sonofsanta

Amen to that TBH I'd say 970 - comes with 4GB, and the memory bus is twice as wide, where memory bandwidth is the limiting factor on the 960; you can only overclock memory so far to bump your performance up on that, whereas the 970 can be massively OCed on the core to get near a 980. I reckon 960 is what I'd tell friends on a budget to get, but 970 is what I'd get for me

Don't be ridiculous. My Pentium + R9 270 was a much better spec for the price! The 960 is about £40 too much to be of any relevance, which is a shame as it looks a good card... but arguably you don't want to be spending too much on a 2GB GPU right now anyway, as they can already be insufficient depending on the game & resolution. Saying that, I expect 2GB will forever be plenty for WoW

Starting at around £160 for a 2GB version, which is very nice... so 4GB for under £200 seems likely.

With the best will in the world, though, nobody cares about that except us and our ilk the hardware & innovation in MS devices was often top of the line, but it's not enough - Average Joe just doesn't care for it. It's still early days for both CEOs, Tim Cook and Satya Nadella, but it feels to me like the momentum is shifting. Based on nothing more than hunches and gut feelings, mind you!

Apple's problem at the moment is "me too" invention. For a company whose revival was built on disruptive devices - iPod, iPhone, iPad - what's it done recently? The iPad Mini to ape the Nexus 7, iPhone 6+ to ape flagship Android devices, the iWatch to ape Android Wear... it's the same school of design that saw MS release the Zune, Bing etc., and look how popular they were/are.

Looks like a winner: matches the 770 so it has the generational improvement it should have, but much more power efficient and quiet. Seems to compete with the R9 285 whilst being much more power efficient. A 4GB version could be a no-brainer at a certain price point.

Yeah, I saw; the article has the designer of the HoloLens (Alex someone) claiming the Kinect was only ever a stepping stone to this, it's been bubbling away for that long. Nadella will shape the launch, though, which is almost more important than the product when it comes to Microsoft - Windows Phone is brilliant, but was hardly a successful launch, the Surface Pro tablets are beautiful, but still undersell - and those are products that did get a launch, least. What was that dual-screen folding tablet-book thing called? The internet was completely in love with the idea, and... nothing. MS feel like less of a lumbering Brontosaurus to me now than they did a year ago.

Minecraft. Minecraft will sell this, assuming MS price it competitively. I'm not sure how cheap they can make it though - unlike Oculus Rift, HoloLabs is all in, a complete device full of chips and sensors and circuitry. But they may well take the same approach as Facebook/Oculus Rift and price it at cost in order to establish the platform. In the Ars article I linked to earlier, the author said they preferred it to OR as being able to see the real world still solved the motion sickness problem; I suspect it'll be less disorienting and headache-incuding that VR. I still want both, though

This is a good lunchtime read, that talks about the HoloLabs and how Satya Nadella's leadership of the company has changed the way MS works (to allow things like this to happen) and how it will shape the launch plans: Satya Nadella's Got a Plan to Make You Care About Microsoft. The First Step? Holograms | WIRED I am liking the direction of MS these days, compared to Ballmer's day: more interesting things are coming out of them; they're being a lot more open (Office on iOS and Android would never have happened a year ago); and professionally speaking I have to love things like Student Advantage and the Technology Access Program.

At home: end of this year when I build a new machine with an Intel 6000 series i5 (Skylake) and a PCI-E NVMe SSD At work: maybe Summer 2016, when the servers are due their refresh and will be updated to Server 2015 or w/e it'll be called. I know you can manage newer versions of Windows without needing the server OS in lockstep, but it does make it easier. Depending on how much work the servers are, though, I might start working on it then to deploy later. EDIT: @tmcd35 - January 2020 for Windows 7 SP1

Looks amazing - they've been , but this is a couple of orders of magnitude cooler. Hands-on: Microsoft’s HoloLens is flat-out magical

There'd been rumours of a free upgrade for Win8 owners - one of my techs bought a copy of Win8 cheap on that basis - but I'm pleasantly surprised at the Win7 owners as well. They've got me on board, I'll be taking that offer up By limiting it to a year to encourage the upgrade, it's a great way of getting those adoption figures up fast and hitting a critical mass for developers - something that always crippled Win8. No more Internet Explorer either - I wonder if they'll keep the name Spartan for the browser, to tie in with Cortana... (and how long before Windows Media Player is rebranded Warthog? )

@Sunnyknight... recommending... AMD? That's it! That's why my day has been so horrible - it's all just a dream! I'll wake up soon and all my virtual servers will be fine and happy and the snow will be falling and everything will be perfect with the world again. Phew. That's a relief.

Definitely preferred the nose on the FW36 :S agreed that the Merc had the nicest nose last year as well, shame it's against the formula now. I liked the way Force India hid the proboscis last year, painting it black Toto Woflf said he expected Williams to be the most dangerous competitor this year, which is quite the recommendation! (Though of course he may be biased, being a shareholder and all.)

LanSchool for us, as we just needed the classroom management and it does it much cheaper than the all-in approach of NetSupport & Impero.

ThinkPads are not necessarily light, but they are certainly robust and durable, and very simple to work with from an IT perspective - no daft unclipping of the whole keyboard and twenty screws to put an SSD in, all the drivers are easily available on the site, built like tanks. We have half a dozen ThinkPad Edge 540C (Core i3-4000M, 4GB RAM) that we upgraded with 120GB Samsung 840 EVO SSDs and they are things of wonder. I bang on about them a bit too much round here, in fact. About ten seconds to boot to login, really solid keyboards, sturdy power connector (no silly pins involved, more like a thick USB connector); the only thing I don't like is the trackpad, but I don't like any trackpads. Decent wireless mice aren't expensive though. BT Business have them for £315 ex VAT, stick a 256GB SSD in and you're sorted for less than £400 all told. Only downside is they're not ultrabook light 'n' shiny, which as we all know is of the utmost importance to SMT...

Really daft question, but it's an outside shot... on my screen, the Office 2010 links are below that install button at the bottom of your screen. Could you scroll down...? (I'm sorry, but it's all I can think of ) I'm using Firefox, if that makes any difference. I have the Office365 ProPlus for Faculty assigned to my account. It also shows up for me on a test student account in IE11, though the page is longer so I do need to scroll down.

If you want a laptop for Office/web/DVD playback & streaming, no gaming but to last five years, I'd get a ThinkPad. Built like bloody tanks. We have half a dozen of this model in the office and I'm a little bit in love with how well built they are: Lenovo ThinkPad E540 20C6 - 15.6" - Core i3 4000M - Win7 Pro 64-bit / Win8.1 Pro - 4GB - 500GB (20C600JDUK) - dabs.com Stick a 256GB SSD in and you're good to go; if the cashback comes through (and there's no reason it wouldn't), you won't have spent much more than £400, and you'll have a laptop that restarts so fast you'll wonder if you actually restarted it or just clicked log out by mistake*. *I have done this at least half a dozen times today whilst updating laptops.

I can still see the links when checking on my Windows 7 machine - at the bottom in plain text: So not sure what's going on, but they should be there I think.

Just realised that case I recommended only has space for 2 hard drives - you may have to step up to a full-size ATX case to accomodate 4 HDDs. Cooler Master N-Series N200 - USB 3.0 Micro-ATX Case Side Window Edition - Ebuyer is £22, still mATX but don't know how quiet it is and only supports 3 HDDs. Cooler Master N-Series N300 - USB 3.0 Side Window Edition - Ebuyer is the bigger brother to the above at £33, ATX and supports up to 8 HDDs but again - I can't find much on its acoustic performance. Sticking with Fractal Design, which tend to be quieter cases, this is a £41 ATX case that can contain all your HDDs: Fractal Design Core 2300 ATX Case - Ebuyer Modern cases tend to have separate spaces for SSDs, btw, so you can have 2 hard drives plus an SSD in an mATX case. About the Zoostorm @abillybob mentioned - that Celeron is basically the same as the Pentium (same generation of CPU), but is much slower @ 1.8GHz rather than the 3GHz of the Pentiums. Will probably make a difference in your performance, but should also be quieter as it draws less power.

£250 is a squeeze, but can just about be done, I think... This case is a definite for <£30, pretty quiet, good make, mATX but you don't need anything bigger than an mATX motherboard. RAM, you're only going to get 4GB at this price, in which case you may as well get the cheapest: Crucial 4GB DDR3 1600 MT/s (PC3-12800) CL11 Unbuffered UDIMM 240pin Single Ranked - Ebuyer (2 x 2GB sticks are available for about £5 more) That's £56 gone, leaving us £193. You could push to the Anniversary Edition Pentium and a Z97 board to overclock it (£115, leaving <£80 for the GPU), but without spending another £20+ on a decent cooler you'll only be able to push it so far, it won't be quiet with the stock cooler, and it doesn't leave enough for the GPU so I'm ruling that idea out. A normal Pentium and a cheaper board can be had for £75 total, leaving you just under £120 for the GPU. Only dual core (not even HyperThreading) but a good dual-core, and it'll be plenty for WoW, if not particularly futureproof. You can get an AMD R9 270 for £115. AMD is a good option for cheaper builds; you can get an A6 dual-core processor and a decent mobo for overclocking for £80. Given that you want quiet, though, I'd say the Pentium option above is superior to this solution, given that it's the same price. Ignore this paragraph. The good AMD option is an A8 quad-core CPU and the Asus motherboard; it's £105, so £30 more than the Pentium option, but gives you a quad core processor instead so more future proofed. It leaves you about £90 for the GPU, for which I'd say the AMD R7 260X is your best bet. In summary: this case and 4GB of RAM. Then either: * Pentium and board and AMD R9 270 for £246.42 total * A8 quad-core CPU and motherboard with AMD R7 260X for £250.69 total Personally I'd say the Pentium route - it's more power efficient, so quieter, and although it's only a dual core each of those cores is much more competent than the AMD core, so the two processors end up trading blows depending on what you're doing. The R9 270 GPU is about 50% better than the R7 260X, though, so you'll get more performance in games from the Pentium & R9 combo than you will from the A8 & R7 combo. My two pence!

TIL: I'm going air cooling for my next build...

Not sure what went wrong there but it's had proper LDAP integration from the word go for us, over 4 years ago now. It used to use NTLM, now uses Kerberos and is better than ever.

The last video on the second page of the TR guide shows you in 50s; it really is just blob & spread neatly:

Such a shame Professor Pillinger isn't about to see how close he came