Looks like a Nintendo DS a bit.

One can only hope this deal falls through just like the 2 others recently.

Considering i get premium Peacock for like $6 a month after discounts I agree. I get the live channel plus a ton of other stuff and other pre-made channels to watch. Some sports as well plus the Olympics when they are relevant. Asking $8 just to remove some ads sounds awful. I will stick to using Firefox on mobile and pc with ublock origin which removes all ads.

The other options are great, but i recommend Sabrent just because it’s what I purchased and was slightly less money than WD at the time. It came with the heatsink as well, which replaces the cover and is really nice. Since then, I also built a new PC 2 years ago and liked it so much I decided to buy 2 higher end ones for my gaming pc, and they also have been just fine so far. I just got them off either Amazon or newegg at the time.

Just remember to buy the one specifically for ps5 since the read/write needs to be as higher or higher than the ps5 one. I think it has to be 6k or higher for it to work fine with ps5 games for loading purposes. Obviously, there are cheap ones, but it’s most likely due to older hardware and slower speeds. Just keep an eye out, and you will be fine.

I’m good. I spend less than $20 a month on 3 services, and it’s all I need. Youtube is not even one of them. Dropped the app, use it directly in Firefox on my phone with ublock origin, and I get no ads which would be the only benefit I would want it for. I still source all my music and keep locally and setup my own music server which is accessible anywhere. Same goes for TV and shows, not the streaming sites but an actual local library. It’s been working for about 10 years now so I have no reason to change.

Saw this in our all IT Teams chat today with people complaining. I just laughed and said oh well that’s what you get when you moved from on prem to cloud. At least it was a Saturday, although I think that was by design since it appeared to be due to a change they implemented and reversed so that makes sense.

We recently had a huge outage almost a month ago with RingCentral as well. Our entire call center was down for almost 8 hours due to that crazy outage. I have been with this company 19 years and it was Avaya on prem and never had a single outage, last year we moved to RingCentral and boom less than a year later that happened. The funny thing is they also said they never had that happen that bad ever before either. Thankfully our VP has been around the block and knew to tell the company when we shifted to cloud that we needed to lower our expectations from what we previously had because there’s no way you will have 100% uptime with a cloud solution. 8 hours was never expected, though, lol.

Thankfully the place i work for is just a wannabe and has to weigh financial decisions like this and thankfully always gets denied. I always find it funny when this stuff is brought up because it takes a lot of distrust and bad decisions to think spending a small fortune to watch your employees is going to make them work harder and increase productivity. Like, even if that was somewhat true, which it isn’t for many reasons, you spent a ton of money on a system that will probably take away any increase in profits anyway. The only people who win here are the companies paid to install and setup the equipment.

I have heard several stories like this from my boss who worked at a previous place where he was asked to remove an entire team like you did. He says he will never forget it and is soul crushing. He tried his hardest to cut budgets and even found a few things were he was able to save the money and brought this to upper management where they had to break it to him that it didn’t matter what was saved, that wasn’t the point… people are just names on paper to them and if they decide this is what they want there is pretty much no stopping them. He then said he was there long enough after that where they realized it was an awful mistake and the work you get in return is not nearly as good as the original team you had so they had to hire new people back. It’s a never ending cycle these days.

I also work in IT Healthcare! It’s a brutal industry huh! Thankfully I have been with the same place for 19 years now, but it have witnessed it all. When I started we grew exponentially throwing money at everything, then the owner sold and I got to witness the “no changes expected” followed by everything changing. Then saw partners separate from us completely which was crazy work, and then the boom of covid followed by almost going belly up with massive layoffs for the past 2 years and consolidation of everything basically back to when I started in 2006!

I honestly don’t have too much to back up, so I run one full backup job every Sunday for different directories I care about. They run a check on the directory and only back up any changes or new files. I don’t have the space to backup everything, so I only take the smaller stuff and most important. The backup software also allows live monitoring if I enable it, so some of my jobs I have that turned on since I didn’t see any reason not to. I reuse the NAS drives that report errors that I replace with new ones to save on money. So far, so good.

Backup software is Bvckup2, and reddit was a huge fan of it years ago, so I gave it a try. It was super cheap for a lifetime license at the time, and it’s super lightweight. Sorry, there is no Linux version.

Yeah been using Firefox for over a decade now. I just switched to duckduckgo about a year ago. It took about a month to get used to, but now I love it. Especially since I keep hearing how Google searches are getting worse and worse anyway. I still use youtube, but I don’t use the app and block all ads at least. I put blocks on my network for Google analytics and going to try and give up my Google email address… somehow? I am realizing quick how hard it is to completely cut yourself off from this one company.

It hasn’t even been an entire month yet…

Absolutely, I don’t disagree with your statement at all. I work heavily in systems administration and recently transitioned to networking. I deal with Linux systems, servers, vm’s, Azure daily, and for stability nothing beats Linux. I just tend to agree with the statement above commenting on how you always see these Windows articles, yet almost none actually affect you in the end.

It’s been the same on win 11. The only experience i have had was at work. I work closely with the updating team, and there have been a few times where things would break like printers, and we would revert the updates to stop it from going to everyone and uninstall. Sometimes, that meant a help desk guy had to go to the pc or remote in to do it manually. I’ve been there 19 years now, and it’s happened twice?

I learned this the hard way as well… I did a big OS update on mine once and it broke almost every application running on it. Docker worked perfectly still. I transferred everything I could to Docker after that.

https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-netanyahu-gaza-cabinet-tariffs-02-05-25/index.html

Looks like it is about to get even worse.

Definitely not… I was pointing out how the raising of both cable and subscription services led me specifically to find alternative cheaper services to go to. Because they keep rising them so aggressively, it’s super noticeable and a kick in the face. Obviously, my situation isn’t the same as others where I was already spending too much due to live tv, so figuring out how to get it as low as I can now felt like an accomplishment for me and a wake up call. I hope, just like everyone else here, that rising prices hurts them, but I really have my doubts seeing the stats that show otherwise.

Started with cable and paid about $120 excluding the internet. Ditched that like 5 years ago, but my wife really wanted live tv. We went with Hulu live, and I wanna say it was like $40 fully loaded with unlimited screens and no ads. Then it went up and up and up. I think 1 year it went up twice. By the end, after ditching the no ads and unlimited screens, it was still $85 a month… just ditched all that last August and convinced my wife to ditch all cable except for 1. We now use Peacock with teacher discount for the live tv. She likes the news, some sports, the Olympics, and SNL, which is about the only things she watches live. It comes with other stuff as well, so for $9 a month, it was an incredible deal. We opted to also get Netflix with ads since we were saving so much anyway, which is about $8 i think, and paid for 1 additional year of hulu at $80. With all 3 theres not much thats missing honestly. We never use Hulu anymore, but occasionally she tells me a show we dont get and find out most of the time its on Hulu. We will probably cut it once the year is up as well. They keep rising the costs, and we keep consolidating. I love that after all that we somehow got everything, and for the lowest cost it’s ever been at just under $20 a month. I host my own music, so we never cared about stuff like spotify.

I got my Windows 11 key and office key from here:

https://shop.lifehacker.com/sales/microsoft-office-professional-2021-for-windows-lifetime-license-5

There may be better places but the prices were better than I expected so I tried it. Site was fine, and both licenses worked perfectly. I think i saw get another 15% offer if your a new user so don’t forget to sign up at the bottom to get more off your first purchase. I actually see office 2024 as well now and it’s a bit much at $160, but from what I see Amazon and newegg are selling it for $250. I would still wait, I honestly have no idea what new stuff they ever add that is useful to me anymore, 2021 is probably fine for $100 less.

I know people mentioned the free alternatives, but if the subscription is really just for office, then why not buy a license to a non web based office version? They do still make them, as much as they want to remove them completely. You can even get them heavily discounted off 3rd party sites. I got my copy of 2019 for like $20 a year before it went EOL and I’m still using it because I really don’t have the highest use for it. If you want office 2021, which is good with support until end of 2026, it’s about $50 right now but I see them go lower all the time and can probably get it for $30. This is the pro version as well. Sadly I don’t see office 2024 for sale yet on my site but I guarantee it will be a year from now.

They could just buy 40’s now? They are probably a little cheaper now as well?