All of the consumer lines are pretty bad these days. Acer has a reputation for being unreliable (backed by some data from SquareTrade ~10 years ago). HP is just as bad, in mostly the same ways, but has avoided the reputation.

Reliable laptops are the enterprise lines - Dell Latitude/Precision, HP Elite Book, and Lenovo Thinkpad. But they are significantly more expensive when buying new.

Shrinkflation is smaller quantities and/or higher prices. This is actually tracked in a variety of places.

Changing to a cheaper recipe/supplier is very hard to put metrics on, and isn’t tracked anywhere that I know of

How close are these surrounding towns? What’s the population, particularly for the demographics you would appeal to?

Often, it’s not worthwhile to bring your favorite culture to your home. Just go to the culture where it already exists. Often, these quiet, boring places are populated by people that WANT to live in a place that’s quiet and boring. It doesn’t make much sense for anyone to move there if they don’t.

Even at stores that have this feature, I rarely see people use it. It’s clearly not an experience that people flock to.

OTOH, on the rare occasion I’ve visited a Walmart in the past 10 years, I have a 100% rate of checkout taking an absurdly long time. Everyone there just seems to accept it like they have no choice.

As long as it’s advertised openly, I don’t see a big problem with it. It would probably be sold as a discount for shopping at slower times, though. It’s a tried-and-true method of smoothing congestion.

Assuming a store with 9a-9p hours (every day), a 9-5 worker can shop 44 hours in a week, vs 40 they cannot. But that doesn’t particularly line up with the busy hours. Around here, after 7 on weekdays and 5 on weekends tend to get pretty slow.

To extend this, consider your own safety throughout. Unless the police arrest them and they remain in custody, you have a potential serious threat. Avoid situations where you/others could be vulnerable, such as alone or at night. You may want to setup visible surveillance cameras, alter your routines, etc.

The police will be there after anything happens, but that may be too late for you.

“Hackers” (rather, malicious actors) rarely look to take down IT resources as their goal. Instead, they want to access it for their own purposes. The closest example would be ransomware, where it gets taken down as part of the threat/punishment. But if the victim pays, their resources must be restored.

Plus, I would be surprised if Crowd Strike doesn’t have any protections on its own files. I also expect there will be additional verification checks (hash/etc) on their updates going forward.

Cutting the power for 30 seconds drains capacitors. The most likely culprit is in the PSU, but I’ve also seen it be the motherboard or GPU.

Desktop PSUs have been pretty standardized for 25 years. The odds are pretty good that you still have an old one, or know someone that you could borrow from long enough to test.

Failing that, just get one from a place with a decent return policy. I like Micro Center, if you’re near one of those.

You have to keep in mind the scenarios where it will be used. While truly fast charging does exist today (20 minutes or so for 80% charge), that is not widespread, nor is that the way it’s typically done. Level 3 (DC fast charging) is expensive (moreso than gas), potentially detrimental to the battery, and still usually not very fast (an hour at least). As such, you aren’t going to charge at your local gas station the same way you get a fill up today.

Most people use a level 2 charger, either at home or at work. This means it can sit for 8 hours to refuel. Many parking garages have this as well. Level 2 chargers deliver AC directly to the vehicle, meaning you don’t need a lot of infrastructure- just a 240v line and a billing system. This in turn means it’s cheap and relatively easy to install. Sometimes you’ll see these outside of Starbucks or a grocery store, but not especially often. You’ll get ~25 miles of range per hour charging using level 2. But even if you spend 2 hours drinking coffee, or buying groceries, you’ve only added 50 miles of range.

This is where level 3 comes in. It requires some pretty significant equipment (which is part of why they’re always broken), because it has to convert AC into high voltage DC. It also has to chill the cables internally, otherwise they’d quickly overheat from the electricity passing through. But this takes up space that’s probably not really available in the lot.

I am seeing fast chargers now being installed at travel centers/truck stops along major highways. It fits in nicely with regular stops on a road trip for food. I’m also seeing them being installed at most Walmarts, since that’s perfect for grocery shopping.

Around here, that last group has been from Electrify America, which does NOT require an app. They have a standard credit card reader.

The standalone Hyper-V Server was last released for server 2019. Not only was this leaner than Server 2019 w/ the Hyper V role, it was available for free.

Hyper-V is discontinued, at least as a standalone hypervisor. It’s only available as an additional role on a full OS.

IOW, it’s a replacement for VMware Workstation, not ESXi, and certainly not vcenter.

You can pretty easily create the extra partitions yourself (Google for “diskpart UEFI”). Not sure if that will put it in your UEFI boot list, though. It seems you’ll also need to do some stuff with bcdedit, which is included in WinPE.

Good luck!

Licensing and activation are separate, and only loosely related. If you are at anything resembling a large org, they don’t even use the HWID or OEM key- they will be using an internal KMS server.

It really sounds like you have way more permissions than you should have on a work device. You should’ve hit a wall even attempting to install Win11 (I can confirm that my work blocks this very effectively). I also question why you would want to do that at all. I’m also not sure you needed to do anything to activate- I believe 10 and 11 use the exact same HWID/keys/etc

This really isn’t dangerous unless you already screwed up badly. If it wipes, you just restore from backup/DR.

You do have backups and a DR plan for your prod servers, right?

It’s possible in the US, but generally not at common gas stations. You have to find marine or airport gas stations. The only other place I’ve ever seen it is a place called Sheetz.

Your description isn’t very clear on what exactly you have, or what you need.

It sounds like you have wired NICs in both server and laptop, which will be physically close to each other, but your only connection to the Internet will be WiFi that you don’t control. How accurate is that?

Next question is how do you want them to connect to each other? You can do a P2P wired connection, which is more complicated but fully isolates your traffic. It also means that, unless each device has a separate connection and an appropriate routing config, it won’t be online to the Internet (unless you set up some form of connection sharing). You can also connect them to a router that has no Internet. Simpler than the above, but the same limitations.

You could easily and cheaply get a USB Wi-Fi NIC. The major downside is that all traffic will be going across the wireless connection, both ways. This makes it slow and unreliable.

You can also connect them to a modified router configured as a wireless bridge. DD-WRT and others can be configured in a different way than usual. The wireless router will provide wired LAN ports to your local network, but then use the wireless connection to connect to an upstream WiFi.

None of this has anything to do with Linux, BTW. Once you choose a path, you should be able to implement it in whatever OS (or multiple OSes) you would like. None of it is new or special. You might get more options if you post in the Homelab, Data Hoarder, or Self Hosted communities.

Many private trackers, and even a few public ones, have a request forum. The private ones reward users that fill these requests, so they are often effective.

There are some very accessible private trackers (sometimes referred to as semi-private) that meet these requirements. Once you get set up, they can be very set-and-forget. Just avoid the forums.

Unless you’re on a self-hosted VPN (defeating the whole purpose), it’s not especially hard to identify VPN connections. All of the common ones are known, and many use IP ranges and reverse lookups that clearly identify the VPN/seedbox provider.

It’s a bit harder when you are connected to one that resolves to a residential-looking hostname. But again, unless it’s truly unique (defeating the purpose), simply sorting users by IP will reveal almost all of them.

Some trackers used to do this to weed out people with multiple accounts. Some of the big ones still actively detect and block (or punish) anyone connecting to their website with a VPN (torrent traffic is still generally allowed, though)

I think you mean LGA (Land Grid Array), meaning the pins are on the motherboard. Ball Grid Array (BGA) is used for embedded, non-removable CPUs.

The only thing I’ll add is that RAID is redundancy. Its purpose is to prevent downtime, not data loss.

If you aren’t concerned with downtime, RAID is the wrong solution.