 1/16/25 12:10 PM, Paul wrote:
> On Thu, 1/16/2025 6:22 AM, -hh wrote:
>
>>
>> Of course.  Overall, a challenge with the DIY topic is
>> differences in motivation:  is the DIY because money's tight?
>> Or is the motivation because tinkering with hardware is an
>> entertaining hobby/pastime?
>> Both motivations can & do exist, and can get conflated in discussions.
>
> The motivation, is we don't want to buy shit.

One does that by not buying junk brands, which has nothing to do with if
one is components or complete systems.

> Do I want a Dell with a four phase VCore, when
> I can have a twenty four phase VCore on an
> expensive motherboard ?
>
> Do I want a 230W power supply on a Dell, when
> I can pick up an 850W power supply at Best Buy ?
> Now, I can plug in an RTX4090 when I want to.
> On the Dell, that's... impossible (even if you
> went out and bought the 850W supply, it probably
> would not fit in the small Dell case, neither would
> the Dell cooling system be adequate for the thermal
> load and there wouldn't even be a mounting location
> for a fan to be added).

That's a criticism of Dell, not of all PC system manufacturers.

> When you do a build, you control everything, and
> no screwing around or taking shortcuts.

Doing all of in in-house is taking the "longcut", plus you've
effectively adopted all possible repair & warranty headaches too. When
the costs are significant, its not a trade-off to casually commit to.

> Let's take an example, Mr.LaptopMan.

Okay, Mr Logical_Fallacy_Man, because noting that the marketplace
reality is that 80% buy laptops now isn't an endorsement of that fact
that should get you upset and slinging lame Ad Hominems.

> Take the lady
> in the computer store the other day, a salesman
> explaining to her that "the laptop with the 4070
> is faster than the laptop with the 4060" for gaming.
> Well, what the salesman didn't tell the gaming lady,
> is that the owner will beat the piss out of the laptop
> and it will be knackered after only four years. While you
> are having a gaming experience, it won't last.
>
> Whereas, with a desktop, if I wear the keycaps off my
> keyboard playing Tetris, I just swap keyboards, takes
> about ten seconds. If the video cards burns the
> connector off, chuck it on the table, pop in another.

When the customer wants a laptop, offering a desktop solution is
inappropriate & will be disregarded.

Consider a guy going into a dealership to buy a sports car to race on
the track on weekends: a you really going to try to tell him that his
needs are all wrong and he should buy a big old truck instead because it
can haul more manure?

> And if I want four NVMe storage, I can pop in a board
> with four sleds on it, and boom, done.

Or buy one of these for a laptop...boom:

OWC Express 4M2 - Four-Slot Thunderbolt (40Gb/s) NVMe M.2 SSD Enclosure
for NVMe M.2 2280 SSDs

<https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/express-4m2>

OWC Express 4M2 - Four-Slot Thunderbolt (40Gb/s) NVMe M.2 SSD Enclosure
for NVMe M.2 2280 SSDs

> With this, I could install twenty four NVMe on six cards.
>
> "Asus Pro WS W790E-SAGE SE"
>
> https://dlcdnwebimgs.asus.com/gain/f8c9b3f4-1a07-4645-aa79-594c48bd4090/w692
>
> (Note desktop I/O style on the left)
>
> https://dlcdnwebimgs.asus.com/files/media/35d86ad4-c99a-49d7-b8bb-09601ad49164/images/swiper_left.png

Sure, but that's just a niche of a niche. And since Thunderbolt can
daisy-chain a half dozen devices per port, 6x4 = 24 NMVE's too.

Now to escape from niche corner cases, contemplate how many TB of SSD
storage users actually have, applying the Parato Principle to determine
what the ~80% max capability required use case solution is. YMMV, but I
doubt its more than 4TB.

> You're in control of the build. If something breaks,
> you're in control of the repair too. No returning a unit
> three times, hearing "no fault found", haranguing tech
> support for a replacement machine and so on. Think of
> the hair loss saved.

You very well may have little to no choice other than to try to fix it
yourself. What shops will even touch a DIY build these days?

FWIW, I had a conversation with a shop owner two weeks ago on servicing
some old sports gear I have and his response was that he's discontinued
it because the revenue's no longer worth the liability exposure risk.

> I don't want to use anyones "warranty service".

You may not have much choice in the matter anymore.

YMMV, but I recognize that there's value in having the option of DIYing
themselves, or delegating the headache to someone else to service.

-hh

On 1/16/25 3:40 PM, Physfitfreak wrote:
> On 1/16/25 5:42 AM, -hh wrote:
>> On 1/16/25 1:41 AM, Physfitfreak wrote:
>>> On 1/15/25 7:34 PM, Paul wrote:
>>>> The enthusiast sites have more info, if you need it.
>>>>
>>>> https://www.tomshardware.com/best-picks/best-pc-builds-gaming
>>>
>>>
>>> $500 computer is a "budget" computer these days? Hehe :)
>>
>> Sure is.
>>
>> In 1981, IBM's original PC 5150 debuted at $2,880 for a 64K system
>> with one floppy drive.  In today's dollars, that would be a shade over
>> $10K.
>>
>> Back in that era, PC Magazine's editor Bill Machrone quipped:
>> "the computer you want always costs $5,000."
>>
>> And 1984's price buster of the TI-99/4A started at $525.  What
>> percentage of your gross monthly pay was $525 back in 1984?
>> Don't know about you, but for me, it would've been around 33%.
>>
>>
>> -hh
>
>
> $525 was about half of what I made in 1984. Back then I was getting $700
> and something per month for TA/RA work in school. I also made money by
> tutoring ($75 per sitting no matter how long the sitting lasted - rarely
> over 4 hours). I had at least one tutoring session per week, so that was
> another $300 a month. So about $1000 per month, and I lived comfortably
> (money-wise that is - in reality I was conducting a tough as well as
> quite challenging life in graduate school).
>
> But you (and I so far in this post) are digressing from the point I made.

We're hitting different (but related) points. My point is that PCs used
to be a lot more expensive than this $500 price point for a new PC
today, which is why its pretty fair to call it "budget".

We could do the same with automobiles: 40 years ago, a new Porsche 911
cost $25K ... but $25K today buys a new Civic or another "budget" car.

> I didn't pay "$525" for a computer in 1984. {stores of salvage}
>
> Do you get the picture?

Sure: you've not bought new, but used salvage/used gear. And that used
gear is cheaper than buying new isn't a particularly surprising fact.

> I don't need a $5000 computer for any reason under the sky, not even a
> $500 computer. Those who need them must want to do a Jupiter flyby :)
>
> Right now I'm using a computer that I bought last week for $12 in a
> _thrift_store.

Good for you. For my own workflow/use cases, I have a pretty hefty
dataset for which a high latency interferes and is hindering, so I'm
willing to pay for the hardware which provides a much lower latency: a
decade ago, the solution was RAID0 hard drives .. today, its SSD.

-hh

On Thu, 16 Jan 2025 14:40:22 -0600, Physfitfreak wrote:

> in reality I was conducting a tough as well as
> quite challenging life in graduate school).
>

Bravo.

These fucking COLA losers could never hope to imagine what
rigorous graduate school, especially in STEM, is like.

They are all pampered academic losers.

--
Systemd: solving all the problems that you never knew you had.

On 1/16/25 2:40 PM, Physfitfreak wrote:
> I don't need a $5000 computer for any reason under the sky, not even a
> $500 computer. Those who need them must want to do a Jupiter flyby :)

Here, this will help you do a Jupiter flyby.

Go to the site and click on play button.

https://thiazitch.bandcamp.com/track/-

On 1/16/25 3:44 PM, Physfitfreak wrote:
> On 1/16/25 2:40 PM, Physfitfreak wrote:
>> I don't need a $5000 computer for any reason under the sky, not even a
>> $500 computer. Those who need them must want to do a Jupiter flyby :)
>
>
> Here, this will help you do a Jupiter flyby.
>
> Go to the site and click on play button.
>
> https://thiazitch.bandcamp.com/track/-

This one is what Relf and his super special computer is riding on right
now. Join him. It will go past the edge of the Solar system.

https://thiazitch.bandcamp.com/track/--5

On 1/16/25 3:44 PM, Physfitfreak wrote:
> On 1/16/25 2:40 PM, Physfitfreak wrote:
>> I don't need a $5000 computer for any reason under the sky, not even a
>> $500 computer. Those who need them must want to do a Jupiter flyby :)
>
>
> Here, this will help you do a Jupiter flyby.
>
> Go to the site and click on play button.
>
> https://thiazitch.bandcamp.com/track/-

Don't forget to place that "/-" at the end of your link cause the link I
provided omits the dash.

On 1/16/25 3:34 PM, -hh wrote:
> but $25K today buys a new Civic or another "budget" car.

$25K car is a "budget" car these days? Hehe :-)

The last car I bought is a Toyota Echo 2002, in 2017, for $1600. That's
one thousand dollars, plus another 600 dollars! The damn thing is
indestructible. I have not spent one penny on any repairs on it for the
past 8 years. I don't consider changing a tire or two, or oil and filter
change or insurance and registration and inspection costs as "repair" of
course, cause those stuff are routine, not a failure on the car's part.

It runs great. With one gallon of fuel it travels between 35 to 40
miles. I drive the diameter of this humongous Dallas metroplex with it
and the fuel gauge needle hardly even feels it.

Paying $25K for a car is what keeps many true Americans from emigrating
to Russia. As long as they're charging you 1562% more than you need to
pay, believe me you'll keep them here!

On Thu, 1/16/2025 3:48 PM, Hank Rogers wrote:
> vallor wrote:
>> On Thu, 16 Jan 2025 10:34:01 -0500, Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote in
>> <vmb8t8$3id01$1@dont-email.me>:
>>
>>> On Thu, 1/16/2025 12:03 AM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>>> On Tue, 14 Jan 2025 20:05:34 -0600, Hank Rogers wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I think people are better off to get some type of imaging software ...
>>>>
>>>> On Linux systems, rsync works well. It’s essentially a bulk
>>>> file-copying utility. That’s all you need to backup/restore Linux
>>>> systems.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> With Macrium, I can back up FAT32, NTFS, ExFAT, and ... EXT4. This means
>>> when I image a dual-boot disk drive here, it is a *complete* image. I
>>> can restore it to a brand new hard drive,
>>> and it boots as if nothing had happened.
>>>
>>> As long as my Linux installs use EXT4 for slash, I'm fine and one
>>> imaging tool does everything for me.
>>>
>>> The imaging is "smart". in that busy clusters and busy inodes are backed
>>> up, not white space. If I have 20GB of files on a 1TB EXT4, the backup
>>> image is a bit bigger than 20GB but not by much. Similarly, if I back up
>>> 20GB of files on a 1TB NTFS, the output is not much bigger than 20GB.
>>> And the NTFS and EXT4 can sit in the same MRIMG file,
>>> there is no segregation involved and separate files for them. It's all
>>> in a single file.
>>>
>>> Macrium even backs up the 16MB Microsoft Reserved, which has no file
>>> system. It does that using the equivalent of "dd", but it does not throw
>>> a wobbly and complain about what it has been asked to do. It puts that
>>> back on a restore.
>>>
>>> Details and automation, are the key to push-button success.
>>>
>>>     Paul
>>
>> I'm sure Macrium Reflect is a fine bit of software, but I wonder
>> about the wisdom of imaging a mounted partition.  I think the only
>> way to do that safely would be to boot to a USB stick -- that way,
>> you aren't trying to image mounted filesystems.
>>
>
> It works just fine on a running windows system. It uses Volume shadow service. I'm pretty sure most other backup software can also work while windows is running.
>

They *all* use that.
That's because setting a shadow is so easy,
even home users can do one manually.

You can freeze a copy of C: for example, and
run a Robocopy over it.

*******

$ wbAdmin start backup -backupTarget:D: -allCritical # "Windows 7 Backup.exe" run time 3 minutes.

Retrieving volume information...
This will back up (EFI System Partition),W11HOME(C:),(\\?\Volume{c3bc5ab1-c5f0-4dae-838c-751ef868e237}\) to D:.
The backup operation to D: is starting.
Creating a shadow copy of the volumes specified for backup... <=== VSS (C: partition)
Creating a shadow copy of the volumes specified for backup... <=== VSS (Recovery partition )
Creating a backup of volume (EFI System Partition) (100.00 MB), copied (0%).
....
The backup of volume (EFI System Partition) (100.00 MB) completed successfully.
Creating a backup of volume W11HOME(C:), copied (0%).
....
Creating a backup of volume W11HOME(C:), copied (95%).
The backup of volume W11HOME(C:) completed successfully.
The backup of volume (649.00 MB) completed successfully.
Summary of the backup operation:
------------------

The backup operation successfully completed.
The backup of volume (EFI System Partition) (100.00 MB) completed successfully.
The backup of volume W11HOME(C:) completed successfully.
The backup of volume (649.00 MB) completed successfully.
Log of files successfully backed up:
C:\WINDOWS\Logs\WindowsBackup\Backup-16-01-2025_22-52-06.log

$ dir *.vhdx

Directory of D:\WindowsImageBackup\WALLACE\Backup 2025-01-16 225206

Thu, 01/16/2025 05:55 PM 72,240,594,944 0bd6166a-0836-4041-891c-792df2c72abd.vhdx <=== C: partition
Thu, 01/16/2025 05:55 PM 620,756,992 c3bc5ab1-c5f0-4dae-838c-751ef868e237.vhdx <=== Recovery partition
Thu, 01/16/2025 05:55 PM 60,817,408 Esp.vhdx <=== FAT32 boot materials

It's too bad the restore didn't run smooth like that.
But that's just to demonstrate that programs use shadows.
Even disk2vhd from Russinovich, I think that sets a shadow too.

Paul

On 1/16/2025 4:38 PM, Low Code Larry wrote:

> These fucking COLA losers could never hope to imagine what
> rigorous graduate school, especially in STEM, is like.

You must've gotten Ds in your programming courses, if you took any at all.

On Thu, 16 Jan 2025 10:34:01 -0500, Paul wrote:

> On Thu, 1/16/2025 12:03 AM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 14 Jan 2025 20:05:34 -0600, Hank Rogers wrote:
>>
>>> I think people are better off to get some type of imaging software ...
>>
>> On Linux systems, rsync works well. It’s essentially a bulk
>> file-copying utility. That’s all you need to backup/restore Linux
>> systems.
>>
> With Macrium, I can back up FAT32, NTFS, ExFAT, and ... EXT4.

I’m sure you can, but you cannot switch filesystem types that way.

File-level copying tools (like rsync) don’t care about low-level details
like volume formats, which makes it easy to switch between them.

On Wed, 15 Jan 2025 02:52:40 -0500, Paul wrote:

> The Windows defragmenter is a pretty clever design now.

I’m sure it is. But it is yet more overhead that slows down a Windows
system compared to Linux running on the same hardware.

On Thu, 16 Jan 2025 15:36:35 +0100, Carlos E.R. wrote:

> On 2025-01-16 00:20, rbowman wrote:
>> On Wed, 15 Jan 2025 13:51:08 +0100, Carlos E.R. wrote:
>>
>>> Hum. That is not completely true, either. Some distributions stopped
>>> supporting 32 bit machines.
>>
>> The only one I came across was Debian. The machine itself was 64-bit
>> but our legacy code was 32-bit, as was Esri's ArcObjects. I think
>> Ubuntu 18.04 was the last release where you had a prayer of finding
>> 32-bit Motif libraries and others. It's all fine to pass the 32-bit
>> flag to gcc but if you can't link the libs you're done.
>
> openSUSE Tumbleweed still has a 32 bit version, I believe.

So it does. I don't know if I'd found it or if Debian was the first to
turn up and I used it. I probably still would have went with Debian. For a
production machine old, slow, stick-in-the-mud is good versus a rolling
distribution.

On Thu, 16 Jan 2025 12:28:47 -0600, chrisv wrote:

> I think us DIY guys tend to overspend and overbuild our systems. So we
> don't save any money, but they are better-built.

I keep looking at the Antec Sonata case gathering dust and think I should
do something with it. The case is probably as obsolete as whatever is in
it. It does have an upgraded PS since the heavily hyped Antec PS was one
of a batch with a high failure rate.

Then reality sets in. What would I do with it? I'm not a gamer. That
reality set in when the video card failed and all I could find in the
local shops were Hyper-Phaze Mark 7 Dual Thrusters that were about $200
more than I was going to pay for a generic card.

On Thu, 16 Jan 2025 18:06:00 -0500, Paul wrote:

> You can freeze a copy of C: for example, and run a Robocopy over it.

Until you hit the limitations of Windows and Robocopy, and have to give up
on it and use Linux instead.

<https://www.theregister.com/2010/09/24/sysadmin_file_tools/>

On 1/16/25 5:56 PM, Physfitfreak wrote:
> On 1/16/25 3:34 PM, -hh wrote:
>> but $25K today buys a new Civic or another "budget" car.
>
>
>
> $25K car is a "budget" car these days? Hehe :-)

New car, just like how the conversation was originally about new PCs.

And yes, 'budget' in the context of new car prices, since Edmunds' 3Q24
report found that the average new car in the USA cost $47,542.

And FYI, average used car price was $27,177.

> The last car I bought is a Toyota Echo 2002, in 2017, for $1600.

Bully for you. Did it include a radio? My first car didn't.

-hh

On Fri, 17 Jan 2025 00:11:25 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro
<ldo@nz.invalid> wrote in <vmc77d$3nl2p$5@dont-email.me>:

> On Wed, 15 Jan 2025 02:52:40 -0500, Paul wrote:
>
>> The Windows defragmenter is a pretty clever design now.
>
> I’m sure it is. But it is yet more overhead that slows down a Windows
> system compared to Linux running on the same hardware.

Slow your roll, Chachi:

$ whatis e4defrag
e4defrag (8) - online defragmenter for ext4 file system

--
-v

On Fri, 17 Jan 2025 02:49:17 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro
<ldo@nz.invalid> wrote in <vmcgfd$3osq8$2@dont-email.me>:

> On Thu, 16 Jan 2025 18:06:00 -0500, Paul wrote:
>
>> You can freeze a copy of C: for example, and run a Robocopy over it.
>
> Until you hit the limitations of Windows and Robocopy, and have to give
> up on it and use Linux instead.
>
> <https://www.theregister.com/2010/09/24/sysadmin_file_tools/>

I suspect things may have changed in the last *14 years*.

--
-v System76 Thelio Mega v1.1 x86_64 NVIDIA RTX 3090 Ti
OS: Linux 6.12.9 Release: Mint 21.3 Mem: 258G
"Do not remove this tagline under penalty of law."

On Thu, 1/16/2025 7:27 PM, rbowman wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Jan 2025 12:28:47 -0600, chrisv wrote:
>
>> I think us DIY guys tend to overspend and overbuild our systems. So we
>> don't save any money, but they are better-built.
>
> I keep looking at the Antec Sonata case gathering dust and think I should
> do something with it. The case is probably as obsolete as whatever is in
> it. It does have an upgraded PS since the heavily hyped Antec PS was one
> of a batch with a high failure rate.
>
> Then reality sets in. What would I do with it? I'm not a gamer. That
> reality set in when the video card failed and all I could find in the
> local shops were Hyper-Phaze Mark 7 Dual Thrusters that were about $200
> more than I was going to pay for a generic card.
>

That's a fine case. I own two of them. One of them seems to be older
than the other, and the older one has weird slots for the addin cards.
You can't add a two-slot wide video card, because a "bump" on the inside
side of the case, conflicts with the two-slot-wide flat faceplate on the video card.

But other than that, it has the excellent trays system. One generation
of trays has black rubber cushions (not very thick), and the later one
is silicone rubber and a bit thicker.

The holes in the tray support legacy drives (like up to 6TB in capacity).
The Helium drives (up to 24TB) have the holes in a different place. One
guy on the Internet, used his 3D printer to make an Antec compatible tray
with the holes in the correct place for the Helium drives. But I don't have
any of those, so the 6TB is about the largest drive I can use in that PC
(without using the inconvenient 5.25" bays in the top front).

The Test Machine (ten years old), the trays have been sliding in and out
of that thing for ten years. The SATA cables see a lot of use.

I would not throw the Antec away. If anything, put it up on Ebay (with trays)
and sell it to someone who likes those.

For those who don't know about the trays, they slide out towards you,
and compared to the hell of mounting drives in 5.25" bays, they are
a dream to use. You still use four screws to fit the tray to the
drive, but that's not hard to do, and I keep a Philips head screwdriver
on the desk, to change drives.

Don't use the USB2 ports on the Sonata case, because the wiring is
a bit off on those. Antec didn't seem to have someone with an electrical
background, to verify their front panel connectors. Buzz out the wiring on
the assembly, and see if you can spot the swap. Fortunately, they
never reversed VCC and GND on their wiring, so there were no "fireworks".

Paul

On Thu, 1/16/2025 10:51 PM, vallor wrote:
> On Fri, 17 Jan 2025 02:49:17 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro
> <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote in <vmcgfd$3osq8$2@dont-email.me>:
>
>> On Thu, 16 Jan 2025 18:06:00 -0500, Paul wrote:
>>
>>> You can freeze a copy of C: for example, and run a Robocopy over it.
>>
>> Until you hit the limitations of Windows and Robocopy, and have to give
>> up on it and use Linux instead.
>>
>> <https://www.theregister.com/2010/09/24/sysadmin_file_tools/>
>
> I suspect things may have changed in the last *14 years*.
>

I think we discussed this one already.

That's *not* how you transfer sixty million files.

You image the partition with a cluster level tool,
and by comparison to file level, it screams. It
runs at disk speed.

Then at the other machine, you restore at the cluster
level. Now, all sixty million files are there, and you've
saved enough time to take a vacation.

I have samples of fragmented volumes here, stored as .mrimg .
If I want to show an example of a fragmented volume, I can load
one of those up in about ten minutes or so. The top one, is
64 million files stored in a single directory. The second one
is 64 million files in a tree.

writeflat-64million-Ddrive-736391-00-00.mrimg 2,323,353,194 bytes
writeidx4-64million-Ddrive-736391-00-00.mrimg 2,381,377,130 bytes

It's the same with using 7ZIP for archiving. 7ZIP can run pretty
fast, on solid block files of a good size. However, if you feed it
a tree structure full of small files, it doesn't matter how fast your
CPU is, the program "starves" for want of responses from the file system.
You might get 10MB/sec from it. That's because the disk heads are
flying around. Even if you use my RAMDrive for this, it's *still*
slow. That doesn't help either, as just the file system stack takes
too long per file handled.

But working at the cluster level works a treat, a backup and restore
and you're done. And it isn't even lunch hour yet. It does take
time, for the backup tool to "crawl" the tree and make the
index they like to use. That's still an expensive part of it.

If you attack that problem file-by-file, it's the heat death of the
universe bad.

dir in command prompt took four minutes. Dumped to list.txt

$ tail list.txt
05/26/2024 06:09 AM 7 3FFFFF8.txt
05/26/2024 06:09 AM 7 3FFFFF9.txt
05/26/2024 06:09 AM 7 3FFFFFA.txt
05/26/2024 06:09 AM 7 3FFFFFB.txt
05/26/2024 06:09 AM 7 3FFFFFC.txt
05/26/2024 06:09 AM 7 3FFFFFD.txt
05/26/2024 06:09 AM 7 3FFFFFE.txt
05/26/2024 06:09 AM 7 3FFFFFF.txt
67108864 File(s) 469,762,048 bytes
1 Dir(s) 7,497,859,072 bytes free
$ head list.txt
Volume in drive F is RAMDrive
Volume Serial Number is 50A8-F4E5

Directory of F:\out

05/26/2024 06:09 AM <DIR> .
05/26/2024 04:47 AM 7 0000000.txt
05/26/2024 04:47 AM 7 0000001.txt
05/26/2024 04:47 AM 7 0000002.txt
05/26/2024 04:47 AM 7 0000003.txt

$ wc -l list.txt
67108872 list.txt

Windows has a copy of tar.exe in System32 now, and I
can try that, but it processes about 10MB/sec. A wild guess
is that this might take two hours, but I can't really be sure.
(You can't afford to turn on Verbose, or the terminal
might become the limiting factor.)

I'm trying to avoid explorer.exe getting a "whiff" of
the folder, because once that happens, explorer rails
on one core as it counts files and so on. The way to stop
explorer.exe from working on that, is to rip the file system
away, and once the "pointer" to the file system is not
available any more, it stops. You would not want explorer.exe
doing the copy. tar.exe is looking less efficient than
a backup and restore (the restore of 64 million files took
about 3 minutes 40 seconds). You can also kill explorer.exe in
Task Manager and start another one, if you like.

Robocopy should not be counting files like explorer.exe does
when it prepares to do a copy, but I would expect it's going
to be one of those two hour things. It's going to be in a
different ballpark.

Paul