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Swapping Rifts

falken76
Expert Consultant
Both my brother and I have an Oculus Rift.  He has a VR ready laptop that just randomly stopped working on the rift in the middle of an Onward game while we were playing.  The headset just went black and the sound was still playing.  We're both out of warranty so that's not going to be an option,  The laptop is functioning perfectly fine everywhere except for VR now.  It was sold as a VR ready laptop and worked for well over a full year so this isn't an instance of integrated graphics or an M series card.  He brought the headset over to my house so we could try it out on mine.  I have a desktop computer.  It works perfectly on mine!  But my touch controllers wouldn't work at all when his headset was plugged in.  Clearly these touch controllers are paired in to the headsets.  So here's my question.  Our next step is to try my headset on his laptop.  If my headset works on his laptop we were just going to trade headsets since they're both out of warranty now, but we'll clearly have to trade touch controllers as well.  What will this do to the games we've purchased on Oculus?  Will that mess everything up?

Who knows why the hell it just stopped working on a laptop but seems to be 100% unaffected on a desktop, just some random nonsense that happens to these things, nobody knows the answer, if it were in warranty I'm sure it would end up with "Fuck if we know, send it back". 

Now he's considering the "wireless vive".  Is that the Pro?
3 REPLIES 3

TwoHedWlf
Expert Trustee

falken76 said:

What will this do to the games we've purchased on Oculus?  


Nothing, games are tied to your Oculus account, not the hardware.

Who knows why the hell it just stopped working on a laptop but seems to be 100% unaffected on a desktop, just some random nonsense that happens to these things, nobody knows the answer, if it were in warranty I'm sure it would end up with "Fuck if we know, send it back".  
Seems the Rift is very sensitive to the output from HDMI and USB,  if something drifts a little bit, gets a little too noisy, or the signal is a bit weaker than it should be due to aging caps, dirty connectors etc...Poof, no rift.


Now he's considering the "wireless vive".  Is that the Pro? 

No there's a kit that transmits the signals etc wirelessly,  it's also available for the Rift.  But most reviews I've seen are that it's crap.  Adds latency, significantly lowers data rate and image quality.

falken76
Expert Consultant
Thank you.  He may buy a desktop and a proper GPU for it now.

falken76
Expert Consultant
Well we tried his rift on my machine again after mine worked on his laptop.  It played fine for about 10 minutes then went black.  So we swapped out the cable's and he was able to play on my machine for at least another 30 minutes before he had to go home.  He's using my cable right now to see if it'll last a couple of hours or more.  It's looking like the cable is all that needs to be replaced.  So far so good.