So, this 'new' computer of mine is really quite different than any other computer experience I've had before. As I've covered in more detail before, I built a couple computers after I became a nurse that were good, but I was the warranty and that just ended up pissing me off. I then bought a nearly top of the line custom built computer from Origin. It suited me just fine until I needed a new graphics card, wanting to go from the 2080 to a 3080. As this was during the COVID pandemic and great graphics card shortage, I couldn't find a card to buy at reasonable price for months. It finally hit me that I could get one in a new computer as the system integrators had them in stock. Origin was both more expensive and would take a much longer time to deliver the computer, so I went with NZXT. I got that computer with a 3080 and all was well until I got a 4K monitor and realized the 3080 wasn't ideal for gaming in 4K at ultra gaming settings and ray tracing on. So about a year and a half later, I got another NZXT, this time with a 4090 in it. A year later after quitting my job, I treated myself to a no holds barred, top of the line, best system integrator out there, computer. You can read about my computer history in detail here, with the last step here.
That's my current computer. It's from Falcon Northwest and it is truly balls to the wall badass in every way. Until just recently it had the top of the line Intel processor, a 14900k. It has the top of the line video card, an Nvidia RTX 4090 founders edition. It has 64 GB of RAM, 4 TB of hard drive space, and runs much faster than anything I've ever experienced before.
Falcon Northwest has been great. The sales process, explained in the post linked above, was wonderful as they under promised and over delivered on everything. One thing they didn't include was a code for a game that was supposed to be included. I started a support ticket about this, and they came through with a replacement code that same day. In June they sent out a notice with a fix for a problem that had come up with Intel processors. It really didn't affect me as I wasn't overclocking my system at all, but they still went above and beyond in taking care of me.
In March of this year, I had to restore the computer. I tried to install a program and realized it might be actual malware halfway through, but stopping that process and deleting it borked the computer. You can read about it in this update post. The short version of it is that Falcon Northwest customizes the Windows experience so much that you don't simply format the drive and re-install windows, you use their USB Recovery drive. It takes longer, but it results in a fully set up system, minus transferring my data and installing more programs. Windows and the bios are both setup for the best speed my system can generate.
Fast forward to now and my computer has been a little flakey over the past few weeks. Nothing major and certainly nothing that's been slowing it down, but my wallpapers are messed up as I switch between desktops, and Apple Music is just bonkers crazy. Well, guess what? I tried to install a program and realized it might be actual malware halfway through. I stopped the process and uninstalled it, but it was too late. I borked my system again. I'm not playing games at this time so I can't really speak to how it would have affected that, but Photoshop and Chrome, my two most used programs, were VERY slow. For example, when you click through a folder in your bookmarks bar in Chrome, the menu drops down. As you move your pointer down the list, each website higlights. It's a smooth graphically satisfying system. But my system, my big mamma jamma kick ass system, would hesitate in drawing the menue and the highlights from the pointer would be delayed by about a second.
It doesn't sound like a huge issue, but I can't emphasize this enough... nothing should be slowing my system down right now, let alone Chrome. Sure, Chrome is a memory whore but even there, I have 645 Gigs of RAM. Plenty to stave off Chrome slowdowns. If something was slowing my big rig to that degree, it truly screwed up my install of Windows.
Remembering the USB Recovery Drive, I got that yesterday, backed up all my data, and started the recovery process. About 4 minutes into it, the recovery program came up with an error stating there was data corruption Well shit. I try it again, making sure to follow every instruction to the letter (and not just skipping through it quickly as I did the first time), but got the same result. Data corruption. Of course, the first step in the recovery process was formatting the drive, so I no longer had a bootable drive on my computer.
Remember back when I bought my Chromebook and then alter replaced it with a Windows laptop?
Well, one of the reasons I got those, in the back of my head, was it could be used as a backup computer should I ever lose mine. I was imagining having to send my big computer in for warranty service, but this situation is the same. So, I pulled out the laptop and started a support ticket with Falcon Northwest, explaining the Data Corruption error.
This was around 4 PM, so I figured they'd get back to me tomorrow (today) even though they said it would be within 24 hours. I was shocked this morning to see that their response came in at 5:30. Only an hour and a half later!
Their first suggestion was making sure I wasn't having a problem with the USB port as the front ports are using extension cables. I didn't believe that was the problem, but I got down on my hands and knees to move the USB drive to one of the rear USB ports and tried again. No bueno. No go. Same error.
In their original email, they also detailed the next few steps. If the USB Drive was truly corrupted, I could use a different drive by downloading a bunch of files and then having them remote log into my computer and setting the new drive up as their Recovery Drive (including the personalized changes to my computer). Or, if it wasn't urgent, they could just ship me out a replacement USB drive that's a mirror of mine (i.e. already customized to me).
I wrote them back, saying that I'd prefer them to just send me out a replacement USB Recovery Drive as I have my laptop to get me through.
It's funny as the laptop is much faster than my desktop while at the same time is also much slower than my desktop. It's faster because it's basically a clean install on a fairly new computer. No borking and no excessive programs or games. This laptop literally just has Chrome, my password manager, Office, Acrobat, and Photoshop installed. BUT, spec wise it's NOTHING compared to my desktop. The processor is a 13th Gen i7-1360P laptop processor. It has 16 GB of RAM, 1 TB of drive space, and just uses the intel processor's integrated graphics as opposed to the 4090 video card.
Before I get into how I noticed it's slowness, let me tell you about how I set it up since it's going to be my primary computer for a week or so. First thing's first, I wanted it hooked up to my big monitor. There's absolutely no reason to use a 14" 2K OLED screen when I have a 48" OLED 4K screen inches behind it. As my Nintendo switch sits close by and I don't play it all that often, I pulled the HDMI cable from it and plugged it into the laptop. I set the resolution up to 4K as... why not? I then hooked my USB C charging cable into it as that always sits on my desktop ready to charge my phone, my speakers, my headset, and anything else USB C power enabled (and yes, it's using a charger that's plenty powerful enough to charge the laptop). I let it stay on WIFI initially as I didn't think I'd need the extra speed from a wired connection. I then pulled out the mouse I bought with the laptop (a logitech MX Anywhere 3S... a smaller version of my desktop's logitech MX Master 3S) and then since I now use a wired USB C keyboard, I pulled the cable from the back of the keyboard and used a new USB C to USB C cable to plug the keyboard into my laptop. I had to change one setting so that when I closed the laptop screen, it would keep running on the external monitor. Once that was done, I closed the laptop, pushed it right up against the monitor, and moved my keyboard in front of it.
The first problem was when I tried to watch a YouTube video. I noticed that it was streaming in 720p resolution. I normally stream in 4K unless the internet is acting wonky when it will drop down to 1080. 720p was noticeably fuzzy in comparison, so I manually bumped it up to 4K. And oh the hitching and pausing and buffering that started. I forgot how weak the WIFI signal is in my room. It's fine, most of the time, for checking email and doing basic internet tasks, but it can't stream 4K. That meant I had to pull the USB A to RJ45 dongle out of my laptop's box so that I could pull the ethernet cable from the Nintendo Switch and plug it into the laptop.
Now, technically my desktop is quite a mess. The laptop takes up enough space and has cables coming out of both sides, including the keyboard cable which coils over the top of the laptop since the keyboard sits right in front of the laptop. I have two mice on my desktop and now can't charge anything via my USB C cable, meaning my phone is sitting on its wireless charger for hours. Frankly, this would be unacceptably messy to me if it weren't temporary.
So, how is it slower? Let's face it, I'm not exactly doing anything taxing on it. I don't have my photoshop files to work with so even Photoshop tasks are very basic. I have discord up, two Chrome windows with about a total of 5 tabs, Apple Music playing music in the background, and Windows Phone Link so I can see my text messages on the computer. Even a laptop i7-1360P processor with 16 GB or ram should be able to handle that. Well, they can. It's the graphics card that's tasked to much.
Last night, after I got this all set up, I pulled up Paramount Plus in Chrome and streamed a movie (The Terminal with Tom Hanks). Once it got rolling, it was fine, but the screen flickered once or twice before the video started, and the video stuttered quite a bit for a minute before it caught up. This was repeated afterward when I changed over to Hulu and watched an episode of The Americans.
I didn't think too much of it, until this morning. Part of my morning routine is doom scrolling through Threads, Facebook, BlueSky, and Twitter. We'll get to twitter as that's out for now, but whenever a video or even an animated gif came up in the stream from Threads, Facebook, or BlueSky, the whole screen would blink in and out of a black screen and stutter. This laptop literally can't be in 4K and use Chrome to scroll through social media websites with video running on them.
Thankfully that's a minor inconvenience. The biggest annoyance is my secondary drive on the desktop. I have several things stored there like old downloads, some more personal files, and all of my Fonts. The biggest portion of the drive, however, is my 'Erotica' folder. Not only my porn, but all of my 'Caitlyn' online files. For example, I don't have the template for the header graphic I will use in this post. It'll be easy enough to save one of the older header graphics and use it as a template for sizing, making a new one, and saving it both in Photoshop and JPG to the cloud, but I have a specific template for my 'Update' posts and I won't even attempt to re-create that without the template. If I do an update post, which I'm strongly considering, I'll use a temporary image until the desktop is back up and running.
There's also writing. I honestly was at the point yesterday that I was either going to write a chapter in Gamer Gurl or do the computer restore. Now that the computer is borked, I don't have access to my outline and 'details' file. The outline is important as it tells me what I already thought should come next. It's important as that makes sure I put down any hints as to what's going to happen in the future and any tiebacks to things I set up in earlier chapters. I thought I could at least get the next chapter out as I basically know what it will be... but the more I think about it, the more I realize that's just a bad idea.
Anyway, I'm up and running at let's say 75%. Better than not being up at all but close enough to good that it hurts that I'm not at 'good'. I'm sure I'll update this once I get the new USB Drive. I'd complain that they haven't responded, but I believe Falcon Northwest's name isn't just a cute fun wordplay... I think they're actually in the Northwest of the country, meaning it's only 6:30 AM there now.
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Update 12/14/2024
Falcon Northwest responded later in the day saying that my USB Recovery Drive will be made and tested that day (the 13th) and either shipped out that afternoon or on Monday. As I didn't receive a UPS tracking number, I assume it will go out on Monday. They also gave me the option of using faster shipping. They'd pay for regular UPS ground which might take up to five days. If I wanted to pay for anything faster, they'd only charge me the difference in price. But since I'm set up as I am, I just opted for the standard shipping.
I have to say, I'm completely over the moon satisfied with Falcon Northwest's customer service. It sounds like they could have gotten me up faster if I was willing for them to remote in, but that was my choice. I couldn't have asked for anything better or faster in the terms of customer service.
Another note I wanted to share, the image I ended up using as the header was completely generated in Adobe Photoshop. While I've used Photoshop to extend some images (such as my Gamer Gurl header graphics), this is the first time I started on a blank canvas and had it generate "burning desktop computer in a gamer computer room". Like most AI things, it isn't what I had in mind, but it completely works.
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