Cutting the power for 30 seconds drains capacitors. The most likely culprit is in the PSU, but I’ve also seen it be the motherboard or GPU.

Desktop PSUs have been pretty standardized for 25 years. The odds are pretty good that you still have an old one, or know someone that you could borrow from long enough to test.

Failing that, just get one from a place with a decent return policy. I like Micro Center, if you’re near one of those.

Most people are on multiple platforms. Find them now, while you still can. Save whatever contact info you can for them. You don’t know when you’ll need it, nor why.

Most of the “Tiny houses” on the market are literally mobile homes, but with a fancier facade to hide that detail.

In the US, completely unpaid internships are rare. Most are paid, but fairly poorly. There are a few major reasons for this:

You have to meet a lot of requirements for unpaid to be legal, and it all has to be documented.

Internships are a “farm” program- many interns are offered and accept a full time position afterwards. If they were unpaid, they are unlikely to accept.

Minimum wage is an absolute joke everywhere in the country. Why bother fighting it when you can pay as little as $7.25/hour? Even doubling or tripling that makes it appealing to poor college students and the farm program, and won’t cost much.

(Your example would be illegal in the US, and possibly even enforced)

You can pretty easily create the extra partitions yourself (Google for “diskpart UEFI”). Not sure if that will put it in your UEFI boot list, though. It seems you’ll also need to do some stuff with bcdedit, which is included in WinPE.

Good luck!

My point was, where do you draw the line? Any answer is equally arbitrary. MS drew it at 8th Gen Intel Core. Would 6th Gen have been the right answer? 3rd? Core 2 Duo? All of them can run Win 10 just fine, and can (at least technically, and for today) run Win11.

I’m only addressing that last line, but really think it through. Should you really expect, or even want, an OS that runs on a 386? It wasn’t that long ago that most Linux distros could. But they all moved away from it because that limited performance on anything more modern.

The newer instruction sets are created for a reason, and that reason is typically higher performance. If the OS (or any code, really) can use them, it will work better. But if you can’t or don’t, the code will be more compatible.

There also isn’t “any” computer; it’s simply not a thing. The question becomes how old (more technically, what minimum specs) do you want to support, and performance you want to be limited by?

While I agree that Microsoft has leaned too heavily into newer hardware as an expectation, there’s definitely a line to be drawn.

More to the point, the boxes weren’t all the same. Sure, they only had ~10-20 different pieces, but they would be placed seemingly at random. You may (or may not) have had a card to identify them, but that wasn’t tied to location.

It also doesn’t cover the quantities. Does this box have 5 cherry cordials or just 1? What about honeycomb? Opera cream? Peanut butter?

You still see this from some of the smaller chocolatiers.

Licensing and activation are separate, and only loosely related. If you are at anything resembling a large org, they don’t even use the HWID or OEM key- they will be using an internal KMS server.

It really sounds like you have way more permissions than you should have on a work device. You should’ve hit a wall even attempting to install Win11 (I can confirm that my work blocks this very effectively). I also question why you would want to do that at all. I’m also not sure you needed to do anything to activate- I believe 10 and 11 use the exact same HWID/keys/etc

This really isn’t dangerous unless you already screwed up badly. If it wipes, you just restore from backup/DR.

You do have backups and a DR plan for your prod servers, right?

I think we found the guy that secretly wants to be Cartman

Your description isn’t very clear on what exactly you have, or what you need.

It sounds like you have wired NICs in both server and laptop, which will be physically close to each other, but your only connection to the Internet will be WiFi that you don’t control. How accurate is that?

Next question is how do you want them to connect to each other? You can do a P2P wired connection, which is more complicated but fully isolates your traffic. It also means that, unless each device has a separate connection and an appropriate routing config, it won’t be online to the Internet (unless you set up some form of connection sharing). You can also connect them to a router that has no Internet. Simpler than the above, but the same limitations.

You could easily and cheaply get a USB Wi-Fi NIC. The major downside is that all traffic will be going across the wireless connection, both ways. This makes it slow and unreliable.

You can also connect them to a modified router configured as a wireless bridge. DD-WRT and others can be configured in a different way than usual. The wireless router will provide wired LAN ports to your local network, but then use the wireless connection to connect to an upstream WiFi.

None of this has anything to do with Linux, BTW. Once you choose a path, you should be able to implement it in whatever OS (or multiple OSes) you would like. None of it is new or special. You might get more options if you post in the Homelab, Data Hoarder, or Self Hosted communities.

Many private trackers, and even a few public ones, have a request forum. The private ones reward users that fill these requests, so they are often effective.

There are some very accessible private trackers (sometimes referred to as semi-private) that meet these requirements. Once you get set up, they can be very set-and-forget. Just avoid the forums.

Unless you’re on a self-hosted VPN (defeating the whole purpose), it’s not especially hard to identify VPN connections. All of the common ones are known, and many use IP ranges and reverse lookups that clearly identify the VPN/seedbox provider.

It’s a bit harder when you are connected to one that resolves to a residential-looking hostname. But again, unless it’s truly unique (defeating the purpose), simply sorting users by IP will reveal almost all of them.

Some trackers used to do this to weed out people with multiple accounts. Some of the big ones still actively detect and block (or punish) anyone connecting to their website with a VPN (torrent traffic is still generally allowed, though)

I think you mean LGA (Land Grid Array), meaning the pins are on the motherboard. Ball Grid Array (BGA) is used for embedded, non-removable CPUs.

The only thing I’ll add is that RAID is redundancy. Its purpose is to prevent downtime, not data loss.

If you aren’t concerned with downtime, RAID is the wrong solution.

TorrentLeech has open registration several times per year. Keep an eye on Opentrackers.org for any of these. Note that some are open, while others are open application. The latter means you must meet certain criteria to be accepted. Typically this is proof of your stats on other trackers, but sometimes it’s exclusively for refugees from one that failed.

Keep in mind that you will not ever find open registrations on an established, reputable tracker. They don’t need more users. They only recruit from lesser, more accessible trackers. You will need to start on these to establish yourself. There are plenty of guides on this, with most starting on RED or MAM.

If you aren’t on any of these, it’s not because they’re too hard to get into- it’s because you don’t want to put in the effort. Which is exactly what private trackers want to avoid.

Also, smaller doesn’t always mean bad. TorrentDB was a rising star, with regular open invites, right up until its collapse. Even the giants like PTP started from nothing. Getting in early is a perfectly viable strategy, especially if you help grow it.

The absolute easiest and simplest would be to modify your grub config to have a longer timer on the boot menu, effectively delaying them until the NAS is up.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best option- there are ways to make the actual boot process wait for mounts, or to stagger the WOL signals, or the solutions others have mentioned. But changing grub is quick and easy.

You’re overlooking a very common reason that people setup a homelab - practice for their careers. Many colleges offer a more legitimate setup for the same purpose, and a similar design. But if you’re choosing to learn AD from a free/cheap book instead of a multi-thousand dollar course, you still need a lab to absorb the information and really understand it.

Granted, AD is of limited value to learn these days, but it’s still a backbone for countless other tools that are highly relevant.

To anyone else reading this, there’s something you should know:

Memory errors don’t always mean the memory itself (hardware RAM stick) is bad. It can also be a power issue (bad PSU, incorrect voltage set in the UEFI), compatibility, defective memory controller (CPU or motherboard), and more.

OP almost certainly has a bad stick, but it’s worthwhile for anyone building a PC to run a slew of stress tests and diagnostics before using it for anything that matters.