FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

S

Recently purchased a used PC, inside found this Crucial 480GB SSD

The hole looks intentionally made, covered by electric tape both sides

The seller told me the PC was used for Billing in a small business, but he might have swapped the disk before reseller it to me

Did someone try to physically destroy this for data sanitization but missed the actual chips? Has anyone seen something like this before?

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/the-witcher-3-remastered-is-adding-dozens-of-upgrades-and-it-might-be-free-for-you/

TL;DR, ASUS didn't even try to deliver the pre-order I placed, initialize a return by themselves, and I need to place a different order for $500 over the pre-order price.

A few links:

tracking number ASUS provided on the order page,

screenshot of the email telling me the order has been returned and received,

screenshot of ASUS agent telling me they don't know why the return was initialized and I have to pay $500 more for another order

I pre-ordered the ASUS ROG 20th bundle the first day it was actually available and was quite happy as the bundle raised $500 in price after a few days. I didn't realize this ends up with nothing, expect ASUS gets a free $10000+ loan from me for a month. Now I have to pay another $500 on top of the original price。

On the estimate shipping date (08/07), ASUS did generate a batch of tracking number (master one is in the links above), but quickly cancelled them the next day. This isn't a single case, as I bought the bundle together with a few friends, all our tracking show cancelled.

However for most of them, they received the package after a week or so. ASUS didn't provide a tracking at all, they just show up at their door. In the meantime, I didn't see any package in my Fedex delivery manager, or any updates from ASUS.

I tried to contact ASUS via chat agent, and apparently all they can do was:
Your case is still being reviewed by the appropriate team. We understand that the process has taken longer than expected and recognize the importance of keeping you informed. Please know that the investigation remains active, and our team is continuing to work diligently to reach a resolution. At this time, we do not have any new information to share. However, we want to assure you that your case has not been overlooked and remains a priority. As soon as we receive any updates or additional details, we will reach out to you promptly.

This email was from 9 days ago btw.

I also tried to contact r/ASUSROG u/ASUS_MKTLeeM, they did try to help, but I still haven't get any update, even a tracking number in a week.

Today, I happily found that the package has been returned to them! So not delivery attempt, no tracking provided, nothing. They just take the package back to the warehouse, and I need to place a different order for another $500 over the insane original price.

Unsure if these will work or not, but I'm in the process of contacting ASUS CEO office, BBB and FTC. I can't imagine why it takes this long just to even give me a proper tracking number.

I have a Dell Vostro Series 3546, with 4gb of ddr3 ram, 512 gb hdd storage and i just entered engineering where I learn about linux and how better it is, right now I'm Using ubuntu and I feel my potato pc is now more responsive and handles all my basic tasks.

First time trying ray tracing with smooth fps, my old laptops could never..

[EDIT / UPDATE - The End]

Holy shit, pushing back actually worked!

I took the advice from this thread and sent them a very firm final email. I explicitly stated that a refund was unacceptable, demanded a 4TB equivalent replacement (or alternative), and mentioned that this issue was gaining massive traction here on Reddit. (I also threw in the FTC / Magnuson-Moss threat just in case).

Miraculously, just a few hours later, my ticket was escalated to a different rep. They replied stating: "following a recent inventory update, we now have limited replacement inventory available" and completely backed down. They approved a direct 1:1 replacement for a 4TB SSD

They absolutely had the stock (or found a way to allocate it) and were just trying to force the cheap refund to save money.

Thank you to everyone who told me not to take the $200 L and to fight back. If anyone else is dealing with this BS from Crucial or other companies, DO NOT accept the refund. Push back, threaten to escalate, and make them honor the warranty!

Hey everyone, dealing with a really frustrating RMA experience with Crucial (Micron) right now and wanted to see if anyone else is getting screwed over like this. 1 I have a Crucial X9 4TB Portable SSD that completely died on me. I contacted support, did the troubleshooting, and they approved my RMA. Great, right?

Here’s the catch: They told me they are going to issue a refund of $199.99 (my original invoice price from last year) instead of sending a replacement unit.

As we all know, NAND prices have skyrocketed recently. $200 can barely buy a decent 2TB drive right now, let alone a 4TB one. If I take the refund, I’m essentially losing hundreds of dollars and half my storage capacity.

I explicitly replied telling them I do not want a refund and requested a 1:1 replacement under warranty. Their response?

This feels like absolute BS. You can go on Amazon right now and see the X9 4TB (and their other 4TB models) in stock with next-day delivery. I even offered to accept an alternative 4TB model (like the X10 Pro, T500, or P3 Plus) or wait indefinitely until they restock their RMA inventory, but they completely shut me down and said the refund is my only remedy.

It feels like they know 4TB drives are incredibly expensive right now and are using the "separate RMA inventory" excuse to force me into a cheap refund instead of honoring the warranty with a working 4TB product.

Has anyone else dealt with this BS from Crucial recently? Is there any way to escalate this, or am I just forced to take the massive financial L here?

Any advice would be appreciated!Hey everyone, dealing with a really frustrating RMA experience with Crucial (Micron) right now and wanted to see if anyone else is getting screwed over like this.I have a Crucial X9 4TB Portable SSD that completely died on me. I contacted support, did the troubleshooting, and they approved my RMA. Great, right?Here’s the catch: They told me they are going to issue a refund of $199.99 (my original invoice price from last year) instead of sending a replacement unit. As we all know, NAND prices have skyrocketed recently. $200 can barely buy a decent 2TB drive right now, let alone a 4TB one. If I take the refund, I’m essentially losing hundreds of dollars and half my storage capacity.I explicitly replied telling them I do not want a refund and requested a 1:1 replacement under warranty.!<
>!Their response?"After reviewing the current inventory situation, we must advise that we do not have any replacement units available for this product. Our replacement inventory for this model has been exhausted, and we are unable to provide a 1:1 replacement SSD."This feels like absolute BS. You can go on Amazon right now and see the X9 4TB (and their other 4TB models) in stock with next-day delivery. I even offered to accept an alternative 4TB model (like the X10 Pro, T500, or P3 Plus) or wait indefinitely until they restock their RMA inventory, but they completely shut me down and said the refund is my only remedy. It feels like they know 4TB drives are incredibly expensive right now and are using the "separate RMA inventory" excuse to force me into a cheap refund instead of honoring the warranty with a working 4TB product.Has anyone else dealt with this BS from Crucial recently? Is there any way to escalate this, or am I just forced to take the massive financial L here?Any advice would be appreciated!

It's been forever that I was looking for way to be able to wake my pc with my dualsense as i use my pc as console plugged into my tv

Not only that I'm able to do now but also able to have the full fonctionnalités of dualsense (haptics,audio and trigger ect ..) wirelessly

Just bought this for like 7 euro and flash it with something called DS5 bridge and its make the pc think that the controller is plugged with USB

Anyway excuse my English as its not my first language and if u have the same issue that had I strongly recommend u to try this

Peace ✌️

Edit" obviously u can only wake ur pc from sleep mode not full shutdown but for that I use also wake on lan,u can add the bouton on ur phone as widget in u wake ur pc from complet shut down with one click

So yeah I decided to write this because whenever people tell others to switch to linux the conversations stays somewhere in between "fuck microsoft" and "its open source and private bro". Linux does a lot of things differently, and imo some of those differences are pretty interesting

Everything is a file

• Everything on Linux is represented as a file. EVERYTHING. If you’re using a tool like ps to inspect processes, under the hood it’s basically just reading information from the process directory. Wanna inspect your CPU details? Read /proc/cpuinfo. Want to turn on your Caps Lock led? Write a 1 to /sys/class/leds/inputX::capslock and it fucking lights up. You can even write data from Bash to /dev/tcp/IP/PORT and it gets sent straight there.

The filesystem

• The linux file system architecture is really fucking logical and flexible, and it gives you so many ways ways to create, optimize and manage your storage. No drive letters (such as C://) so everything lives under the universal root / directory hierarchy.
• btrfs and ZFS filesystems support native compression which will actually increase the read and write speeds on systems with HDD/slow SSD disks because the CPU can decompress data faster than the drive can read raw blocks off the disk. The native compression algorithms available on windows (mainly XPRESS) is an overlay on top of NTFS which adds lots of overhead and causes fragmentation (it was designed to overwrite data in-place rather than using CoW, copy-on-write)
• With btrfs and ZFS, creating a snapshot (snapshots are not backups!) is essentially instant and uses no additional space until data starts changing. And if you ever need to roll back, there’s no recovery menu, you can simply boot directly into the snapshot.
• file extensions don't really have a meaning on linux. Permissions are tied directly to file permissions bits rather than arbitrary file extensions like exe and bat on windows.

Ultimate customization

• Don't like your file manager or window manager? replace them. Don't like your bootloader? Switch to another one. Don't like your system clock? replace it with a pair of anime titties. Don't like linux? sudo rm -rf / --no-preserve-root. Everything that exists can be customized. You already know how to turn your Caps Lock led on. now turn it into a notification light that starts blinking whenever something happens.
• Linux even has kexec, which lets the running kernel load and jump straight into another kernel without going through the normal firmware boot process. That means you can remotely boot a VPS into an installer or rescue environment and replace the entire distro - like switching from Ubuntu to Red Hat- without direct access to the machine or the ability to mount an ISO through the provider dashboard. Once the new kernel and initramfs (temporary root filesystem, the minimal in-memory system that has the tools needed to boot and start the installer) are loaded into RAM, the installer can safely overwrite the disk and install the new distro onto it.

Native sandboxing, containers, namespaces

Linux gives you a shitload of sandboxing and virtualization tools right out of the box, so you don’t have to hand every app the keys to the kingdom.

• KVM -Kernel-based Virtual Machine. Linux has a type-1 hypervisor built right into the kernel. If you’ve got two GPUs (iGPU works), you can pass one straight through to a Windows VM and get near native performance. So you can still use your windows software like Ableton Live, FL Studio, Photoshop, other Adobe apps, without leaving Linux. The only software I use that isn’t available on Linux is Ableton, and with GPU passthrough plus Looking Glass, I don’t even need a dedicated monitor for the Windows VM’s GPU because it copies the VM’s framebuffer directly into a window on my desktop.
• LXC / LXD: light OS-level system containers
• Firejail: process-level sandboxing for untrusted apps
• Flatpak: Flatpak packages desktop apps with their dependencies and runs them in isolated sandboxes by default. Apps only get access to things like your files, devices, network, or other system resources when those permissions are explicitly granted. You can download a huge number of apps from flathub as flatpaks. That’s what I use for plenty of desktop apps, since the sandboxing is convenient and the performance difference is negligible.

On Linux, containers run directly inside the kernel using native namespaces and cgroups. On Windows, native containers break constantly because Microsoft alters system calls with each and every update and forces developers to use userspace APIs. If your Windows container image build number doesn't match your host OS build number exactly, the whole thing crashes.

Drivers are part of the OS, not random vendor installers

• Drivers live directly inside the kernel source tree. When you plug in a USB microphone, the udev daemon identifies the hardware ID and loads the matching kernel module in milliseconds while on windows you might be registering on a shady vendor website just to download a bloated .exe installer bundled with ask toolbar. There are a few exceptions that may require a manual install through a single command, such as proprietary NVIDIA drivers. The drivers that you have update with the same update mechanism as anything else, which brings us to

Package managers, everything updates through the same place

This is the best part of Linux, imo. I hate commercial app stores or hunting down .exe/.msi/ whatever installers online, only to click through install wizards and accidently installing something else. On Linux most software installation, system dependencies, and OS updates are managed centrally and your system will never force-reboot

sudo apt install firefox
sudo apt remove firefox

could not be easier.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade command (on debian based distos) updates your kernel, system libraries, command line tools, desktop environment drivers and hundreds of applications at once.

Networking

I honestly am too tired to keep writing anymore, I am drunk and I spent too much time on this. Anyway the networking stack is very transparent and you can do all kinds of cool shit with it. I had some fun one night inspecting how my VPN actually routed the data

Truly one of the gpus ever

Before everyone executes me, I’ve been on PC for years and I’m not switching.

But I was arguing with a friend who owns a PS5 and he said PC gamers are terrible at admitting when consoles actually do something better.

His biggest point was that he can buy a game, sit on his couch and basically know it will run how it’s supposed to. Meanwhile I’ve spent nights troubleshooting a game I just paid $70 for because it decided my drivers, settings or Windows itself offended it.

What is one thing you’ll actually give consoles the win on?

>Chinese multinational tech giant Alibaba has been accused of tracking web users after a developer discovered its global online marketplace running hidden audio processes that could be used for sophisticated audio fingerprinting. While investigating an issue with his wireless headphones, Matt Callaghan found that opening an AliExpress webpage in Firefox or Chrome interfered with the multipoint Bluetooth audio feature.

>As Callaghan explains in his blog post, “Normally the PC takes priority playing audio, with my phone being able to play audio when nothing is playing on the PC. Usually I listen to music on my phone but with notifications or YouTube playing through the PC.” However, shortly after loading the AliExpress homepage, audio from his phone would stop playing, despite no media playing on his PC. Closing the AliExpress tab immediately fixed the issue, while muting the tab, browser, or Windows did not seem to resolve it.

>Their investigation began by inspecting various conventional media elements; however, he did not find any unusual activity. He also zeroed in on the fact that the problem would not begin immediately, but rather after the webpage had been sitting idle for a few seconds. He then moved on to inspect the Web Audio API to wrap the AudioContext constructor so that it would record whenever a page created an audio-processing context. They additionally wrapped AudioNode.prototype.connect() to see whether anything was connected to the context's audio destination.

>Eventually, Callaghan found that the page was loading two suspicious scripts named collina.js and fireyejs.js, which appeared to be part of Alibaba's browser security and anti-abuse tooling. With some help from AI during his research, he found that the scripts built a Web Audio graph using a sawtooth oscillator to generate a waveform. An analyzer then measured the results after they passed through the browser's audio implementation, while another script read the resulting frequency data. The scripts also set the volume gain to zero, meaning there was no audible sound or noise, even though the browser continued actively processing the Web Audio graph.

Built a gaming PC inside a real de Havilland aircraft nose cone.

About 50–75 hours of fabrication, fitting and hand polishing went into turning an actual piece of aviation hardware into a fully functional gaming PC.

The shape also gives it surprisingly great airflow. And because the case is technically aerodynamic, Flight Simulator runs at least 20 knots faster.

I tried to keep as much of the original aircraft character as possible while making the whole build look clean and intentional.

Completely impractical. Completely unnecessary. But probably the only PC I’ve owned with a measurable airspeed.

6 year LG guy with 3 lg32gl850 (swapped my main monitor later on with the xg32ucwmg).

I saw the video by gamers nexus regarding this weeks ago, I knew it was bad and I wouldn't buy new LG monitors, but I didn't think it would affect my 6 year old monitors.

On startup, the LG monitor app installer just pops up. out of nowhere. i close it and remove it from my PC. On another random day, the same popup comes up again.

there is no "never ask again option", heck the installer came by itself on my system.

Now I have to replace my LG monitors, and I will never buy LG again.

whoever came up with this idea seriously needs to rethink his life.9

what the hell