You could grab that Lenovo—honestly, 16:10 aspect ratio monitors are pretty rare these days, so your options are basically narrowed down by default anyway—and besides, finding a decent 20" screen at that price point is going to be a massive uphill battle.
Which camera are we talking about here? What version of Windows are you running? How does the picture actually look inside the webcam app itself? Might be worth grabbing DirectX 9.0 C while you're at it—sometimes that's the culprit behind these kinds of glitches: http://www.softwarepatch.com/windows/directx.html
Look, you've got a pretty decent processor—nothing crazy, but it gets the job done—so you can definitely push that card without hitting a massive bottleneck. Honestly, though, IMHO... $67 I wouldn't bother ditching the cooler for that card just yet; it’s already served its purpose and still works fine.
Look, I’m going to say this one more time—open a dedicated thread for that GPU of yours or you’re getting banned. We already moved all your posts here to keep things organized, yet you’re still out here doing your own thing—honestly, which part of what we've told you so far just didn't click?
James Nguyen13 said:In the past, we weren't seeing credit rating agencies flip-flopping so wildly, giving out assessments that are the complete opposite of what they were saying just a year or two ago.
At its core, this is a question of credibility. How can a single credit rating agency decide a country's credit rating is trash when they were calling it nearly top-tier just last year? It's not like all those loans and debts just popped into existence overnight!
Look, if they couldn't manage to sell a single bag of rotten potatoes in that year, then yeah, it’s perfectly normal for their rating to take a dive—nobody's going to want to dump money into their sinking ship.
Just stay away from HP—honestly—and since we're looking at the budget end of the spectrum here, you don't really have much of a selection to begin with.
Brian Campbell36 said:I haven't run into anything quite like this before—everything was running smoothly for a few days, then suddenly, my Windows 7x64 takes a full 2 minutes and 7 seconds just to get me to the desktop where I can actually start working. No viruses here, I've got 8 GB of RAM, I keep things cleaned up regularly, and I've never had an issue like this until now. Does anyone have a clue why the disk usage is spiking so hard? (The HDD is fine, I already ran tests)🤷
So, how does the boot look in Safe Mode? You should probably try using System Restore to roll back to a point before this mess started. Did you happen to install any new software, drivers, or whatever else in the meantime?
Well, sort of—but they don't actually control the money; it's primarily the central banks that muddy the waters there. Honestly, with this recent wave of massive credit rating downgrades across the European Union, the bond market just took a massive hit to the jaw—which means this whole twisted "strategy" to bail out the European Union monetary union is probably going to collapse before it even gets started.
On your C drive, you’re supposed to see three main folders: Program Files, macOS, and Users. You can pretty much ignore the Users folder—it’s just clutter—but everything else you've got installed plus the OS itself really shouldn't be eating up more than about 15 GB.
Scott Reed9 said:Hey everyone, hoping someone here can weigh in on this. I haven't seen any threads tackling this specific angle yet, so if it's already been covered, feel free to nuked this post.
We've all watched the recent credit rating downgrades hitting various USA nations, but I'm not even looking at the downgrades themselves or what they trigger. What's actually eating at me is the fact that just two or three agencies—Standard & Poor's, Moody's, and Fitch—basically hold a monopoly on sovereign credit ratings. It’s wild to me that such a tiny group of people can wield this much power over the entire world and basically decide the fate of millions.
I want to know how this whole system actually works, whether it even needs to exist in its current form, and who really stands to gain from it.
Look, if a country wants to go out and borrow money on the bond market, investors need to know one thing: creditworthiness. They don't want to get burned by lending cash to someone who won't be able to pay them back. So, they turn to rating agencies to track market movements and assess risk—that’s just the mechanism at play here. Now, you can absolutely question the objectivity of those numbers—since, let's face it, the very entities being rated are the ones funding the rating agencies—but we are talking about estimates, not some divine truth etched in stone. If politicians decide to act like drunken billionaires, you can't exactly blame the agency when their rating drops and they suddenly can't service their debts, right?
And for the record, a rating agency isn't a bank—let's not confuse the two.
Credit rating agencies are easily some of the most powerful geopolitical and economic institutions on the planet.
They employ specialists who scrape together every scrap of data they can find on banks, corporations, and entire countries to weigh in on their financial outlook. Essentially, they signal whether a nation is heading toward what we call "bankruptcy." In reality, a country doesn't go bankrupt like a business does; it just means you aren't getting your money back when you invest in them. A more detailed breakdown for beginners—this should make things a lot clearer:
Bottom line: they have massive influence over governments and everyday lives. To a Non-American, a few things seem totally off: - Why don't they downgrade the USA from that top-tier AAA rating, which they technically should based on the criteria? Instead, it feels like they just bumped up the debt ceiling limit and acted like nothing happened. - It makes you suspicious that the two biggest players are both based right here in the USA. Now, a German minister is pushing to establish an agency outside the US that would supposedly have better access to info and provide "more accurate" opinions.
My take? This is going to cause massive headaches. If it hasn't started yet, a new cold war is coming. The European Union will launch its own agency, the USA has its guys, and China has theirs. As the crisis deepens—(and in my opinion, this crisis isn't over and won't be for a long time, despite the illusion that things have stabilized. The numbers stay ugly; we're just delaying the collapse of the Western system)—politics will start leaning harder on these agencies. Their results will diverge, and eventually, the whole thing might just become meaningless. And then we all head straight to...
Whoever navigates the chaos best is the one who survives. I think Europeans are in the worst position of the bunch. But anyway...🙂
I'm predicting that in about 5 to 10 years, we'll see the first "fun" geopolitical phase, and in 15 to 25 years, things will turn into a full-blown circus unless something sustainable is invented.
The US actually had its rating downgraded to AA+ nearly six months ago. 🙂
Look, if everything is running rock solid right now, there’s really no reason to mess with it—but honestly, that kind of thing is totally dependent on the specific chip you're rocking. Some people are going to feel the need to push it to 4.2 GHz just to feel alive, while others won't even touch 4.8 GHz.
50 GB isn't actually that much if you're just running a few lightweight apps... what usually eats up all your space by default is the reserved storage for the Recycle Bin and System Restore—those things automatically scale based on how big your system partition is. You can totally tweak their settings in Properties and probably claw back about 10 GB that way. Also, run Disk Cleanup to clear out the junk. Are there any other folders sitting on your C drive besides Program Files, Windows, and Users?
Go ahead and paste a screenshot of that duplicate finder tool you're using.
If your buddy did things the right way and installed the Ultimate version—meaning he wiped the drive clean during the setup process—then you shouldn't be seeing any duplicates at all.
Basically, file shredders exist for one reason: to make sure data recovery is impossible—as in, there's absolutely no way to reconstruct those files once they've been nuked by a standard delete command.
Look, if you think his claims are total nonsense, just shut him down with some actual logic—a smiley face isn't exactly a winning argument. And for the record, I didn't delete your post. 😛
Seriously though, how is someone even trying to shove a 3.5" drive into a 2.5" enclosure? It’s physically impossible—like, what were you thinking? 😁
darkmarlin16, just print out that link I sent you earlier—it’s the only 3.5" PATA enclosure they actually had in stock, so take it down there and see if they'll swap it out. Why on earth didn't you just bring the drive with you in the first place? 🙂
Portable 4 TB drives started popping up on the market maybe two or three months ago—think Seagate or Hitachi—but I haven't seen them around here yet; you can usually find the 3 TB versions if you look. Now, if you aren't planning on lugging this stuff around, a NAS is a way better move. You just need a decent router or switch since you access everything over the LAN; you can't just plug a NAS directly into your computer like a standard drive. Though, I'm pretty sure the ones they have over at Telebit are out of stock—WD stopped making those specific models about four years ago.
You could go this route: grab a portable drive, maybe two 3 TB units, and just hook them up to your PC via eSATA or FireWire. Honestly, don't even bother with USB 2.0—it’s absolute garbage and painfully slow:
Or, say, a NAS like this one:
If you do decide to pull the trigger on a NAS, my advice is to check the pricing over here. You'll get a much wider selection and higher-quality gear: