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Well, that's unfortunate... Over the years, pretty much all the folks I knew, who had experienced HDD failure, were saying that it's hard to miss when drive is about to die. That's why I was favoring HDDs and didn't get into SSD. Loading times don't bother me much, as newer Win version are already loading lightning fast even on HDD. Although I do agree that this piece of hardware served me well over the years, it's just surprising how suddenly it ended. And on SSD, many folks recommending it nowadays, but statistically, how long can I expect for the drive to last if I have it for OS and maybe some games (with slow load times) are on it?

Just yesterday my 8 years old HDD died (1Tb Seagate Barracuda). Thankfully I had backups on spare drives + flash, so I didn't lose too much important data. In over 20 years of PC usage, that's my first dead HDD. What's most curious is that there were absolutely no noticeable signs of any kind of malfunction or slowdowns, noises, nothing, I just turn on PC one day and it doesn't boot (Windows was on it). While this HDD was connected, BIOS took a good while to load (probably tried to identify it) but when I finally got into BIOS, this drive wasn't indicated anywhere. After windows reinstall on spare HDD, which I connected on same plugs, dead one was on (to confirm there is no connection failure) it booted fine and now works. So, I'm 100% positive it was an actual HDD failure. Out of curiosity, it's not really critical, but is there a possibility for me to bring that dead HDD to life or somehow find out what exactly caused it to fail? Any ideas? For the record, it's just dead silent, isn't identified in BIOS or Windows interface if connected, just like it doesn't exist. Also, is there a way for me to somehow spot and prepare for sudden HDD failure like that? Because if I lose another, I just don't have a spare to save ~500Gb worth of data, I'd hate to lose. And as a side note: Should I set windows disk optimization (autodefrag) on or off? Any positive or negative effect there? I do manual defrags and checks every 1-3 moths or so. Any other settings/tools to keep that stuff in check?

Is that possible? Would be neat.

these all belong in the request forums not here But why? Description says: "Got an idea for a killer modification that hasn't been made yet? Outline your ideas here and discuss it with others. Who knows, it might get created!" But I don't want any of these mods to be created, I want to know if ones I listed even exist. If they don't, I won't ask anyone to make them.

Not an expert on US laws or anything about it, but from what I know, law forbids entering church with firearms, and I think best solution to avoid, or rather reduce death toll of such incidents is by allowing firearms in the churches. You can never do anything against any nutjob who's about to snap, and nobody can never know who that might be, so the only thing person can do is to be ready to protect him/herself. It's always amusing to hear arguments which state that laws against civilian firearms possession reduces crime, while most people who going to commit it either get weapons on black market or use something homebrew, while regular civilian has absolutely no way to protect himself and falls easy victim. It may not be the case with real psychopaths, but regular criminal, who knows his victims can shoot his head off, may think twice.

Actually I'm thinking to get back into Skyrim as well and curious about SE stability with mods. I don't own FO4, but my friend who does, has it quite heavily modded and he says that game doesn't crash at all (which I have witnessed myself), but Skyrim LE have been crashing like no tomorrow for us both, even not so heavily modded and we tried every possible fix there was, which only reduced issue but never eliminated it. I bet those crashes weren't mod conflicts but rather memory related. How would you compare FO4 stability to Skyrim SE with mods?

Looking for some mods for SE version which I had no luck finding myself yet and some mod recommendations: 1). Mod that makes all vampires burn in ashes on death (maybe with certain kill conditions). 2). Dawnguard (dual handed) Battleaxe and more expanded Dawnguard arsenal in general. 3). Small mod that lets me enchant weapons with Sun magic damage type, maybe with couple of small spell additions too. 4). Which weapon collection mod you would recommend? Since Immersive Weapons aren't ported, which I liked quite a lot in LE, what alternative you would suggest? I'm into lore-friendly stuff, not overpowered or too fancy looking. Would be great if it contains Dawnguard or Silver weaponry expansions (than point 2 gets irrelevant in that case). 5). Any combat enhancer mods you can recommend? Not something too script heavy but dynamic? 6). Are there any specific spell packs or ritual mods tied to occultism/satanism/daedrism? It's hard to describe what I want exactly, just something dark, sinister and disturbing in terms of powers my character can possess not tied to vampirism or lycanthropy. Blood Magic?...

One of my favorite topics raised, so I can't ignore it. Yes, I'm fascinated by idea of humanity enhancing itself, because let's face it, human kind went far off the rails of natural selection (broadly speaking) and genetically is in heavy decay which will have severe consequences for our kind in the future. To make my point clearer, consider this: with our science and generally medical advancements, when two parents breed child and one of parents had or has some sicknesses, it transfers genetically to the rest of the bloodline. In ancient times, when life was harsh, such people usually died when they were still young and couldn't leave any offsprings, so only most healthy ones survived, and overall genome of population was stronger. Now some can say that if medicine can save people it should, absolutely, but consider heap of ailments increased with each generation, dreadful, isn't it? And that's just one of the many examples. Some people put a lot of faith in biotechnologies, which involves genetical enhancements and other types of manipulations with live matter, which might be considered as part of transhumanism ideas. But personally I think it's not the best path for technological advancement, because pretty much any serious scientist having experience with genetics would say that any manipulations with it can have millions of variables, which is simply impossible to predict, like if you try to enhance gene of embryo to safeguard it from certain illnesses, it can cause any types of by-effect at any stage of life, which has extremely low chance of predictability. Thus I think best way would be focusing on mechanical advancements, so human could merge his own body with artificial components, and maybe in the future perform full transition from biological body to mechanical one. This could have almost unlimited advantages which I'm not sure even worth listing. The only problem is that our current science is currently as far from any real applications of it as possible and right now it is only a distant dream which might not ever be possible to achieve, and that's very sad. On classic theme often raised in some futuristic novels about class division in society leading to some outbrakes and etc, I think it's the least of concerns, because obviously it won't have any more dire effect than what we have now, where people may not be able to reach immortality, but small percentage of society lives in unimaginable luxury, having access to best kinds of food, medical treatment and etc. while others are living in the slums or even jungles and hunting animals or insects to eat or finding food in the dump while average death age is around 30-40s. Assuming technologies will undergo some serious breakthroughs, for the first time any cybernetic enhancements would be practically impossible to obtain (like cars some 80 years ago, or computers relatively recently), but it will be more and more accessible to the masses, which in the end would be better thing despite all the shortcomings. Though I'm more curious about psychological aspect. For example, just as an author (I presume) I would jump on operation table to replace as much living matter as possible right now if I could, but many people would hesitate. I had some debates where people hold their bodies precious, thinking it as some vessel which holds their soul and some other explanations why they think it is unacceptable for them. The sole idea of human being rejecting prolonged life of better quality or even immortality out of beliefs might be even more fascinating for me than entire transhumanism...

Can't believe ppl taking it serious... NK having nukes with missile dummies exploding 5 secs after the launch. Really? Country is starving to death, all wealth is concentrated around god palace of Kim with newest models of Bugatti and Maybach around along with all luxury from the western world which isn't cheap. Not many people taking into account how pricey and technologically difficult is maintenance of nuclear weaponry, and even if we allow that NK is on such high scientifically advanced level to develop and sustain those armaments, but cannot produce launch carrier, what's the point? Seoul and Tokio are obviously too jumpy, as always, but Kim is just performing his famous shakedown for funds, as always... poor China.

Any developer realistically can't do nothing to prevent modding their game. If they come to Nexus, for example, and demand to remove mods, they will pop up on another site and so on. It will be impossible to find and punish everyone doing it. For example: GTA V, it has absolutely no modding support and creating them is almost impossible, but users go such incredible lengths so game probably breaks world record for number of available mods. There are still games that are technically impossible to mod, but those aren't too many, it really all depends on popularity and demands. If game sucks too much, you won't see many people trying to hack into its code to make content.

I'm not really sure what your point is, but for the reference, Skyrim has 50+ different categories for mods, and most more or less popular games with active and live modding communities has about similar number.

I can agree that most engines suffer from certain malfunctions, but obviously Gamebryo/Creation is one of the worst engines today. FO4 is broken real bad, game has no optimization for what visuals it presents. Putting Skyrim SE on x64 rails only (maybe) reduced crashes, but visually it basically the same as it was, how can it be step anywhere at all? I don't see any progression here, and my only guess is that Beth doesn't wanna change engine, because it's too expensive and crew will have to learn working with new software, and even if it's much better, it will stall most of their projects. They rather release games on old broken re-branded engine, and let customers deal with issues, as they always have. For reference GTA V engines are almost perfect, game only suffers from insignificant memleak issue, and it only occurs during multiple data reloading, though it's not the only good open-world engine out there. As for the "living" TES/FO worlds, can't say it's very lively to me at least, same ol' routines happening over and over again, plus coding can be done much more resource efficiently than the way it's done. Constantly having lots of gamebreaking issues across 6! different games released by Beth on it doesn't really play in "bad coders" argument, by that time, they should have learned to solve at least half the issues, but every time things get even worse, what's to blame here if not the engine? It is obviously technically disabled soft.

Very curious and short survey, hope it helps, was fun to participate. :happy:

Do you repack Data3.pak files with WinRAR? Those files are very acrhiver sensitive, wrong format will ruin it. Modifying files and putting it in Data3.pak worked for me so far, hence I did it in the right way.

Sorry, but I'm just curious, what is great country in your opinion then? What makes it great? Now THAT is a tough question..... What makes us Great? Look at what we were during, and for a while after, WWII. Sometime after that, we lost our direction, we lost pretty much every war we were involved in after that, until our first engagement with Iraq. Which we indeed "won", we accomplished our goals. Get the Iraqis out of Kuwait. We did that. We had no intention of ousting Saddam at that time. Bush senior was obviously brighter than his son..... Senior knew exactly what would happen if we did. Junior didn't believe him... Senior was right, and now, a couple trillion dollars later, everyone else agrees as well. It used to be we had some of the best schools in the world. Now we are ranked somewhere in the low 30's..... We used to be a manufacturing powerhouse, with a strong middle class. Both of which are gone now. The rich keep getting richer, and the rest of us are VERY lucky if we can maintain our current income levels. Most are slipping..... I am waiting for them to add an amendment to the constitution, framing the "RIght Not to be Offended"...... We have become such a litigious society, no one is really willing to say anything at all to get us to change direction. But, in this day and age of "no one is responsible for their own actions"..... it comes as little surprise. I really hate the country we are becoming....... Just a random thought, but maybe this spark US had during after WWII period was because this war actually pulled country from the Great Depression? After WWII world basically put responsibility to maintain world order on USA, because it was the only country which could at that time, and it still lies on US up until today. Having currency which doesn't depend on gold value (or basically anything) and having it spread in the world where in some cases there are more USD than local currency in economy or in hands, have strongest military and etc. I can agree that outsourcing is a big problem, but it happens almost everywhere these days. On social notes, IIRC you have grant-in-aids for unemployed and poor (which is rare thing in the world to have), medical care and some other things any civilized country should have. If we put aside moral factor and look at numbers, it doesn't seem to me that US losing something or in a loser position. Every country suffers recessions during some periods, but it seems to me that US can pull out of anything right now. I don't say it couldn't be better, especially for ordinary residents, but everything US does right now, including wars and etc, fills pockets of megacorps, sure, but also part of it most likely goes into economy, I don't think country could sustain itself, and in current condition, any other way. Also I'm pretty confused, which wars do you mean US lost? Can't think of any after WWII.