sonofsanta

50 degrees is lovely and chill for a CPU, boss. Believe those warning temps listed, they're about what I'd work with anyway.

@ICTDirect_Dave to tag correctly If it's new you're after, Lenovo ThinkPads are the sturdiest I've come across, much better than HP. Easy enough to put an SSD in yourself, if you've not got too many to do (they're very easy to open up and swap components, because they're proper business laptops). We have some with i3-4000, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD and they fly. If you want a big chunk of new and don't have time to do that yourself, I suspect @VeryPC or @Stone_Charli may be your best bet for custom sturdy laptop.

Sit on your backside for the first month. I reckon that's about the length of time it takes to start getting a feel for things, both the network and the staff, before you start diving in and making big changes. Someone will grab you on the first day and blow something up to me an urgent disaster that they need you to fix. They're probably lying and trying to take advantage. Just spend your time working out what servers do what, checking them over for updates etc., working out the network topology, what computer specs you've got around, what audio-visual kit there is... just sit and observe and document and act as a basic technician dealing with minor problems. You'll soon spot the patterns and start formulating a list of priorities and a plan of action

Minimum 800mm, preferably 1000mm, with 22" monitors. We have 70cm depth on our benching and that's comfortable to work on. How much do those privacy screens cost? We usually put candidates on every other machine, but there are times when it can get challenging to fit them all in.

A pair of HP A5800s at the core. Edge switches are either A5120s for major cabs or 1910s for smaller cabs (i.e. single IT room cabs).

The SSD Endurance Experiment: They're all dead - The Tech Report - Page 1 In brief: SSDs all last a lot longer than they're rated for.

Samsung 850 EVO is all the SSD you ever need. If you needed the extra performance of the 850 Pro, you'd already know it and probably wouldn't ask. No point in spending the extra, tbh. The Crucial BX100 is also good, but unless it's on offer and £10+ cheaper than the Samsung, I'd go with the 850 EVO.

Parkin. It's the HobNob of the cake world

We just have bginfo.exe and the .bgi config file in the GPO Logon Scripts folder and call bginfo.exe as a startup script with the arguments filename.bgi /timer:0 /NOCLIPROMPT /SILENT The .bgi file points at a JPG file on the local hard drive these days, but only to cut down on network traffic at logon; we used to just call it from a central share. Can't say I've ever had any problems with permissions.

Ah, he's not that bad. He's better than Ben Affleck, at least*, and he suits this role pretty well. *though: who isn't?

I'd swap a couple of SFPs about, because although we have two switches in the stack, not every remote switch is redundantly cabled, so I'd have to move some from the broken switch to the working one. Config is backed up and taken off-site as part of my disaster recovery procedure, and I have a copy on hand as well, so if it destroyed itself software-wise I can fix that pretty easily. Given how integral a part of the network it is, you absolutely need redundancy in the core in some way. A spare switch that sits on the shelf is probably a waste of money, but a stack of switches that can limp along with reduced capacity and give you headroom when fully operational is a good design (though I may be biased there )

Also an in-universe teaser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CumZP6_9sHU As Ars Technica point out, the journey to Mars is around 150 days in the story, and it's 170 to the launch of the film, so we may well get real-time progress on the "mission" in the build up to the film.

Don't know, but it happens to me probably every other holiday with at least one of the physical boxes. Even though I know this, I still get increasingly nervous as time rolls on and I still can't remote back into it...

I think EduGeek is astonishingly civil. How many pages did we manage in the General Election thread without it ever getting locked? I can't think of a more welcoming, less trolly community in 15 odd years of loitering in unsavoury corners of the internet. I only found my way here through Googling an answer. Think it only took me as long as it did because the site was blocked as a forum at my first school. I found it within 11 days of starting this job

Been using it for four years. Looks after itself, has never let an outbreak kick off, is light on system resources, can be set to update automatically quite easily, tells us everything that's going on via email, and saves me about £2k pa on what I was paying for Symantec before. It has also never broken itself with a silly update as so many others seem to have. No complaints at all

We decided against A3, but we've been running an Epson XP-750 for a while and it's been brilliant. Quality is fantastic, and it's never been mechanically unreliable (it occasionally turns its WiFi on, which means it stops listening to the wired connection, which means no-one can print to it till we trudge up and disable WiFi on it again). I mention this only so you know Epson printers can be reliable and high quality, as you'll hear plenty of opinions to the contrary (and I don't think I'd trust them except for their photo printers, to be fair). We control access to it with a security group that only Photography students and teachers are members of, to prevent random rubbish being printed on it. Students are given a pack of photo paper each so they all have their own supply, and have to pay for more when they're through that supply; this keeps print volume in check. We only use genuine inks and genuine Epson photo paper, so we can use the exact colour profile in Photoshop, and the monitors in that room (and around Art in general) are all IPS and calibrated with a Datacolor Spyder, which is worth the ~£100 if you're going to start spending money on a high quality printer.

Happy birthday EduGeek 10 years old means Lego for your birthday, right? All ten year olds want Lego. And most of the 30+ year olds on here.

How much has all that cost?

Only 2 minutes? If you're going to do it, do it for 10 hours

Now the hard part begins And when you're still sat there at 4am, rubbing Millie's back and trying to whisper soothing things in her ear and doing all you can to just stay on your feet, when it feels like it's all too much and it's overwhelming you and you must be missing something because everyone else makes it look so easy so why are you struggling so much? Know that everyone else is thinking exactly the same thing. Everyone hides it, and you will measure yourself against the perfect face they present, but you are doing just as good a job as them, you are doing nothing wrong, it will all be ok. If parenting seems really bloody hard, well done! That means you're doing it right and putting the effort in. Also: they get much more entertaining from 6 months old. It's ok to find them kind of boring and pointless at first

I got you a hat:

This can't be accidental. Just noticed, whilst randomly talking nonsense about Lego in our office, that if you go to Amazon and look for an AT-AT... LEGO Star Wars 75054: AT-AT: Amazon.co.uk: Toys & Games ...it's £88. Touché, good sirs. Making a pun of a price tag is no small achievement.

Last game bought: technically 10,000,000 for my phone, from Humble Store... but the one before that was Shadowrun: Dragonfall on my PC, and that's a much better answer. Phone games aren't real games, after all. Last game played: currently playing Max Payne 3, which is alright, but not the same for not being all grim New York in the rain at night. Brazil just ain't the same, yo. The Sonic kart game is good for quick sessions, but really isn't as good as Mario Kart. Not as challenging, not as fun, just... doesn't feel right, somehow. Last game actually completed: Alan Wake, including both the DLCs (free with the PC version) that were the best bit of the whole game. Actually really enjoyed it, had a really strong sense of place and environment. Oh, and Stanley Parable over one Christmas holiday evening (very funny, bit unstructured, preferred Save the Date for expressing the same concept of gameiness) and Mind: Path to Thalamus, which is the most garbage plot ever contrived married to some of the most beautiful environments ever created. Pro tip: mute the game, stick some ambient music on in the background (Eluvium was good for me) and invent your own story as you wander between puzzles. Much better that way. Short indie games are about the only things I ever have time to complete these days.

It's a bit depressing that it still looks like Gamebryo then it's all just so... flat. Polygonal. The animation on the dog is so awkward. Still, I stand corrected. And I'm sure it'll run & look gorgeous after the modders have had a year or so to play

Also, just to clarify for future visitors to the thread: The Casio M series also use M3 mounting holes. The Casio Core (XJ-V1) is the first LED projector to use the standard M4 bolts. I fitted both an XJ-M241 and an XJ-V1 over the half term last week, and the M projector was definitely still M3 You can usually cludge it with M3 bolts and combinations of washers, but some mounting systems are more of a faff. We had some that used a hollow threaded tube for the height adjustment, with a long bolt dropped through it to actually secure the projector. We couldn't find M3 bolts long enough so we had to hacksaw down the threaded outer tubes, which limited the adjustments we could make to positioning. It's doable, it's just an added complication. To be fair, though, the XJ-V1 not only uses M4 bolts, it has 4 mounting points, so you have flexibility with how you mount it. The only problem I have now is the zoom range of 1.1:1; for a 1.2m high image, the projector should be mounted 2.5-2.7m away, and the existing projectors I want to replace now are mounted 3-3.2m away