Huh? Isn't there a hole for each pin, so being bent would stop it connecting? I'm confused by the photo, there's only one bit that looks like the pins might be flattened, but several that don't seem in the right position, except where the two halves meet and they all look flat. Far too Eschery for my tired brain. :(
The machine was running with them bent, right? So are unconnected pins like bad sectors on a disk and the processor just ignores them and runs a bit slower?
Apparently there's a lot of redundancy in 'some of' the pins, whereas others are crucial. The photo is very difficult to make sense of without being able to look really clearly at the pins - I bought a jewellers magnifying glass to help with the straightening. They look pretty Eschery in real life and there's a bizarre perspective thing when you turn the board around and realise that the half that looked like dimples when the other half was little metal clips now look like little metal clips because they're bent in a different direction.
I decided to bend them straight because although I'm 99% certain I didn't do the damage - I'm really paranoid and careful when I move CPUs around and I've done it dozens of times - there's still that 1% telling me that I did it all and the processor won't work otherwise.
When I first examined the bent pins there were loads of straight fibres and bits of fluff in there that I blew away. I got the impression that some arse had maybe had a go with a cotton bud or microfibre cloth before discovering the Intel Velcro.
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
LGA sockets (as opposed to a PGA on the processor itself). It seems that when Intel first adopted LGA sockets for their CPUs, a number of hobbyists and system rebuilders were caught out. They were used to preparing a motherboard for a new CPU by giving it a quick clean with an air-spray cleaner and then running over the board with a cotton bud and some isopropyl alcohol or similar. Quick and easy when the socket has loads of holes for a PGA processor (pins on the CPU, holes on the motherboard). But with an LGA socket you have hundreds of miniscule bent over very sharp copper contacts in the socket on the board, exactly like copper Velcro. Bye bye motherboard when you give an LGA socket a good clean with a cotton bud.
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
As I said, I'm 99% certain it wasn't me. I managed to break the 'near-field' connector on my other half's phone when fitting a new battery - tiny little metal springy thing about a millimetre all round. She has never missed it but ever since then I've been absolutely paranoid about messing around near little metal springy bits and fit CPUs etc with enormous care. Even so, when I looked at the socket there was that nagging doubt in my mind. ZIF sockets are so much easier and I've never bent a CPU pin. I can see the reasoning: mobo with an average cost of say £75 vs CPU with an average cost of £250, so put the pins on the mobo (also 'not my problem' for Intel).
Scan are being slow over my CPU cooler refund. I assume they're relying on insurance to cover costs so have to wait to get it back. When I've returned stuff to the evil-empire of Amazon, I've had the ping of a text notifying my refund seconds after the pick-up point has scanned my returns parcel.
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
So now the little beast is up and running (silently), I'm starting the lengthy process of ripping a few hundred CDs to .flac format, oh, and picking a music player. I say a few hundred, but I don't really know how many. It may be 1000 or more. I always assumed that the software choices would be easy, after all there are dozens of rippers capable of churning out FLAC and dozens of media players to choose from. Not so.
The first thing I found is that Windows 10/Explorer/WMP etc. aren't really compatible with FLAC. Yep, you can make WMP play FLAC with the appropriate codec and then Windows and Explorer will recognise them as music files. Problem is that Windows doesn't handle the metadata tags in FLAC properly. It's a bug that's been there for years and MS have no obvious interest in fixing it. Most obvious symptom is that all things Windows will truncate the displayed track/song title to 26 characters. Nor can you correct this by editing in Explorer via the properties dialog as you can with most basic metadata. What you can do is royally screw the existing metadata. Top tip: if you try to correct this with another tag editor then Windows is quite likely to deny that the file has any metadata at all. It's all there. If you use WMP as a ripper then it rips just fine and even downloads and inserts metadata just fine (some of the genre decisions are a bit weird but MS isn't alone in that). Well, I say 'just fine' but that's if you know to turn off autoplay and autorip. Otherwise it has a habit of missing all info for the track it started to play. Oh, and sometimes it ignores your decision not to autoplay and autplays anyway, unless you manually add a registry DWORD just for CDs. Oh, and WMP totally relies on metadata as a player, so that's a bit sad for FLAC. WMP will take a squint at the library it happily ripped, and organise it for you. Only it will miss a few tracks from an album. It will give you odd un-named albums from unknown artists (made up of the missing tracks). And it will sometimes decided not to play a track, but the next one instead. So, all in all, best to stay clear of WMP as a ripper and player if you're interested in using FLAC.
I know that many will say that's an obvious decision even without experimenting. But then there's the fun I've had since with some other highly regarded software...
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
You really are taking advantage of all the extra time you have with retired life!
I'd obviously recommend some sort of command line based Linux thing (if I knew of one), but I doubt that really helps you right now.
I've had a quick search and I think I may have used CDex in the past for MP3s. I also remember Exact audio copy being popular.
I spent nearly a whole day with MusicBee - I felt I owed it to teh forum. It has a devoted following, does loads and loads of stuff and is probably a huge achievement. I'm sure it's great. I didn't like it. I thought it was unintuitive and unnecessarily complicated for even simple steps. The final straw for me was that with a clean hard drive and a single folder with about 150 FLAC files ripped into it, it totally and completely refused to even see them let alone organise and play them as a library of music. This being pretty much my idea of the primary function of a music player, I gave up.
My aim is to have something really simple that doesn't do a bazillion things. At the moment I'm giving Dopamine a whirl. It's as simple as it gets and just happens to be my favourite so far of the half dozen I've played with.
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
VLC is great and I wouldn't be without it for some of the naughty things I do to video files etc. But I want something that looks even easier as soon as it fires up so that Mrs WilliamA who is totally non-techy doesn't get put off and can get at her CDs.
I used to use DBPoweramp all the time. Can't remember why I stopped now. I'm trying out Exact Audio Copy which was a bit of a pain to set up and not as "one-button" as most, but does a fantastic job of producing accurate archive copies.
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
I'm using Exact Audio Copy now. It's very good indeed, slightly more hands-on than most and it doesn't like a network drive as the target (which I found out after a couple of totally unhelpful error messages). But it's very reliable with rip quality.
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
I'm not too fussed now that I've found something that works. I have two optical drives on my main desktop which is some help, but I still have to manually load each disk and remove the last one whatever I use.
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
have you tried foobar as a music player? a lot of people seem to swear by that. I think it's one of those ones that is quite powerful in terms of configuration, so it might be a bit wild at first but hopefully you can set it up to make it simple for MrsA.
I stumped up for dBPoweramp - best money I've spent on software. If the price hasn't sky rocketed, I'd recommend trying it again. We've got somewhere in the region of 2000 cds and it's the quickest ripper I found - 1 cd will take less than 2 minutes to rip as FLAC. There's some inbuilt clevers which can fill in any gaps or read errors that scratches cause. It also comes with a batch converter, which was damn useful for converting the lossless files to mp3 so I could stick the entire collection on my phone.
