kids and computers

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ed
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#1 kids and computers

Post by ed »

faint hearted?..look away now, I'm gonna have a rant.

Before Christmas we bought young Seb a desktop pc, he's 9 years old, so we got him a budget HP from ebuyer. This was mainly to let him keep up with his chums who are playing roblox online....or so I thought.

Anyways the pc broke 1 week into the new year, the wifi card just failed. Contacted ebuyer and they said this computer is covered by the manufacturer and suggested I contact HP. This I did and HP said the machine was only just in warranty, it was started in February 2019. I was non-plussed as I bought the machine in November 2019. Thus it seems HP guarantees start when the retailer(ebuyer) buys a machine to go on the shelf. Anyway, the problem was resolved and HP adjusted the warranty period. A courier(DPD) arrived and the machine and power supply were packaged in the courier's box.

so far so good, I was notified the machine was repaired and would be delivered within a week. It arrived but when the box was opened there was no power supply. I made the courier take a note of this and declined to accept the delivery. I contacted HP support and I was told the machine would be redelivered and if the power supply was not in the box I was to accept delivery and HP support would send me a replacement power supply.

The machine came back with no power supply and I notified support. Further emails ensued informing me that I hadn't included the power supply in the original return. Further emails ensued asking me for photographs of the rear of the machine.

anyway, after 19 emails and countless telephone calls a new power supply was finally delivered.

Yay, whoopee......

meanwhile Seb has been pestering me on an hourly basis, 'when will my power supply arrive?, all my chums are running fortnite and I've got to get with plan!'

so, machine plugged in and reconfigured and fortnite downloaded......installed and loade.........hang on, machine won't load fortnite. It transpires The HP pavilion 590 is nowhere near in the ballpark for running fortnite....

seems I've got to build him a new machine with a monstrous engine and a mega graphics card.....

kids and computers eh!......computers should not be allowed to play games! oh waily waily
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#2 Re: kids and computers

Post by Ant »

I had a gaming pc built for the kids this Christmas, but not for fortnite
my kids aren't allowed fortnite as when it came out on console, they were subjected to rediculous amounts of grief and abuse from so called school friends. And other online players so I removed it and banned it completely. That game seems to turn otherwise normal kids into absolute little horrors. Keep an eye on the conversations he is having with others if he's playing that. Seriously. Hopefully he will have a much better experience than mine did
What I did when I specced the pc I got for them was to pick a game that was hard to run and base it on the spec needed to run that.
I ended up with a middling i5 processor, middle g ram at 8gb, and a respectable graphics card, an Nvidia geforce gtx970. The performance has been very good, one of my lads likes older games, he's played the original doom more than I have.....
Quake and quake 2 run flawlessly, more modern games like half life and half life 2 run flawlessly, modern games like destiny 2 and doom 2016 run at high frame rates and again pretty flawlessly with only the odd frame rate drop when the screen has loads of enemies ect on it.
Roblox is handled with no issues at all, it's well below the threshold of the other modern games.
But keep a close eye on his online play, it's full of complete arse holes who think nothing of making threats and saying horrible things to other kids. My three have all experienced it, and so have I playing my games online. An adult will shrug off what a kid can't as you know
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#3 Re: kids and computers

Post by ed »

thanks Ant

I've refused the fortnite thing for ages, for exactly the reasons you mention. I finally gave in after my eldest told me the grand children are all on now because the fortnite people have tightened up their act and security is being monitored. Nevertheless I'll keep a sharp eye on it.

I've just pushed the button at ebuyer for:

I5 9400f
gigabyte z390 mobo
8gb ddr4 2666 ram
256 gb ssd
geforce gt1030

I've got a spare case and power supply so a bit of dosh saved, nevertheless I still parted with £390....waily

I do hope it's all up to the job....
Oh did I mention, computers weren't invented to play bloody games....sassenfrassencursinfrassen ClaudeHopper

edit: ps etc etc....If anybody is interested in a 2 month old HP pavilion 590-a0020na still with 9 months guarantee I can do a good deal.
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#4 Re: kids and computers

Post by Ant »

That spec should be fine for fortnite, the graphics card can be swapped out down the line for something else if he decides he wants to play more hardware taxing games without having to alter the motherboard
I think I'd have to swap the motherboard and go to either an i7/9 but be able to keep the 970 for an upgrade down the line. The i5 in it is the bottleneck, but is sufficient at the moment, I think its a 3500 series quad core iirc. I've already had enquiries from the youngest about swapping the graphics card for an rtx card that supports Ray tracing :roll: not with a 3500 series.....
This one should be good for a year or two before having to put more money into it though, and everything they seem to want is available on either console (ps4), steam or epic games store so I'm happy with where the downloads are coming from.
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#5 Re: kids and computers

Post by Nick »

Not that I am paying much attention these days, but in terms of performance and cost AMD seem to be ahead of Intel ATM.
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#6 Re: kids and computers

Post by ed »

Nick wrote: Mon Feb 10, 2020 10:18 am Not that I am paying much attention these days, but in terms of performance and cost AMD seem to be ahead of Intel ATM.
d'ye know I nearly took this opportunity to look into AMD as I've never used one before....but then I remembered how long life is...
if there are performance differences I'm thinking that a nine year old is not going to rumble them any time soon....

I'm still being reminded that the four previous offspring have never bothered me with this level of techy computery stuff, save for a brief period when they played myst.....I'm thinking this is payback

edit: I've also been thinking that I don't have an OS for this build. I think I have an unused win 8(not8.1) retail on the shelf...I'm hoping that might work with the new hardware for the time being.....otherwise I'll have to fork out for an OEM win10....Oh waily waily.
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#7 Re: kids and computers

Post by Ant »

Why not pull the HD out of the other one if it has an os already on it for use as the c drive and set the other HD as the d drive?
I did look at amd processors, my sisters bloke who knows about these things and whose advice I sought when it all got mind boggling for me tried to explain what the differences were, something about parallel threads.. It all went completely over my head. When I showed him the spec for the one I bought he ok'd it. He did say that he would have used amd processors if it were him speccing it. He's built his own gaming rigs before so was my go-to. Handy to have when you do t have a clue what you're doing... :oops:
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#8 Re: kids and computers

Post by ed »

Ant wrote: Mon Feb 10, 2020 12:44 pm Why not pull the HD out of the other one if it has an os already on it for use as the c drive and set the other HD as the d drive?
the other one is brand new... I was rather hoping to sell it for half price with 9 months guarantee intact...
I have ordered an SSD for the new build...it wouldn't be sensible to sideline it in favour of a slow HDD


it was a question that was niggling me...what to do when you buy an off the shelf machine with an OEM win10 and later on down the line you want to upgrade the mobo.....my understanding is that the OEM win 10 will only run on the machine it was originally loaded to, as opposed to a retail version which will run on any machine as long as there is only one registration. If I'm right it would explain why a retail win10 costs twice as much as an OEM win10. Also explains why you can reload an OEM on it's original machine cos the mobo/bios knows the serial number of the original OS and can re-register it......don't life get trixy
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#9 Re: kids and computers

Post by Ray P »

Ant wrote: Mon Feb 10, 2020 9:33 am ...supports Ray tracing...
I've never been stalked before :lol:
Sorry, I couldn't resist!
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#10 Re: kids and computers

Post by ed »

cor blimey

machine goes like stink.
boy is happy, not sure for how long though.
fortnite is 37gb to down load, takes ages on a 50mbit fibre line...
fortnite is 64gb on the disc...to me that's insane...wrote whole systems on a 64word drum with 8k core store, and that was considered luxury.

now got to figure out the parental controls.
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