Good news I guess, but at the risk of looking a gift horse in the mouth, didn’t Intel previously lay off a bunch of their linux and driver devs just last year in July/August?

Sources:

www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-SLM-Driver-Orphaned

techradar.com/…/linux-at-risk-recent-intel-layoff…

tomshardware.com/…/major-intel-linux-driver-proje…

I have been out of the tea game for a while, but here are a few personal favorites that I come back to:

Adagio Tea’s Scottish Breakfast ($0.11/g)

Vahdam Tea’s Daily Assam ($0.06/g, but you have to buy 340g)

Yunnan Craft’s Zhong Guo Hong ($0.09/g)

Yunnan Sourcing’s Black Gold Bi Luo Chun ($0.12/g)

That’s a pretty open-ended question, but I think other folks have made some good suggestions.

Assam, Ceylon, and Yunnan teas tend to be the best in terms of price per gram, and can be found from multiple vendors.

Did you want specific vendors/recommendations?

Based on this reddit post where someone added a graphics card and swapped out the power supply in the same model of Dell Inspiron 3847 for a standard ATX power supply, I would say the odds are good that it is a standard 24-pin ATX.

But this is good advice in general because Dell are notorious for doing non-standard shenanigans with their PCs, so good to check this for anyone else coming across this post.

Yes, power supplies can absolutely fail due to age. Namely, the electrolytic capacitors that smooth the incoming AC (and in other places smooth the switched secondary voltages) are only rated for a certain number of hours of operation before the electrolyte starts to break down, and when they fail, the electrolyte begins to boil and can build up pressure and then rupture with a bang exactly like you describe.

Temperature and operating time are both factors in how quickly capacitors fail, so the fact that the computer was left on most of the time for 12 years means that the caps were probably running at elevated temperature nearly all the time.

In terms of what makes a “good” power supply, the short answer is that, unless you have an electrical engineering degree, the reputation of the brand and the efficiency rating of the power supply are your best indicators. Big OEMs like Dell are likely trying to cut costs in their desktops, so the power supplies in OEM desktops may actually use cheaper components and worse build quality than the power supplies that enthusiast PC builders use in their rigs.

Many modern power supplies are rated on the “80 plus” rating system-- meaning the power supply is more than 80% efficient, although nowadays many power supplies are more like 90% efficient and may be rated “80+ gold” or “80+ platinum”. A more efficient power supply is losing less power as waste heat, so the components run cooler and last longer.

That looks like it is a standard ATX power supply, so almost any power supply on the market should fit. Unfortunately, most 80+ gold PC power supplies would be much more expensive than you probably want, but something like a humble Thermaltake 500W power supply would be 80+ rated, made by a brand people have heard of, and costs around $40. For 5 bucks more, it may be more reliable than some no-name OEM power supply replacement.

I am an electrical engineer, so even beyond Teams and MS Office, several of the engineering and CAD programs we use are not supported or only partially supported on Linux (i.e. hardcoded to only work on a specific version of Ubuntu, lol).

I have spoken to our IT guy, and he would be completely on board with using Linux, but even he acknowledges that there is no reasonable path to us doing so, so I just sort of accept it.

Every few days on the machines I use daily, but I have a couple spare laptops which I only use infrequently, and I usually don’t run into any major problems when I have to make a big set of updates on a machine I am using for the first time in a while.

Hmm, not sure then. It might be called something different. But I do know exactly the thing you mean from having it on my work computers, and I find it very annoying, too.

I believe some Dells have a bios setting for dynamic brightness which can be turned off.

I am a big fan of Zero Japan’s teapots. Glazed ceramic, and i have put them in the dishwasher for years with no issues. I think they also go by the name Bee House. The infuser they come with is pretty good, but it turns our that the mouth is also the perfect size for a Finum medium basket strainer.