To answer your third question about Minecraft specifically, you absolutely can run the Java version of Minecraft independently of the launcher. It’s just a Java package. Find it and load it with your Java runtime from the command line and it’ll play. Without authentication from the launcher, however, you will not be able to connect to Realms or indeed any multiplayer servers that have authentication enabled.

But for that reason, the Java version specifically of Minecraft is famously easy to pirate, provided you are fine with being limited to only playing locally or on pirate servers that have authentication disabled.

In the bad old days this was in fact the only way to play Minecraft in non-supported platforms (i.e. not Windows).

Legal everywhere, no. Available everywhere, yes.

The enzyme products are generally meant to be a maintenance thing, i.e. if you use them regularly they remove light buildups of crud stuck to the inner walls of your pipes before they build up into being thicker layers of crud, which become blockages (or just reduce the effective inner diameter of your pipes).

This stuff might theoretically clear the right kind of total clog, but it’s likely to take a long time.

My advice is to get yourself a drain snake. Chemical clog clearing products “may” work, with various pros and cons depending on the type of clog. But physical removal of the clog with a snake always works, you will never run out of your bottle of snake, and provided you manage not to fuck it up so badly that you break it the snake is also infinitely reusable.

Just get one of those 50’ long jobbies you can put on the end of a drill. That’s just fine for most residential work and should only run you $20 or $30 at the hardware store.

Please don’t say “kill the aliens” they have tech so advanced, its impossible to do it

Somehow I don’t think this would prevent the US government from running up a fuckton of debt trying it anyway, and getting us involved in yet another unwinnable forever-war quagmire.

Anyway, you can wirelessly communicate with light rather than radio, although you’re obviously limited to line of sight. Optical laser transmission technologies already exist for specialized applications. I predict that until we finally got lasers good enough to use them to deal with those pesky aliens, any communication that truly needed to be wire-free would be converted to lasers instead.

using all four memory slots can result in your RAM running at a slower-than-nominal speed

I have seen this, and other notions of its ilk, written many, many times lately. This is not an attack, just setting the record straight.

I should point out at this juncture that although system tweakers pathologically hyperventillate over transfer rate, RAM timings and minuscule latency differences between this RAM stick or the other one, in reality this is pretty much the least impactful factor on your system performance there is. Anyone can delve into this if they like. Tl;dr: “large” differences in DDR5 transfer speed amounted to a real world difference of only 4 to 10 percent, and even then only for very specific tasks, from the very lowest end to the very highest end. Woo. Without fixating on benchmarks it’s unlikely anyone would notice a less-than-10% difference, and basically impossible to notice 4%.

It’s also quite unlikely that any modern board and processor combo would not be able to run all (typically 4) of its memory slots at their full rated speed anyway.

More memory is always better than less memory with a marginally “faster” configuration. Even the difference between dual channel or forcing your board to run in single channel mode is not going to be significant for tasks that are not bottlenecked by sheer memory throughput. For normal users – including gamers – the number of tasks that will be memory bottlenecked you will encounter are zero. Even in single channel mode a stick of DDR4-3200 should be able to transfer at roughly 12.8 GB/sec and there is no storage device on Earth you can put in your computer that will fill it that fast. In order for that to ever be a factor, your workflow will have to require everything you’re doing to not only already be within RAM, but stay there for the entirety of the operation and never touch any disk.

You may theoretically notice a marginal difference if you are doing heavy duty video editing, big time cryptography, or deeply important scientific computing work like folding proteins or something. Otherwise it literally does not matter. Having enough memory capacity to not have to hit the swap disk at any time is much more important.

This was legitimately something, but mostly back in the days of OG DDR and single data rate DIMM’s. In those Wild West times, it was not unheard of for specific brands or models of RAM being not quite compatible with various processors or motherboards. (And there was little enough selection between few enough brands that it was actually feasible for motherboard manufacturers to maintain a list!) These days it’s extremely uncommon.

It’s better than sticking with a regular install when the plug gets pulled. It may be better than trying to shoot for bullying 11 into working on that system, too.

There are no apps that will not run in IoT, however you may have to manually install a prerequisite first if something you use depends on some aspect of Windows which was cut. I have not yet found anything that could not be reinstalled manually if necessary, and that only needs to happen once per install. Even the Windows Store (which is missing by default on that edition) can be reinstalled with one Powershell command.

The only bloat that most people actually use is Edge, and regardless of anyone’s thoughts on the matter Edge does come with the IoT edition anyway so that’s moot. Here in reality, nobody gives a fuck about Copilot or Recall or Candy Crush or Solitaire Collection or OneDrive or an Office 365 trial, etc., and anyone twisted enough to actually want these things can just install them like any other app (except possibly Copilot, I think). The only difference is that these things don’t get shoved down your throat by default.

Steam continued to support Windows XP for 5 years after the actual end-of-life of the OS, and Windows 7 for 4 additional years. Unless some technical reason forces them it seems unlikely we will not get a similar extended run for Win10 systems, especially considering that from most app support and API standpoints there is no mechanical difference between Windows 10 and Windows 11 anyway; certainly not to the extent that there is between Windows XP and, say, 7.

TL;DR: For the vast majority of end users, Win10 LTSC is a perfectly valid solution to their woes if they either can’t run or simply refuse to countenance Windows 11. Win10 LTSC will not get feature updates, but it will continue to receive security updates for 10 years according to M$.

You can leave your old RAM in place. As others have noted, this may have a marginal impact on speed, but it definitely will not be any slower than it is now provided whatever RAM you slot in there is at least equal to or greater than the speed of what you already have. The entire bank of RAM will run at whatever the speed of the slowest module is. If you’re lucky, your existing RAM modules will have a sticker on them describing the speed.

The speed is the number like DDR4-2400, -2666, -2933, -3000, -3200, etc.

In the bad old days of single data rate RAM (We’re talking like '80’s and '90’s, here) the speed rating was literally the bus clock speed, in megahertz, that the RAM was rated to cycle at. Nowadays with DDR RAM that communicates more than once per system clock cycle, the speeds are in “megatranfers” and are to a certain extent both theoretical and a marketing description of the absolute ideal case scenario.

In any event, higher numbers = faster, although in reality your memory speed is unlikely to make much if any observable difference in the performance of your computer since most ordinary desktop or even gaming tasks are not especially memory speed dependent and even if they are, even slow modern DDR3/4/5/whatever RAM is still, in real objective terms, quite fast to begin with. Also, your processor and board almost certainly also have their own maximum RAM communication speed, which may be less than the fastest RAM modules you can buy. Thus buying RAM any faster than whatever your board/processor’s maximum is will be pointless anyway.

Not having enough RAM to do whatever you’re doing will force the system to use the SSD or hard drive as virtual memory, though, which will instantly make it dogshit slow.

The alternative would be to stay on Win10 after support ends. This is highly risky because of missing security patches. I’m not sure if you can sign up for extended updates as an individual, but that would be another annual expense.

You can “sign up” by using the Windows 10 LTSC IoT edition, which also comes minus most of the Microsoft bloat.

http://massgrave.dev.

↑ Useless comment of the day award, right here.

My brother, OP is literally here asking about an upgrade path. Trying to insult somebody over an upgradable component when they’re already upgrading is like trying to bust somebody’s balls for pulling up to a gas station with an empty tank.

RAM.

RAM, RAM, RAM, RAM. Then the GPU.

8 gigs is basically considered barely enough to run a wristwatch these days. Upping that thing to 32 should only cost you around $50 and will be a worthwhile investment for sure.

The SSD is fine unless you find you’re running out of elbow room for whatever the rota of currently installed games is. Loading modern games off of a mechanical hard drive is really the pits, but if the user is only playing one or two big games at a time it is very easy to swap installs between the big hard drive and little SSD, especially if you’re using Steam. A modern NVME drive will be faster, but you may not even have a slot for one on your board. IF so, you can add one via an expansion card if you really want to. I wouldn’t worry about it unless you absolutely need more room.

After RAM I would look into upgrading the GPU. The GTX970 was quite capable in its day, but it’s very elderly now – four full generations behind, arguably five if you want to count the not-yet-quite-available 50xx cards from nVidia. Even a “last gen” and fairly dinkum RTX4060 should run you about $300 these days and will handily outperform the 970 by just about triple, not to mention support modern rendering platforms, and raytracing, etc. if you care about that. An RTX4070-whatever (super/TI/etc.) is arguably the “true” current gen successor to your existing card but will be significantly more expensive.

If you are not yet willing to upgrade to a newer motherboard as also suggested here, which in reality is really just building an entirely new computer since your processor and RAM probably won’t be compatible with a current board, the advantage of doing the GPU now is that you can easily transfer it to a new PC later. And RAM is cheap. I’m surprised they don’t give DDR4 away for free in cereal boxes these days. What processors you can use are motherboard dependent and the damn socket types are changing all the time, so with limited exceptions you’re stuck with what you have and throwing money at whatever the fastest version of what fits in your old socket is generally not a good value. But GPU’s are easy to move to a new PC. Sure, your processor is “old” but it’s not as much of a bottleneck as people try to make it out to be for pure gaming use. I just upgraded my old PC from an i7 2600k (hello 2011!) and I was still able to run modern games on that crusty old chip just fine. CPU performance has really hit kind of a plateau in the last couple of years and yes, current bleeding-edge chips are “faster” in a numeric sense, but the difference is really not enough to make a massive difference for normal users.

Dead Cells: The leading cause of gamepad breakages among PC players. 9 out of 10 ninjas agree.

This is the correct answer.

For anyone who wants an acceptably flat surface on a shoestring budget — or free — any piece of modern glass will do it. Even that out of a cheap picture frame. Modern float glass is extremely flat. Maybe not to optical lab grade standards, but certainly enough to render the gap between any two given objects small enough to fit on any piece of glass you’re likely to be able to lay your hands on straight enough that you couldn’t slip a piece of paper in between. Supply your own wet-or-dry sandpaper.

This is also useful for mirror-finishing the bottoms of heat sinks or the bevels on chisels.

Yes, I see no reason to leave the fire-breathing, several-generations-old gaming GPU in it in that case.

If I’m going to put my array outboard somewhere, I’m certainly not buying an appliance for it. My old computer has eight (!) total SATA ports, so I can easily stuff it to the gills with drives if I were so inclined.

Pelicans have stupid stumpy little legs, basically no talons because they have webbed ducklike feet, and are able to apply very little biting force with their beaks due to the length. Pelicans feed by scooping things up and swallowing them whole. They don’t bite, tear, or chew. I’ve never seen one try to peck anything. They’re certainly not built for that.

If you grabbed a pelican by the beak I think there is vanishingly little it could actually do to you aside from squirming and flapping feathers all over the place. You should be fairly clear to yeet the thing into the ocean at your own convenience.

Wow, I can’t believe I get to dredge up this ancient photo again:

(Obviously this is satire. I furthermore still haven’t quite made peace with the fact that every single item on Daniel Rutter’s web site can now be considered “retro.”)

“Incoming Memo: Stand by to receive memo?”

Posting tons of links to Lemmy posts, for one.

In that case your M600 macro is probably misconfigured.

M600 is not a command, per se. It’s a macro that runs a set of discrete steps including moving the print head to the park position and rewinds the filament out of the extruder by some amount at a specified speed. It’s likely your nasty 'orrible noises are either the belts slipping over your drive gears via trying to move the print head out of bounds, or the extruder failing to extract and grinding its wheels against the filament.