Hoyt

Last night I bit the bullet and got Clair Obscur Expedition 33 for the PS5. That seems like it'll keep me busy for a while if I can learn the combat. I have never been good at dodging or parrying anything in any game (was mostly an FPS player) so I'm still wandering around in the first area trying to figure it out. I can't remember if I mentioned it or not but the original Dragon Age Origins for PC is one of the best games I've ever played with tons of replay value. You can get the complete edition on gog.com cheap and nexus mods has some groovy graphical enhancements that are nice but not necessary. GOG.com is heavy into the preservation of old games so if you are thinking of any old DOS/early Windows games you'd like to pick up to keep they are the go to place. None of their games have any DRM in them and they have complete offline installers if that's what you want so you can back them up for safe keeping. Some of the better cheap surprises I've gotten over the years were from browsing https://www.loaded.com/ (formerly CDkeys.com) and sorting PC games by lowest price. Most keys are Steam or GOG and I've been amazed at how many great games I've gotten for less than five bucks. They have console games as well but the biggest and best savings are on PC. I got Outriders dirt cheap from them and probably put over 700 hours into it over the years (I think there are five different classes you can play).

OP I don't know if either of these methods will help you but I thought I'd list them just in case. We have used delprof2 for many years with good results. It is fairly customizable but it does delete the entire user profile (which is fine with me). I have a shortcut to it on my Desktop. A lot of times when I sit down at a user's PC I just run it for general maintenance. If you need to script profile deletion this fellow here has some PS scripts that do it: Delete User Profiles with PowerShell & CIM (I have not tried this method myself). Every few weeks I'll use EMCO remote installer and push through my delprof2 batch files across my segment of the network. It seems that with every version of Windows profiles get larger and larger. I have seen some exceed 75 gigabytes.

How does that compare to the first one? I liked the original Outer Worlds (Spacer's Choice Edition) but reviews on the sequel haven't been good over here.

Not exactly single player but during break I tried to get back into FFXIV. I do most things solo but when I get stuck the Novice Network in the chat window is very helpful. I like that I can play it on console and PC depending on where I feel like being in the house. The only problem is it doesn't carry everything over from one system to the other very well. If I create another job class on the PS5 it doesn't automatically show up on PC or even the old PS4. I have to upload the settings and configs then go to the other system and download them, which sometimes takes several tries. I guess a small company like Square Enix doesn't have the budget to get their cloud save functionality working 100%.

GOG has got VTM Bloodlines on sale now. Probably my favorite single player RPG of all time.

A wise admin allowed this:

Are they stand alone or do they sync to your Domain?

Since you mention Intune I'm guessing they are not on a domain? If they are you can block whatever .exe you want with group policy. We have also used Sophos to block browsers as well. Does your AV app allow blocking? All that being said if a device is not personal (meaning paid for by the taxpayers) I see no reason for end users to have admin rights. Just asking for problems and dancing with liability IMHO.

Late to the party I know, but I had seen similar behavior when the drive I had my Clonezilla images on was formatted in NTFS instead of ExFAT. When I reformatted the external drive as ExFAT I didn't see the problem anymore. I thought it was weird that only some machines had this issue. Just thought I'd throw that out there in case it helps anyone.

I've had a few HP workstations do that when creating images. I'm lazy, slow, and cheap so I just used an old program called Double Driver Backup. I booted the machines with the original HP image and used that program to extract all the controller drivers ad put them on the bootup flash drive.

Interesting. That almost sounds like it is a 32 bit game instead of 64 bit native. I remember when I downloaded some mods for Dragon Age 2 on PC to clean it up I had to download a program called large address aware and modify the main executable so it could access more than two gigs of RAM. Once I did that everything looked good and ran smooth. I had to do the same thing on my old Remote Desktop Connection Manager. Everything modern uses a database engine of some kind, this old program is much simpler and easier to back up.

I can only guess that there is a much larger hammer hanging from that enclosure that is not in the photo...

Has anyone on the Steam forums looked into this? Sometimes those guys can find unofficial workarounds that fix some major issues.

I just remembered the original Plants vs. Zombies was a blast.

Looks like they adopted the Jack Daniels pricing structure (that ain't a joke, they really do that). Over here they know us drunk rednecks won't realize we are actually paying more for larger quantities.

I've got a similar situation regarding one of my machines with an AMD GPU in it. The machine in my basement on my workbench is a 7800 X3D CPU with an AMD 7900 XTX video card. Sometimes on Friday nights I go down there to play Counter Strike and it won't go much more than an hour without that game crashing. Only game that seems to do it. The machine upstairs in the office has an Nvidia card and it doesn't crash on that one. You'd think they'd have figured this stuff out by now.

Interesting. I wonder if the PC port is just buggy or if it don't like your particular hardware? The Steam Deck looks like a groovy little gadget, but I know my eyes would be tortured by a screen that small. I did buy the FFX/X2 remaster on Playstation, so hopefully I'll give it a go one day. Back in the day I played through X on the PS2. Got a little bit into X2 but never finished it due to my late Wife falling ill. I remember a cheese I had tried on X2 that I read about. I got my party in a dungeon and tied the left stick forward with a rubber band so they were always walking (facing into a corner). Then used another rubber band to tie down two buttons that corresponded to AOE attack and and full party heal. Left it running that way when I went to work. Basically the game kept throwing random encounters that those two keys would wipe out. When I got home my party was leveled up nicely 😁

I've seen that one advertised. I put it on a wish list for when it goes on sale some day. I've got a coworker that says he's had a lot of fun with a game called Dredge. Seems to have above average reviews on Steam and Xbox. Hopefully it isn't a cash cow and Microsoft hasn't been deleting one star reviews on it. They actually delisted and relisted Black Ops 7 to clear out all the negative reviews in one swipe.

Over Thanksgiving break Xbox had a sale on Necromunda Hired Gun, a Warhammer spinoff from a smaller developer. It was a good little time waster once you learned how the side missions could feed your upgrade paths. I subconsciously feel like I'm missing out by not getting more into online RPGs but then again I can never really get too deep into them. Sometimes it seems like folks that live in fantasy land in the real world migrate there, but it might be that I haven't stuck with it. I just keep going with drop in drop out single player stuff.

Couldn't have anything to do with the LED light strip the teacher plugged into the USB port of the panel could it? Or the air freshener? All joking aside we only use desktop PCs to plug into the panels, so some sort of cabling is what we would like to stick with. Due to the layout of some rooms running Ethernet cable with converters was the first thing we thought of since we were doing the same for the HDMI connection. Another thing I should mention is they empty out every classroom at the end of every school year to clean and wax the floors. That is a huge stress on cabling so being able to just put three keystone jacks on a 2x4 box on the wall to plug everything back in was enticing to us.

We have a few long HDMI runs but have had problems with them depending on the panel brand/model so often fall back on the HDMI to Ethernet extenders. Also since most of our PCs are the HP business class they tend to have DisplayPort outputs instead of HDMI. We have some that have both but the HDMI ports have been dang near non functional. SMART tech support actually told us to get DisplayPort to HDMI adapter dongles and sure enough that helped a great bit. Fortunately our teachers have used projectors for over fifteen years and we had placed shortcuts to DisplaySwitch (a lot of my schools still say "Connect to a Projector" from the XP/Win7 days) on their redirected Desktops so they are used to navigating the different display modes. Martin do you recall if y'all ever had to convert from DisplayPort to HDMI on any of those longer runs? In some cases if the panel had a VGA input on it I just reused the VGA cable and those have been rock solid. Nobody around here has gotten Shiny Object Syndrome (tm) for 4K resolutions, so that helps. I haven't seen anything yet that wouldn't work just fine at 1920 x 1080. Thanks for all the info it is good to hear from everyone. Oh one thing I happened to remember; do y'all have a favorite USB over Ethernet extender? The SMART branded units seem to be the most reliable of what we have tried but they are pretty expensive. Some of the El Cheapo Monoprice units will transmit the touch signal, but often fail when it comes to actual data transmission (think SMART Ink functionality). Thanks again for all the help.

Howdy all, In my district we just started migrating from overhead projectors with VGA cables to display panels a couple of years ago. With the projectors they were drop dead simple with DisplayPort to VGA adapters. When we started getting in some display panels of various brands (why on earth would they all be the same?) we used REI HDMI to Ethernet adapters. None of them are above 1920 x 1080 so they seem to work for the most part, but occasionally we have to unplug the power supply to the REI box the PC is plugged into to get the PC to sync to the board again. For the panels with touch we use USB to Ethernet adapters. Those get a little weird with some brands (SMART in particular). Oddly enough I have better luck with the SMART branded USB to Ethernet extenders I saved from the old SMART boards that these newer panels replaced. How are y'all connecting to your display panels? For the most part we have PCs with DisplayPort outputs (we have a few with HDMI but have had terrible luck with them) and convert that to HDMI over Ethernet as described above. In some very rare cases the PC is close enough to the panel to run a direct cable. We are an isolated rural district so we don't have many other folks to bounce ideas off of. Also I have wondered about how we could handle things in the future when these panels go out of warranty. It is a real time consuming pain to RMA one of these panels when it dies. I can swap out a lamp in a projector in five minutes. I can swap out the entire projector in fifteen. Those are small and cheap things we can keep as spares. Nobody in our org and tackled the idea of what to do when these large, heavy and expensive display panels start conking out after the warranty expires. What do y'all do in those scenarios? Thanks for reading this far. Just trying to see what folks do in more modern areas.

I have tinkered with FFXIV off an on for a year or so. I'm spoiled with so many other games I haven't really stuck with it. I just renewed my sub for two months this week so hopefully I'll get back into it. FFXI Braver sounds like a cool game. Might dig into it.