Well, That'll Teach Me To Fully Inspect Expensive Shit I Buy!

So, July 2024 I bought a spendy laptop to 'play' Microsoft Flight Sim & X-Plane Flight Sim and to do both on the Quest 3. Supposedly I bought a Dell G16 7630 Laptop, 16" QHD Display, Intel Core i9-13900HX, 65 GB DDR5 RAM, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 with 12 Gig vram all for the low, low, price of $2000 (rounded up).

And, yeah, it's been working great (mostly) when I start it up and all the updating (Windows 11) gets done and the auto-start shit gets done loading. X-Plane was kind of glitchy in VR; but mostly the laptop works as advertised.

Wait, did I say Supposedly? Aye, I did!

Over the past weekend I installed and have been playing with "ComfyUI" to better learn text-to-image/video and image-to-video. Checked with Grok and Gemini and both stated that my laptop was in the top 5% of home machines able to run ComfyUI without problems with the specs I presented. (They were very enthusiastic.) Except it kept running out of vram. ???

So, started up 'dxdiag' and had a look.

Excuse me? 8 Gig Vram? But. But.

Yes, my bad, I know. I shoulda check it all out 15 months ago when I accepted the thing. But everything was (mostly) working far better than any computer I've ever personally owned so I didn't think to check.

Dipshit. That'll learn ya.

So, I'm drafting (with Gemini's help) a letter to let Amazon, Dell, and even Cardinal Pro Electronics know how unhappy I am. No, I do not expect they'll replace the laptop with what I ordered; or even have me send it in and 'upgrade' it to what I ordered, but I can voice my displeasure and ask that they (one of them) refund the price difference between what I ordered and what I got.

Yeah, we already know how far that's going to go.

So I will adapt and overcome and continue on because that is what I do. When I have to. ComfyUI works reasonably well, considering. Memory management is the thing AND I'm really limited on what size I can make  a image-to-video. But it works well. Did this:

Picture of SWMBO's ??? from the 1950's.

But, my desktop computer (Ol' Faithful) is now going on 13 years old. Still runs great (probably thanks to Linux Mint) but, with only 12 Gig RAM and 8 Gig Vram it won't run some of the programs I want to run. Especially anything AI local.  It's getting like when your phone just refuses to update. (Or am I the only one that holds on to a phone for that long?) So, time to upgrade.

Looking at: MSI Codex Z2 Gaming Desktop: AMD R7-8700F, GeForce RTX 5070, 32GB DDR5, 2TB m.2 NVMe SSD, USB Type-C, VR-Ready, Windows 11 Home : A8NVP-436US (with a supposed 12 Gig Vram) that, if I get it ($1700 delivered), you can be damned sure I'll check out on first run. And if everything checks out immediately convert to Linux. (I hate Windows. Or, more probably, I hate Microsoft and what they've done to Windows.)

Otherwise, around here: SSDD. Raining way more. Still have the headache and the CT scan was basically negative. Still old and fat and still getting older. (Which is a good thing.)