I don't know how common it is anymore, but it definitely was a few years back. You knew a computer was infected with everything when you saw a stupid cartoon dinosaur or something as the mouse cursor as soon as the pc booted to windows... I think it was more about what was bundled in the download from scummy websites doing the damage though, not the actual cursor files. I still cringe though if I see a non-standard cursor in windows, like PTSD-esque flashbacks...

I'd bet it is a typo stating ddr5, not on the CPU model. 8GB sticks of ddr5 are rare enough to find as singles, and 4gb sticks basically don't exist - makes more sense if it is a DDR3 system. Plus, the GT 730 is basically only barely a graphics card, a lot of them are Fermi based chips (like gt 400 series from 2010)... They are dirt cheap video output for a machine that otherwise wouldn't have any video out, but they get packaged by less than honest companies/people with other old hardware and marketed as "gaming computers" all the time unfortunately.

Ubuntu is not the limiting factor to this machine gaming, unfortunately. It is going to be choking itself on basically any games from the last 10 years :(

paypal's business model is basically theft. They regularly "freeze" accounts of people that have money to be taken, refuse to unfreeze them, and then when it eventually turns into a class-action lawsuit they settle for pennies on the dollar (that mostly goes to attorneys anyway). When it happened to me over 10 years ago, I was doing remote tech support and getting paid via paypal. Had a business account that was like 10 years of use. Then one day they froze the account and told me there was "suspicious activity".

When I appealed and asked what suspicious activity they found, they simply said that there was money in the account and there wasn't before... Then they asked for, specifically, ebay transaction IDs and UPS or Fedex tracking numbers for the products sold on ebay. I explained to them again that I was not selling on ebay and was doing remote tech support. The person on the other end of the phone just said "ok, well, then your appeal is denied. Your account is staying frozen" and hung up.

I ended up just refunding all the transactions that were recent enough I could (because that was the only thing I could do with the account) and sent those customers a note explaining briefly what happened and that I would rather have done the work for free than have done it so paypal can steal the money...

Eventually got tacked onto a class action and got a low double digit payout almost a decade after losing a few thousand...

I'd be interested to hear that. It seems significantly more likely that fan noise you are hearing under load is coming from the CPU and/or GPU fans, and will still be there after swapping the PSU.

I have a hard time believing that the PSU fan is the one you hear the most when pushing the system. They usually have pretty big fans in them so they can move a lot of air without crazy high RPM, similar to case fans. But your CPU and GPU on the other hand... usually smaller fans which means a lot more RPM to get the CFM needed to cool. Especially if you are using an Intel stock cooler... Stock CPU coolers SUCK.

That said, to answer your PSU question... You generally want to live around or under 80% of the rating of the PSU, as it is most efficient. Which typically is easy to do: based on quick calculations and making generous assumptions for your system, the PSU you have is likely enough (estimated true power draw of all your components mentioned is around 500w, likely just under. And that is assuming you are pegging every single component all at once, which is unlikely to happen through normal use. 500 / 0.8 = 625 or 620*0.8=496W).

My advice is filter down to brands you trust, and then look at modular units, and then buy the most wattage with a good 80+ rating that you can afford within the budget of the system you are trying to build.

"now now, calm down everyone. Let's see what the Orphan-Crushing Machine really does before we start getting upset. Just because it is fully capable of (and seems exclusively designed to) crush all orphans doesn't mean it is actually going to crush ALL the orphans. Probably just a few orphans really."

There is a reason Microsoft stopped caring a long time ago that it is so easy to install and use Windows without paying for a key. You can STILL use any old windows 7 key you have to active windows 10 and 11. You can use the OS nearly in it's entirety (as far as home users are concerned) without even doing that. It is because Windows is no longer Microsoft's biggest product, the user is.

I'd recommend looking up Ventoy and getting a big thumb drive (like 64gb or so). Then you can download several different distro live images and put them all on one flash drive and try them all out in a live environment. It isn't 100% the experience you'll get running it installed on the machine, but you can get a decent feel for each distro to see what you like and what you don't without having to keep track of 5-10 different flash drives.

The problem is we've already kinda seen what that brings to the industry through mobile gaming, and it's been universally terribly not just for mobile but for the entire gaming industry.

I dunno, maybe this would be different, but to me it is just another test-bed of innovating new ways to dick down the consumers that will eventually spread to the rest of the world again.

Probably not if it's actually Sony. But if they paired with a headphone brand I already trust to make good headphones and they have fans in them that keep my ears cool and comfortable (and somehow don't mess with the sound quality in the process, through sorcery I guess?) then I'm in.

It's people from Hexbear... From what I've seen, you can't expect anything other than this from them. Just don't engage them.

I thought this was going to be about the programming language. :/ I blame XKCD

It would actually be 35 days, since it is inclusive of July 3rd. Maybe simple mistakes are equally simple to overlook, sometimes. :P