TweakHound

Computer stuff...

Eric (a.k.a. TweakHound)

Please Help Me Find A Whitepaper

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In researching for the Game Only tweak guide I’ve come across several Microsoft articles referencing a whitepaper called:
Windows 10 Processor Power Management – Algorithms and Static Configuration
I’m usually pretty good at hunting down stuff but this one eludes me.
If you can find it please let me know.

Intel’s New Kaby Lake CPU Line

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Intel released a new line of CPU’s. Very few in the tech enthusiast community are, well, enthused about this new lineup.
My take from the reviews, Kaby Lake is a smidge faster at stock speeds and they don’t overclock for squat.

ARSTechnica – Intel Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake review: Is the desktop CPU dead?
“With identical performance to Skylake, Intel brings desktop performance to a standstill…
As it stands, what we have with Kaby Lake desktop is effectively Sandy Bridge polished to within an inch of its life, a once-groundbreaking CPU architecture hacked, and tweaked, and mangled into ever-smaller manufacturing processes and power envelopes. Where the next major leap in desktop computing power comes from is still up for debate—but if Kaby Lake is any indication, it won’t be coming from Intel.”

Anandtech – The Intel Core i7-7700K (91W) Review: The New Out-of-the-box Performance Champion
“In most of our benchmarks, the results are clear: a stock Core i7-7700K beat our overclocked Core i7-4790K in practically every CPU-based test (Our GPU tests showed little change). When overclocked, the i7-7700K just pushed out a bigger lead for only a few more watts. Technically one could argue that because this part and the i7-6700K are equal in IPC, a similar overclock with the i7-6700K achieves the same performance. But the crucial matter here is how lucky a user is with the silicon lottery – based on our testing, the Core i7-7700K CPUs tend to overclock rather nicely (although +300 MHz isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things).”

LegitReviews – Intel Core i7-7700K Processor Review
“For months we’ve heard people talking about how Kaby Lake is going to suck and that there is no reason to upgrade to it since it’s basically just an updated Skylake processor. We can understand that some people might look at the specifications and minor architecture changes and come to that conclusion, but the benchmark results look good. For those running older Intel Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge Processors the time to upgrade is looking pretty good right now…For now Intel Kaby Lake is as good as it gets for gamers and enthusiasts and we’d easily recommend it to anyone looking to upgrade their system.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_CPU_microarchitectures
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaby_Lake
https://ark.intel.com/products/codename/82879/Kaby-Lake#@All

Wednesday Random Stuff…

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Win10 To Improve?
2 stories caught my eye today:
Microsoft To Provide Additional Windows Update Installation Options With Creators Update
and
Microsoft is working on a ‘Game Mode’ for Windows 10
The update thingy sounds like MS will put a button in to enable this tweak.
The Game Mode thingy is interesting but no details. Coincidentally, I’ve been considering a Game Only tweak guide.
Would anyone out there be interested?

The Tweaker
This is the best Steve Jobs article I have seen.
I’ve never been a fan of SJ so I’m not quite sure how I feel about the articles title.

Creepy
Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them
IMHO this article doesn’t even scratch the surface.

TV Malware
This man’s smart television with Google TV caught some malware, and now it’s bricked
“…installed an app of some sort to stream movies.”
Lesson: Don’t be surfin’ for free naughty videos on your TV.

“Fix Windows Update Errors” Almost Useless

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Over the past week or so lots have sites have pointed to a new Microsoft web page that supposedly helps you navigate Windows Update problems.
Fix Windows Update errors

Here is what it gave me:

Question – On which Windows version did you get the error?
Answer – Windows 7
Solution – Run the network troubleshooter

Like I don’t know if I have network issues?

Next Question – Did this resolve the issue?
Answer – No
Solution – Run the Windows Update troubleshooter.

In all the years I have used this, running this by itself never once fixed my problems.

Next Question – Did this resolve the issue?
Answer – No
Solution – Reset or reinstall Windows.

Really?

Random Christmas Eve Stuff…

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Sorry for the lack of news. I’ve been super busy with work and I’ve got a terrible cold/flu/whatever on top of that.

Linux Mint 18.1
Mint 18.1 got released last week. Very disappointed in this release.
It is using LTS kernel 4.4. Skipping this one.

Winbubble
Winbubble is tool I used to tweak some Windows stuff (mostly GUI customizations). They now have a version for Win10.
Not as many options as it had for previous Windows versions.
Old version for Windows XP/Vista/7/8 is at Major Geeks.

ETC.
Google sued for encouraging employees to spy on each other

Reader Emails
(shortened to make them a quick read)
Q – Where do I get Win10 ISO’s?
A – Official downloads: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO
Easiest way – Microsoft Windows and Office ISO Download Tool

Q – After installing and deleting openSUSE I have left over entries in my UEFI boot menu. How to I get rid of it?
A – EasyUEFI – http://www.easyuefi.com/

Q – I need a large regular hard drive for video editing. What do you recommend?
A – The best SSDs and hard drives are always listed here: http://www.storagereview.com/best_drives

Getting too aggressive in pushing out of the Windows 10 free upgrade.

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This week on  TWiT – Windows Weekly, Chris Capossela, Chief Marketing Officer of Microsoft said:
“… Getting too aggressive in pushing out of the Windows 10 free upgrade. We know we want people to be running Windows 10 from a security perspective etc., but finding the right balance where you’re not stepping over the line of being too aggressive is something we tried and for a lot of the year I think we got it right, but there was one particular moment in particular where you know the red X in the dialog box which typically means you cancel, didn’t mean cancel, and within a couple of hours of that hitting the world, with the listening systems we have we knew that we had gone too far and then of course it takes some time to roll out the update that changed that behavior. And those two weeks were pretty painful and clearly a low-light for us. We learned a lot from it obviously.”
Start listening about 16:00 into the video. The text above starts about 17:40:
Good to see someone at Microsoft knows what’s up.
And on a side note. Uh, excuse me, Um, what “listening systems” are we talking about?