Now is a suitable time for me to take a break from entering music notation and get a post here edgewise. For starters, I was afraid my computer was “toast” due to a minor accident that happened. You see, I have this USB peripheral and…
I use a StreamDeck XL for many of my music computer programs. The Stream Deck adds an immense amount of convenience to any application that is menu-click or mouse heavy. In use, you simply program a key to handle operations that would normally cause you to deep “menu dive” to get at the commands you need. Problem solved.
What happened to the computer though, is that the USB cable to my Stream Deck had wrapped itself around my chair’s arm without my noticing it. I had decided to get a drink and pushed back my chair to get up. Of course, this pulled sharply on the USB cable and toppled my computer, which keeled over with a good thud. My computer screen was locked up and nothing was working on my PC!
I set the computer back upright off its side and proceeded to reboot it, thinking that was all that was needed, but somehow, all it would do is blink the power-switch light with morse code. Oh no, the dreaded POST code that only occurs when the computer is unable to boot due to a hardware failure. Ouch.
I realized right away then that the computer tipping over probably unseated something like the DRAM sticks or possibly one of the peripheral cards such as the Geforce GT1660 Ti video card or the Firewire 800 adapter. It took several tries, but eventually I reseated everything inside the computer that could have possibly knocked itself loose and that did the trick.
This PC is running on borrowed time though. It’s a 2016 Dell XPS and it was quite the monster PC in its day, and still is in someways. It has 48GB of memory installed, and about 8TB of SSD storage. It needs all of that to handle the humongous music sample libraries that I have, my photography catalog, my media projects and so on. I’m a content creator, after all.
This PC does run Windows 11, as it has all the necessary hardware to do so, but the sixth generation Intel i7-6700K processor it has isn’t listed on the Windows 11 certified CPU list. I had to apply a “hack” to the Windows 11 installation process to allow it to proceed. I suppose Windows needed to place a cutoff point for hardware support which for some reason left my CPU off the list, but left the possibility of installing Windows 11 anyway – if you were smart enough on your own to figure out how to bypass the restriction.
So – this is where I’m at. I have an 8-year-plus-old computer, it’s running on borrowed time, support for it is no longer viable, and it’s really maxed out. Time to start looking at new computers. An intel i9 processor, and a minimum of 64GB ram, or 128GB. I’ve hit my head on the 48GB memory ceiling more than a few times on some projects, so I’m feeling cramped with what I’ve currently got. Time to go shopping.
Postscript:
7/13/2024
I settled on purchasing an Alienware Aurora R16, and my wallet is now screaming bloody murder at me. Mine is a 64GB i9-1400KF 16-core beast, with 64GB ram and an RTX-4090 24GB graphics card. I would normally go for something like a high-performance Dell XPS rather than something more game-oriented like the Aurora but getting the same configuration in an XPS chassis ended up costing about 15% more than the Aurora. They are currently having a Black-Friday-in-July sale at Dell, and the Alienware Aurora is being nicely discounted. I can live with the gamey LEDs and blinking lights. The water-cooling system it has is a nice touch, though.