triple88a

iTrader: (2)

Throw a fan on the PSU on the outside just to test it and see if it solves it.

z31maniac

I'm now 99.9% sure it's the video card after reading about some other symptoms I've had with it.

Also went back and checked on the beast of a power supply I bought, it doesn't automatically turn the fan on when powered up (like the video card/CPU), only when it reaches some preset temperature.

I guess at least video cards are a lot cheaper now. But I'm considering just doing a new motherboard/CPU/RAM/Video card. I'm considering buying some pretty powerful publishing software I use at work and want to start trying to land some freelance work.

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

MG's ongoing career change:


I had a 4 hour interview session with the first company today. 1.5 hour group interview, then a 1 hour skills assessment, then a 0.5 hour interview with 2 more managers, then another 0.5 hour interview with a department VP. Felt pretty good about all of the interviews, and I am pretty sure I crushed the skills assessment (writing evaluation, basic network knowledge test, and then a test involving setting up the company's main network appliance using some VMware virtual machines). One guy I was supposed to interview with today wasn't available so I'm going back on Friday for another 0.5 hour interview with him.

Then, on Monday I have an interview with the second company. I guess they would be the dark horse. I'd be surprised if they could match an offer from the first company, but you never know. And if the first company doesn't make an offer, it might still be a good option.

I feel bad about leaving my current department in the near future -- we're so understaffed as it is that it's going to royally suck for them if I leave. It's easy to overestimate one's own value, but it's not so much that I think they can't manage without me as that they just don't have the man-hours to handle the workload, and trying to find someone and then train them in 3-4 weeks will be incredibly difficult. C'est la vie.

fooger03

iTrader: (2)

It's pretty cheap to test a video card
Radeon DMS 59 PCI E Low Profile Video Graphics Card 256MB | eBay


Don't feel bad - you owe them nothing. Your departure and corresponding high turnover rate is a function of their cost-cutting measures - it's their fault that you're leaving, not yours. It's also all your coworkers faults if they collectively take on the strain of your work instead of allowing it to fail on account of inadequate staffing levels. I would tell them that too - "when I leave, if the company expects you all to take on an additional 25% workload, tell the company go to F themselves". Additionally, if you have given some skin in order to prevent some projects from failing, then shame on you, too. When employees go the extra mile for an employer without being justly compensated for it, that's an enabling behavior. If **** doesn't start to break when an employer starts cutting costs, then what economic incentive is there for an employer to not cut costs?

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Just be warned that if you buy that specific card, you won't be able to use it. Quoting from the listing: "Does not include any video cables or connectors."

As you can see from the image, that series of cards does not have any sort of on-board video connector into which a monitor can be directly plugged. What looks at first glance like a DVI port is in fact a semi-proprietary multi monitor output, into which a fanout cable must be plugged in order to connect a monitor.

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

Yup, DMS to DVI or DMS to VGA adapter would be required.

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

Well, I don't think I've shared the worst part -- this is a big part of why I'm ready to leave.

When the last person left our department, my boss approached me and one other employee and said that rather than trying to hire a direct replacement, that they would hire an entry-level person, and then bump our pay if the two of us would split the duties of the exited employee. We got the extra pay, and we got the new duties, but we did not get an entry-level new hire to lighten our load. I don't know whether it was intentional or unintentional, and whose fault it was, but I'm not interested in doing another year or two like this just to see if they decide they want to hire someone. In 3 years time the department has shrunk from 7 employees to 4 employees, and we were already pretty damn efficient at 7 people (our employee to support person ratio is way above the industry standard). 4 people just isn't enough to do the work.

triple88a

iTrader: (2)

If you're getting new video card might as well wait for the 1070 or the 1060 whenever that comes out.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Damn you.

Turbo kitten has been killing a lot of time in this recently.




Not my highest score, but my first time at the #1 position.

Girz0r

iTrader: (1)

Once I found out there are chrome plugin hacks for that game I stopped playing.

Infinite zoom is very handy...

I've been addicted to this one even moar... diep.io

WASD + Mouse controls, I've only been #1 once. When you do free for all, and still team up with others (spin gun for friend), it becomes fairly fun teaming up and getting to the top. The developer seems to update every few days

Girz0r

iTrader: (1)

Car update:

Insurance was short, like 1300 short. Tore them a new one on the phone. Original adjuster misquoted part#s, grabbed 05' wheels and not 04'... Had a 2nd adjuster go out to my trusty shop and have them go over the differences. Much success, getting additional monies but still paying 'some' out of pocket. This has been a very expensive lesson.

I should have it back by next weekend

EO2K

iTrader: (37)

Our server that handles outgoing email to mobile devices just ate **** and died so I just sent out the following company wide email:



I immediately received 6 phone calls (4 at my desk, 2 on my cell) from users asking if email would work on their desktop over the weekend, or if email would work on their laptop over the weekend if they took it home. (you must be connected to our VPN in order to get email on a laptop when offsite.) The two on my cell were from C levels.

Did I ******* stutter? In what way was this unclear? I really sometimes wonder about some of our users

Thank god I'm not on-call this weekend.

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

I like to play dumb in those situations.

"Oh, you must not have seen the email I just sent. Here, I'll read the relevant portion of it to you."


EDIT: Also, I'm a little confused by whether you mean outgoing or incoming email, but if the problem is incoming email delivery, wouldn't the fact that they received your email be a clue that their email was working?

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

If we're doing IT shop talk, I had a doozy this week. And this isn't a "twins named lemonjello and orangello" kind of apocryphal story, this is something that I personally witnessed 2 days ago.

The admin office receptionist got a virus on her desktop (clicked an email attachment, our email filter sucks) so I had to deal with it as the other IT guy in my building was out all week. As it happened, we didn't have an image for her computer (she was given an older computer that's not the same as the rest of our inventory), so I just grabbed a replacement desktop and set it up for her instead. This meant 5 or 6 calls a day asking me to come do things like putting shortcuts back on her desktop or changing her default printer. She's been shown all of this before, but it is what it is.

The kicker was when she told me that the new computer wouldn't let her get to the internet. I asked her what she meant by that. After several minutes of torturous conversation, it became apparent that whereas her last computer was set with 3 homepage tabs (intranet, timeclock, and google), I had only set 2 home pages (intranet and timeclock). She believed that this meant she no longer had access to the internet. When I pointed out that she could still enter an address or even just a search term in the address bar of the browser, she asked if I could come down the hall and show her what I meant by "address bar."

This is an employee that is entrusted with data entry for employee records that would likely be included in our next audit.

Have I mentioned I'm looking for another job?

z31maniac

I said the hell with it today after work since I had to run some other errands. Stopped by Best Buy and just bought the cheapest PCI-E card they had (turns out the only video card) an Invidia Geforce GTX 950. Only $20 more than it was on Newegg.

My plan being if it turns out to be the PSU instead of the video card, I'll just return for cash because it doesn't work.

However, so far so good (2+ hours in of messing with it). I blasted the SSD, reinstalled a fresh version of Windows 10, updated video/sound drivers. Working fantastic and super quick. This video card will be more than sufficient for anything that I need to do until I build a monster of a computer to handle trying to start consulting and having a VR/Occulus Rift setup for Sim racing. Going to spend dollars on the next one because I want to not only be over the top powerful/overbuilt, but also very quiet.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

It's struck me as extremely odd for the past decade or so that the companies which are best known for producing GPUs do not produce graphics cards.

This wasn't always the case.

During the early-modern polygon era, if you said to someone that you have a 3DFX video card, that meant that you possessed a PCB made by 3DFX, containing a chipset made by 3DFX. Ditto for Diamond.

Today, if you say that you have an Nvidia graphics card, that means that you have a card made by any one of a large number of companies which does not include Nvidia. Ditto AMD.


This is a peculiar business model.


It would be like saying that you drive a Ford, and that being automatically understood to mean that your car was manufactured by pretty much any company other than Ford itself.

Erat

iTrader: (5)

I wish our IT department would let us buy our own computers. I've got a pretty hefty monthly budget, yet I'm suck with using an old core 2 duo, with 3gb of the 4 usable, and onboard video(which struggles to play youtube videos).

Erat

iTrader: (5)

Sure they do.

You can buy reference models all day from Nvidia.

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

That's not that unusual as a policy, but it is weird that you are that far behind the curve. Our standard laptops are Dell E6420's with i5's and 8GB ram. About half and half between Intel and nVidia video -- fortunately I have one with the nVidia chip so I can run 3 monitors. And knowing that we wouldn't be buying new computers for a while, my boss recently authorized us to replace drives with SSDs and max out the ram on any computers we felt needed it (including our own).

Erat

iTrader: (5)

When our controls and programing laptop died (for accessing our PLCs, chillers, chemical add systems) they couldn't just get us a new one. They had to diagnose and prove ours was unfixable. So I said F it, went and bought the most expensive ultrabook I could buy at best buy. I still don't think IT knows... Our division alone makes 50k a day and the computer I have here is one of the better ones.