Tom's Hardware of Finland

I need them to add the ink/pen UI tools soon so I can stop marking up PDFs in Edge lol

I was so annoyed when the most recent upstream chromium suddenly had support for Windows’ scaling settings, no doubt from microsoft working with them, because it looked awful (compared to all the old win32 apps which look much better with a 10% bump)

I had to go look at the CLI arguments I used to disable chromium DPI scaling under linux years ago and thankfully they work here too

It’s just that I use ff everywhere else’s so all my bookmarks and tabs and stuff are synced

Lastpass is surprisingly much better on ios, that was a pleasant surprise.

Not having punctuation on the main keyboard view is pretty annoying. Wish I could just get rid of this dictation key I’ll never use.

I am an inveterate swipe typer as much as this sacrifices some of iOS’ privacy advantages, and I like swiftkey’s layout better for that reason and others

@km if you liked haptics on the keyboard Gboard on iOS just added them and the hardware for iOS haptics feels great imo

there’s an ‘enable dictation’ toggle buried somewhere in the keyboard settings

hit request desktop site and that’s sorted

The button remains even with the setting off. Its sole, sad proposal is to pop up a modal asking if you want to enable dictation. What a waste of space. Also hate that the suggestions are too busy showing pretty animations whiles your type to keep up with what letters you actually hit, so I hit the wrong prediction almost 100% of them time.

Wish I didn’t have to re-buy swiftkey :frowning: oh, apparently Microsoft bought them??

Day 2 of Kinesis Advantage and I’ve regained about 10% of the 25% speed I lost, sitting at around 75 wpm down from 90 on the old Freestyle Edge. Highly recommend keybr.com for training - they even have what appears to be synchronous competitive multiplayer.

I’m disappointed that the only Typing of the Dead game on Steam is the port of the gross grindhouse Wii game. I know of Epistory but not many other typing games and it’s bizarrely one of the largest holes I’ve found in Giant Bomb’s wiki.

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This is now the km complains about ios thread

Punctuation on these keyboards is making me scream.

SwiftKey follows the iOS conventions for punctuation and spacing and should not feel any different from how you are used to typing.

So steve jobs decided that commas shouldn’t be followed by a space, and now no keyboard will do it automatically?? Trying to put underscores around a word made me want to throw this thing across the room! That and the far too aggressive autocorrect, how do people live like this

I like healthkit a lot though, that’s kind of surprising to me

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AMD is seriously going to own the consumer desktop space unless something totally unforeseeable happens

I’m just thrilled that Ice Lake U is apparently happening in the summertime because I do not want to drag my notebook to Xmas, hope Apple doesn’t leave me hanging

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Here’s a post about how important certain housekeeping is, with computers.

I’ve had my Laptop for 3 years. Its been awhile since I ran a fairly hefty game on it. Decided to install Dark Souls 2 and The Turing Test. The laptop is a Dell E6330 with an Ivy Bridge i5-3360m. Its one of, if not the highest clocked Ivy i5’s. and in terms of dual core CPU power, keeps up with current laptop dual cores. Because the clockspeed is so high. The point is, its a chip which could get pretty hot. Its a 2013 laptop, which I bought refurbished in 2016. The refurbish was so good, it looked brand spanking new. Anyway…

Temps in Dark Souls 2 were consistently 91c or more. It seems to throttle at 93c. As it would never go over that and would suddenly dip down, when it hit 93c. It didn’t used to be like that. So…I took my laptop apart and applied fresh thermal paste. It was otherwise quite clean inside. I blasted some air through the fan and radiator, for good measure. but they didn’t need it.

The thermal paste was fairly dry and while there was a ton of it all around the chip, there really didn’t seem to be much of it actually on the chip. The chip was pretty clean and the copper contact for the heatpipe was completely clean, over the chip area. Its not supposed to be thick, but there is supposed to be a visible layer.

Anyway, all applied with fresh stuff. and my temps are now back to like when it was new. With Dark Souls 2: 81-83c. With occasional quick peaks to 85c and often quickly dipping into the 70’s. So I’m looking at about a 10c drop in temps for Dark Souls 2. Temps in KoTOR 2 were in the mid 60’s, before I re-aplied the thermal paste. So you can see how much more demanding Dark Souls 2 is on the CPU. *and the temps are the same, in KoTOR 2. So the old thermal paste was keeping the cooling system from being able to bleed heat in the highest demand situations. But it was adequate for something less demanding.

Taking this thing apart and putting it back together was fairly hellish. However, the quality is good, so nothing broke and nothing felt like it would break, easily. (Unlike my fat PS3, where the clamps for the ribbon cables are made from the softest plastic ever. and I broke the clamp for the card reader so it no longer works. Thankfully, that was the first clamp I tried. So I was super delicate with the rest.)

I have also had professional experience with minor dissassembly and parts replacement of this exact Dell model, as well as others in its same line and some other Dells. It would have been a lot more hellish, otherwise. Because some of the panels have very specific ways in which they need to be taken off. Particularly the keayboard area. But I was already aware of some of the tricks.

Here are some pics from the laptop:

Laptop speaker drivers!

here is the mainboard

Here is the cooling setup for the CPU. I don’t have a discrete GPU, so this is it.


The CPU is under that little plate with the four large screws.

This is the radiator/heatsink. Its quite small. So, the heatpipe moves heat from the tiny plate over the CPU, to this radiator. And then the turbine fan blows air out through the radiator.

There is very little airflow for the fan to intake. The main intake is underneath


and with the bottom attached, this crappy vent is right over the ram. which hugs right up against it. So yeah, that fan is choked.

It can also techinically take air from the other side. This is underneath the keyboard. But there aren’t any vents up top. So its just passively pulling from whatever cracks will give.

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I should probably re-goop my ivy desktop at some point if I’m going to have it for another six years but I am really not looking forward to taking it apart to do that

Coincidentally I had to do the same thing for my 2013 MacBook Pro last week because it was shutting down under any sort of load. When I checked temps, it hit 90C very quickly even under modest usage like a simple Premiere timeline. After replacing the thermal paste, I’m still running hotter than when it was new (mid-40s idle/light usage) and it maintains a steady 96C with no underclocking while running Prime95. Not bad for $5 of paste and an hour of work.

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Prime 95 is a good quick way to test stability. But its unrealistic for temps. It will heat your processor up like nothing else. especially if you do any of the tests which aren’t the mixed test. I usually do the second test and let it cycle to the 20th pass, for stabilty. Don’t get me wrong, its fun to generate all that heat and it is a pretty quick way to shotgun your CPU for stability. But I take issue with people worrying about not keeping moderate temps in prime95. And I also wouldn’t let it run overnight on an overclock or a scenario where cooling isn’t good. Its just too risky, IMO.

In my opinion, the best test for temps is Handbraking with an at least 3GB 1080p res movie file and convert to DVD res and like half the bitrate. With a bunch of quality setttings turned on. (or make a an ISO or full quality rip of a DVD and then compress it in the same fashion) And that’s because handbrake is a realistic load temp. Its actual work a lot of people will/may do, and it keeps a consistently high load on your CPU. Due to that, it will generally heat things up more than most games. Handbrake is also a very good stability test. I have had it fail, after everything else ran fine.

And the best overall stability test to set and forget, is Realbench. Because realbench uses a variety of real software and mimics actual workloads. You can let it loop overnight.

however, you should always try your favorite programs, as well as reboot a couple of times. Because all of those scenarios can reveal instability.


I usually use GC Extreme thermal paste. As it beats the old classics such as Arctic Silver Ceramique, by a few degrees. And it doesn’t need any “cure” time, like some others do. But I couldn’t find my tube.
So for this laptop, I used what I could find: Scythe’s stock grease. Which reportedly is only about 1-2 degrees hotter than GC Extreme. However, it seems like it needed some “cure” time. As I’m now consistently 79c or less, in Dark Souls 2 only going up to the early 80’s, here or there. Whereas I was averaging 81c before. With some quick peaks to 85c and infrequent dips to the late 70’s.

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I usually re-grease my desktops every 1 - 2 years. Its pretty easy to do and I’m usually running overclocks which I want to keep in top form. I’m also probably in there for some other reason, anyway.

This is the first laptop I have ever re-greased. Its also the only laptop I have owned, besides an old ibook I bought used (from a co-worker( to try out Apple; then it blew a solder joint and wouldn’t get passed the startup noise. Apparently it was a common problem with a batch of ibooks.

ITX + I need it for work makes disassembling it far enough to do that a huge headache

it’s been six years & I’m at the point where my voltage-stable overclock can push it just above 85c on a hot day if I manage to push an actual solid 100% load for more than a few minutes (games are fine) so I’m starting to consider it

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My desktop is ITX nowadays, too. But my case comes completely apart. So its fairly easy to work with. Whereas the Micro ATX case I had, only had side and top panel removal. It was markedly more difficult to work in. even though it was at least twice as large.

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yeah that’s why I’m eyeing zaber sentry style cases for next time but they’re expensive and it’s a ways out for me either way

Those PCI-E riser cables have really solved things for GPUs. Its kinda strange that its only been within about the past 4 years, that such a thing has really caught hold.

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