Daily Tech News 22 April 2024

• Is the Minisforum V3 any good? Yes. (Notebook Check)
  
  It looks good on paper, and it also looks good in actual use.
  
  The one shortcoming is the battery life, which is only around six hours due the the high idle power draw - about twice that of a Microsoft Surface tablet.
  
  That's likely to be an issue with the BIOS on the review model not putting the CPU into the proper sleep state, but as of today it is something you need to be concerned about.

• If you're worried about the disappearance of the Z80, don't be: There's a project to produce an open-source version. (GitHub)
  
  It's being produced as part of TinyTapeout and the chip measures 320x200 micrometers when produced on an ancient (and therefore cheap) 130nm process.
  
  
  
• I mean, who doesn't need a 256-core carryon? (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This squishes two 128-core servers each with 2TB of RAM into the size of a regular carry-on bag.
  
  There aren't many people who need to be able to grab that amount of compute power, jump onto a plan, and just plug it in wherever they land, but the people who need it really need it.
  
  
  
• Asus laptop update: It's dead easy to open and upgrade. Modern laptop covers are held in place with plastic clips as well as screws, and those clips can be a massive pain. In this case not so much; pry the first one open, and then just keep levering it gently until it's free.
  
  Worth noting that the four short screws all go at the front.
  
  Anyway, installed the extra 32GB of RAM, booted it up with the cover off, and it worked just fine and showed 40GB of RAM (it has 8GB soldered in place and one free slot).
  
  Next up I swapped the SSD. Powered on and BIOS recognised the new device, so I closed it all back up and plugged in the recovery drive.
  
  Which told me to go jump in a lake.
  
  So I plugged in the Windows 11 install drive.
  
  Which also told me to go jump in a lake.
  
  I have some Windows 11 install tricks to try, and failing that, a couple of spare SSDs.
  
  But why in 2024 does the Windows installer still fail with a generic message and an 8-digit hexadecimal error code? You're not short of space for proper error messages, guys.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:13 AM

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