sonofsanta

I like to think that years in the future, when Al has retired and spends his days as a gentleman of luxury, he will have great big red-leather-bound photo albums full of all our crap Photoshops of him, and he will sit down in his armchair in his retiring room of an afternoon and peruse them fondly.

May as well start as I mean to go on, eh? I made a Socktober Monkey. Can, and should, be made into a sticker to put on everything.

What I'm really gathering from that detective work is that I spend far too much of these competition months doing crap Photoshops for giggles. There's more than a few images in that folder with my name on...

+1 - my wife's premium went up because someone else was entirely at fault in hitting her rear bumper (going too fast with not enough braking distance/attention) with no-one hurt, no damage done and no claim made. We made the mistake of informing the insurer just in case anything came of it. Should not have done. As best I can tell, this essentially boils down to "your premium has gone up because you're not psychic".

Think that's my mug - I can see an Avaya box in the background from our recent phone system update... Does that mean I have a bonus entry already for a picture on the wall?

Another good article with a few additional points (good old AnandTech): AnandTech | A New Windows - Windows 10 Announced By Microsoft I like: Start Menu with Live Tiles, at bloody last. Think I saw the first article saying "here, MS, you should do it this way" about two or three years ago. Really like the resizing shown in that Vine as well, that's clever. That Continuum thing looks pretty smart as well - I'd buy a Surface Pro 3 now if I had the money, should be even better with that. Ctrl+V in command prompt! At bloomin' last. Proper high-DPI support. Multiple desktops. Why has this taken so long? I was using that in Linux at school in 2002... 4-Way Snap, because Aero Snap is still my most-loved feature in Win7 Wot @Arthur said about rolling upgrades for Hyper-V Clusters. The things I get excited about get sadder with every year. Not sure about: Search results from the web when searching the start menu, because ugh, Bing Windows Store used for Volume Licensing. On the one hand, there are parts of VLSC that still tell me I need to be in IE5 or higher. On the other hand, Windows Store is a consumer shop front, don't shoehorn enterprise into it. In general, they're sticking to their pattern of "refining all the massive changes we made last time to actually be good". Think how much time and money they could save with some decent in-house user analytics on all these mad plans. It's also fulfilling the promises they ran out of time for with Windows 8 - the unified apps thing has been mentioned before now, and has always been the obvious move to help Windows Phone (build for WP, automatically available on Win8, so may as well build for WP and get two (angry) birds with one stone).

Instead of just burning the Windows Vista forum from the system and salting the earth and so on... can we do it with the OS as well, please?

Thank goodness for that, was starting to think I'd be the only one. Radio 6 is ace - still get to hear some new releases but by and large, it's anything from the 60s onwards (with an emphasis on the 90s British music of my youth). <3 RadMac. Nowhere near as repetitive as Radio 1/Kerrang/other commercial stations, nor as dull as Radio 2. Personally I find that having a low level of background music encourages conversation because you're not breaking a silence if you pipe up.

Might be an issue for boarding schools where students have their own devices, I suppose, but ain't no-one messing with PAC files round here.

Oh my goodness that is asking for trouble on the day when you accidentally pick up a real light bulb and squeeze it.

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Just sayin' (Seriously. big tellies = mad cheap these days. 42" for around £300 I think. Get LG/Panasonic.)

I often wonder how I ever managed four way Goldeneye/Mario Kart/etc. on a 15" CRT in my bedroom. 42" is fine for me when I'm on the 360/PC, but maybe that's because the comfy leather armchair is only about 6 foot away from it <3 mancave.

Exactly - bankruptcy involves a very long list of debtors, and "customers wot pre-ordered something for a few hundred quid" is a long way below "bank wot loaned millions" in the priorities. But that's not happened here: they have the money, they could do it, but because they're not legally obliged to (as @nephilim says) they're going to take the opportunity to keep the cash because they're greedy bar stewards (PwC, that is, as administrators).

Er, what? I'd expect to hear that if they'd gone bankrupt - "we've got no money, lots of debt, and other debtors are more important than you, tiny peon" - but I thought Phones4U had lots of money in the bank and were an otherwise successful business?

Speaking of postage errors... @VeryPC Al, how much do socks cost to post? Just checking you know this now, before you post them

For SCCM, windows-noob.com is your friend (it was certainly mine): using System Center 2012 Configuration Manager - Part 9. Deploying Monthly Updates - Configuration Manager 2012 - www.windows-noob.com You may need part 5 if you haven't done any set up yet (installed the WSUS role) and part 9 is followed by the also-relevant part 10. I've been deploying updates that way for a couple of years and it's worked well. The only change I've made to their procedure is not to run the automatic deployment rule on a schedule, because running it at 23:30 on Patch Tuesday, I didn't always get the updates due to time zone differences, and the second Wednesday of a month does not necessarily follow the second Tuesday (i.e. Patch Tuesday). I set a reminder on my Outlook instead then right-click-Run on the ADR. Not really much effort, tbh, and more to do with MS being in a US timezone than anything else. To answer your question: computers only install the updates they need. Deploy everything and they'll pick what they need.

They stick Daybreak (or whatever it is now) on in the morning for breakfast, but over break & lunch they instead go for the approach of "go on hurry up eat faster people are waiting no don't hang around get on with it eat eat EAT EAT GO GO GO!"

Take a System State recovery, and recover through Directory Services Restore Mode using this data. Never ever not ever use a snapshot of a DC as the timestamping will wreck your AD. You might get away with it if you were bringing up only that snapshot on a completely new domain, but if you ever bring back a snapshot of a DC into an existing domain you will ruin everything forever. From my DR documentation, written as a guide to myself: Anything in [square brackets] is redacted information specific to my virtual DC. Last step will be different for most, I'd imagine; amend so that your recovered DC seizes whatever FSMO roles it didn't already have. In my case, one virtual and one physical, recovering from a complete disaster, I'd do the steps above then promo a new physical DC. If I'd only lost the virtual DC I'd probably just promo a new virtual one, though I think you can do a non-authoritative AD restore which brings it back with all the data but updates with newer information from your existing DC. Never experimented with that though.

Personal but not for home? So is the school buying it, is she buying it for work? I'd say best value at the moment is this Lenovo Thinkpad, last-gen Core i3 (for what difference that makes) but only £320 inc VAT with bag and mouse included. I have never seen a proper ThinkPad with a proper CPU that cheap before. Stick a 256GB Crucial MX100 SSD in it (£75 inc VAT) and it'll fly. 2GB RAM could be better, but it easy 'n' cheap to upgrade and sufficient for Office and internet anyway.

Do we really need to PM you all our details again? You have me on file, I'm sure! I'm a size 12 as well, and probably not the only Big Foot in the thread... so if you decide to do a large size, I'll have them please, otherwise I'll just squeeze my feet into the regulars like an ugly stepsister seeking to impress her Prince Charming. You're my Prince Charming in this analogy, Al. And in my heart <3

tl:dr; 980 comes top of all the charts. 295X2 isn't really comparable as it's a dual-chip solution, with all the awkwardness that entails (CrossFire profiles, enormous heat & noise & power, micro-stuttering...). Having done CrossFire before, I am now firmly and forever in the "one decent GPU, as powerful as you can get" camp. Not worth upgrading from my 680 for this, but if this is only the GM204 chip, GM210 will be a monster

$technician says one fix is, counter-intuitively, to defrag the drive. Normally a no-no on SSDs because of the wear, but running a defrag cycle marks all the data as new and restores the performance, reputedly.

Bit worrying, we've got 150+ of these in clients and all their data will be "old" data as it's just the OS install. Hopefully the lack of new data being written will prevent the issue occuring, but it's less than ideal. Buying the MX100s at the moment anyway. Can't argue the price of that 256GB drive when recommending to staff, either

I'm sure there's an Asda within walking distance for you Rory Read, AMD CEO: Breaking : AMD CEO Reveals Brand New x86 Core "Zen"