184: Not the Out-of-Box Experience

Now that we're both on new PCs in the last six months, it's time for us to run through some of our experiences and offer a few (hopefully new) tips for anyone else building a machine. Join us as we talk shop this week about recent BIOS trends, our love of portable apps, unconventional cloud storage strategies, much handwringing about motherboard vendor drivers, Windows package managers, some hefty praise for WSL2 (plus a dangerous digression into the varied feelings about systemd), and more.

Some of the less common software mentioned in this episode, which is all easy to Google:

Rufus (the full-featured disk imager for making OS install media)

PowerToys (make Windows way better)

Chocolatey, WinGet, and scoop (the Windows package managers)

Input Director (Will's software KVM solution)

rclone (command line cloud storage manager)

HWiNFO (the gold standard hardware monitor)

OCCT (hardware  stability and stress testing)

LatencyMon (diagnose audio/video latency issues in Windows)

Lastly, the Wired article about the capsized cars: https://www.wired.com/2008/02/the-race-to-save-the-cougar-ace/

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