Hoyt

Strange how something or someone put an ad for Casino games in a quote from my post that was not originally there.

One more for the weekend...

There's a snake in the hole!!!

Y'all just clued me in to a good easy going RPG. I looked into Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. www.loaded.com had a Steam key for it for about six dollars. These days I prefer to play simple stuff like that on console, so I checked the Playstation Store and it was still listed for fifty bucks. They did have a sale on some of the other games in that series though. They had a sale on Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom for about nine bucks and it seems to scratch that easy going somewhat sane RPG itch. Put a couple of hours into it yesterday and it looks promising. When y'all mentioned shmups it brings back to memory the old Apogee games. I still have Raptor Call of the Shadows on one of my PCs somewhere. I remember playing Stargunner back in the day and I think I have it on my GoG account now. I remember on Raptor depending on what holiday was on the calendar it would change up the enemies, that was a surprise. I see a lot of FF7 remakes and I just can't understand what the difference is in them. I think I actually have the original on my Xbox account. On Playstation Plus I think they have one or two of the remakes but I don't know how the story fits in to the original. If anyone knows where it's best to start please chime in. The Witcher 3 complete edition on Xbox was one of the better games I had played in years. I've got Cyberbug but haven't given it a try since they fixed it up.

Whoops I did mean DRM free as far as Good old Games goes. I have heard of the Humble Bundle but not looked into it. The games they sell, are they keys for Steam? I've only recently gotten into the PSN catalog as I was mainly Xbox as far as online connected consoles goes (they have decent backwards compatibility all the way back to the original Xbox), but lately Microsoft has completely lost their minds. I saw a video of a "nose ring patient" whining that he lost his job at Microsoft for celebrating political assassinations and it really drove home how nuts those guys are. PSN seems to have the same AAA games but also a lot of titles that I had never heard of before that have been pretty interesting. They also give away three games a month like Microsoft USED to do. The storage situation on the PS5 is a lot easier to manage with the M.2 expansion slot as well. The one thing I will say though is I MUCH prefer the Microsoft gamepad over Sony's. For one they didn't require a new gamepad going from last gen to current, and Playstation controllers have always cramped my hands. They are just too dang small. For RPGs and relaxed play type games they are OK, but for FPS and frantic action games they cause cramps. I just keep a couple of sets of rechargeable AA batteries near the console so I never have to charge the controller, I just swap the batteries out. I appreciate all the recommendations y'all have listed. That is one thing I still like about Xbox, they still have real reviews. You have to read them though, they manipulate the star ratings to try to sell games. Like with Failguard, you won't see any reviews over two stars, most are one stars and the overall rating is four on the title page. Reading what y'all are into will definitely give me some new titles to try.

I just finished The Outer Worlds Spacer's Choice edition on PS5 after 83 hours. I also played the new RoboCop game on it. The New Game+ was pretty wild with all the upgrades. I'd really like to get into Baldur's Gate 3 some more. I've got it on PC but I never played any D&D games so I keep getting overwhelmed. I REALLY liked Outriders on PC. The WorldSlayer DLC makes later playthoughs a blast (you can shuffle some weapons and gear between characters). Got a petty good backlog on PC, PS, and Xbox. I would catch sales on CDKEYS (now called Loaded) on Steam and GoG at times as well which extend that backlog. One nice thing about Good Old Games is their games are DLC free. You can download the installer and back it up for future use. You can also use their Steam like front end if you want automatic updates. My Son seems to really like Warframe after we got bored of Destiny 2.

We had something similar with the HP EliteOne 840 23.8 inch G9 and Windows 10. I had built an image for an initial shipment of the units that worked fine. When we got a second shipment of the same model but different CPU a few teachers were reporting hiccuping audio during media playback. It was random and only affected a few units. As a test I to a Windows flash drive and reinstalled Windows from scratch after completely wiping the drive. I let the teacher test it for a week and she said the problem never cropped up again. I wound up creating a fresh image on a machine from the second shipment and it seems to have fixed all the affected units according to the other techs. I realize this isn't specific to Windows 11, but maybe you could try the same approach. Do a manual from scratch installation of Windows 11 on a machine with the problem and see if helps. If it does you might could cook up a fresh image to try out.

Just one less thing to worry about if someone gains access to network browsing. It's easy to forget to remove the "Everyone" group when setting up a new share. Also if you do need shares visible keeping most of them hidden reduces browse time a good bit.

That looks pretty cool. Looks like a slightly more advanced version of what I use. The one that only has component input to HDMI output is less than $15 shipped, but older consoles that don't have component out wouldn't work with it.

For some reason the PS2 connection to HDMI is one of the weirdest to get a good color pallet on. I tried a couple of PS2 to HDMI adapters but the image was just too dark. I found that using a regular component PS2 cabled plugged into a component to HDMI converter box gave the best image. I don't know if y'all use component connections over there though.

Oh man forgot about the older consoles. Got a pile of PS2s in various states of modification in the basement. One even has an SSD with the games on them. One thing I will say about PS2 games is the PC emulator is out of this world. You can play your discs straight from the DVD drive or use ImgBurn to rip them as ISOs on your hard drive. It allows your modern video card to clean up the graphics with AA and AF to where they look modern. I also have a few original Xboxes modded with large hard drives in them. Xbox Media Center is still a great thing to have piped into your TV. Played all three Mass Effects back on 360 but haven't spent much time on the remasters. The Mafia trilogy seems to be pretty good as well. Played 2 on PC and am now on the first one remastered on the Xbox. I really dug the second one for the soundtracks.

Forgot to mention you can buy it on the current Xboxes (Xbox store) and it runs great. Visuals are a little cleaned up and no more disc swapping. Load times are much faster as well.

Thanks y'all it's hard to believe how many of those I've already played and how many y'all mentioned that I have backlogged. VTM Bloodlines was the first RPG I really got into despite my advanced age at the time. If anyone hasn't tried it yet definitely get the unofficial patch. It was WAY ahead of its time. I think Fallout 3 GOY edition was the first Fallout game I tried (360) and really liked it. Then the New Vegas GOY edition on PC, then Fallout 4 which still has little segments I haven't completed yet. I liked that you could use your tablet for a Pip Boy, that was awesome. I've got 76 on Xbox (free code) but haven't tried it yet. My Son and I played Skyrim a lot when it came out. Before that I had played Oblivion but for some reason got ground down and never finished it (PC). I have enjoyed The Witcher games (PC and Xbox) and The Outer Worlds (Spacer's Choice) on PS5. Tried Death Stranding but it just didn't grab me. Liked RDR for a bit but never got through it. I've got Cyberpunk 2077 on Xbox but didn't get far into it. Now that it's patched up I might try it again. I have played FFXIV on PC and PS5 but I keep falling away from it. I started playing Counter Strike in 99 or 00 when it was a mod for Half Life and gravitate back to it from time to time. I fooled with Destiny for many years but they got so far off the rails like so many game studios with their political agenda that I gave it up. I think one of my problems is I've dabbled in a little bit of everything over the years so I haven't stuck with one thing for very long. I do still seem to enjoy a good RPG every few years, so I'm thankful for that.

I've heard that is a great game. I'm torn between getting it on PC or console. Except for FPS games I find myself playing on console more these days. That being said sometimes the mods available for PC games can really add life to them.

Just happened to think that lately I've gotten back into an Xbox game called "Lost Odyssey" that I first completed over fifteen years ago. It is a JRPG that was exclusive to the Xbox 360 at the time. It is a very deep RPG that has numerous strange mechanics that suck me in so that I can actually win the random encounters without using all of my resources. I've got scads of other games on my accounts (and quite a few discs - I still love the ability to play offline) but something like this old gem can grab my attention better than anything I've seen lately. I did pick up Baldur's Gate 3 but I'm getting the impression it is geared towards smart folk, which ain't me. What titles have y'all gladly sunk many hours of playtime in?

I still primarily use a Samsung mono color printer plugged into our wired network. Our laptops can print to it through the access point they connect to. When my old scanner got left behind by Windows 11 I picked up a cheap Epson all in one unit and it works fine, but I never print in color so when the cartridges ran out I never replaced them. Don't know if y'all have Epson over there or not but I think I got the thing delivered on sale for less than $60. I used to hate the thought of all in one units because the software always seemed cumbersome, but since I needed a scanner anyway that little Epson has been impressive.

After looking at this issue for a while I find more and more posts of folks complaining about this. They tried the solutions offered by Microsoft (I'm not about to tinker too much with our production servers) without success. On a lark one day I fired up Computer Management on my workstation and just connected to the storage server (right click on Computer Management in the upper left and select connect to another computer). When I did that and looked at the sessions it was lightning quick like it used to be on Server 2019 and before. I tried it on four of our six file servers and it worked great every time. I guess we are just dealing with an age where Windows in most flavors is so bloated that even Microsoft doesn't really know what is going on anymore. Figured I'd post this in case it helped anyone.

Might be a Native American on the admin team...

Yeah if I remember correctly that setting is in the Computer part of the policy, not the User. We just killed it completely. Our end users don't need search, only I.T. uses it so it just inconveniences us, which is OK with the district for sure. Hopefully once we get going with Intune we can tweak that a bit. We just have an empty Start Menu with shortcuts on read only redirected Desktops for our users. Since most U.S. schools have signed on to the Google ecosystem, Chrome is the only browser that is allowed (turn over the infrastructure of education to a bunch of hippies in California - sounds groovy to me). Since most things are done online through Chrome the only custom shortcuts users would need can be saved in their bookmarks which synchronizes with their logins. One thing that bugs me going forward is the guy that got stuck looking over us techs is completely burnt out by the I.T. director who is an educator; the person has no I.T. knowledge at all. He is pushing to do away with Active Directory completely and rely solely on Intune. From what little I understand that is a recipe for things running wild. Do any of y'all have experience using Intune without A.D. and its management capabilities?

Yes I agree with hiding EVERYTHING that is not absolutely needed for an employee or student to complete their assigned tasks. One of things that can cause a lot of unnecessary wasting of time is folks getting into stuff they have no reason to monkey with. If they want to play and explore on a PC they can do it at home on their own time. If I remember correctly the mindset used to be called the "principle of least required privilege".

I can't believe someone actually said that, no offense intended. I'll try to clean up a phrase we use around here from time to time: "That boy could screw up a free lunch!".

Interesting. I don't have prime or Netflix but it looks like season two is based off of the New Vegas game. Was the first season based off of Fallout 3 or 4?

I created batch files with the options you listed and it worked fine. Eventually one of the guys working with our new Windows 11 Group Policy did get the DisplaySwitch shortcut working, but your info saved the day for the first week of school.

Thanks for your prompt reply Psy. We have always just had a shortcut on the redirected Desktops pointing to the executable. The target reads like this: %windir%\system32\displayswitch.exe Do you think we should be doing something different? The above shortcut just brings up the menu and allows them to select which of the four modes they want. You bring up an option that may work though. I think I'll try three individual shortcuts with the mode switches that you just listed and copy them to an affected teacher's Desktop. That just initiates the mode instead of bringing up the Display menu, which might work. Thanks