Adventures in Crochet: The Prologue

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Early this year, I was strolling through Michael’s with my then-2-year-old daughter. We were picking up supplies for our family’s Cub Scout Pinewood Derby cars… paints, adhesive vinyl, googly eyes, etc.

Near the checkout, there was a nice big circular bin, full over colorful fluffy things. The sign above it said “Clearance Yarn”.

My daughter, of course, snatched one up. After a brief back-and-forth of “we don’t need that” and “please?”, she suggested that I should make her something with it. I thought about it momentarily, and shrugged and said “okay, I guess I’ll learn to crochet!”

And so it began.

Spoiler alert… I still haven’t made her anything with that yarn. It’s fuzzy super-bulky weight yarn, and… I’m just not there yet.

The “Ryzen 5 2400g” Blues

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A couple months ago I built two low-end gaming rigs using Ryzen 5 2400g, wanting to see just how well the integrated Vega graphics would actually hold up in reality. I wasn’t disappointed, really, but I definitely didn’t get the performance I saw in numerous Youtube reviews.

I used an ASRock board and 8GB PC2400 DDR4 (single stick), which may have been part of the bottleneck. It ran simple games like Minecraft and Trove at 1080p, maxed out settings, perfectly smoothly. But fast-paced games like Rocket League were completely unplayable even at the lowest settings.

For the hell of it, I slapped a 4GB GeForce GTX 1050Ti from my daughter’s machine into one of the Ryzen builds.

Ta-da, everything ran amazingly at max settings! Smooth! Fast! Perfect! So shiny!

I pulled the 1050Ti out, booted the Ryzen build back up… and…

The monitor went green at the Windows 10 login screen.

WTF?

But it worked perfectly in safe mode. So I uninstalled the GeForce drivers, uninstalled the Vega drivers, reset bios to factory, rebooted… booted fine. But games don’t run too well with the default display drivers… so I reinstalled the Vega drivers. Instantly… green screen again.

I fully wiped the drive, reset bios again, and reinstalled Windows fresh.

Green screen the moment it grabbed the Vega drivers.

Meanwhile, the Ryzen build that never had a GeForce in it… still boots up and runs just like it did originally.

Put the GeForce back in, and it runs fine. Take it out… green screen if you use anything but the default generic display driver.

I don’t know what happened here… but I am unsatisfied. Luckily I had budget left over on these builds, so I grabbed a GeForce for each of them. I’m sure my nieces will appreciate the performance boost anyway.