sonofsanta

I don't think any Haswell-E part can be classified as "low spec". Oh noes only six Haswell cores with quad channel DDR4 and 28 PCI-E lanes! I'm such a pauper! Here you go, I just saved you £5-15 and likely got you much more Haribo than you would otherwise: Online Food Shopping - ASDA Groceries AMD ain't gonna be competitive till at least 2016, that's when they're targeting their new architecture for. They've as much as admitted themselves that the Bulldozer/Piledriver/whatever design has been a steaming pile of, and that the module design they used was rubbish.

Top prize is a fortnight in Disney World? Awesome! If it isn't that then I am going to drive up to the VeryPC offices and sit on Al's desk crying until he relents and makes that the top prize.

Seems a bit anti-competitive, does it not? I wouldn't be surprised of the OFT ends up investigating. Phones4U is profitable still, so obviously attracting customers, but the networks are driving it out of business not by out-competing but by refusing to play ball. And so they ruin 5000 people's days/weeks/months/lives simply to add a few more quid to their off-shore tax-free accounts. Screw big business.

I'm not sure how much was "boring formula" and how much was "boring circuit" because by the gods, the layout on those Beijing streets was dull. I'll give it another race to find out, but I'm not bothering with the first hour of ITV4's coverage again. The pit stops were hilarious though. "Ok, quick, everyone drive into these gazebos and hop into the next car!" For a series meant to promote electric cars, having to have a second car on hand because the battery life is so crap isn't really sending the right message, is it?

Bit of a necro... cos I just finished Alan Wake on PC, and thought it was ruddy marvellous. It's never really a challenge, and the combat is essentially rinse/repeat the whole way; but the setting is fantastic, and the storyline and characters are as close as you'll ever get to Stephen King: The Game. Usually on sale for a few quid when the Steam sale rolls around, or on Humble or GOG. Took me about 16 hours to do the main story, got another 2-4 to go with the two DLC packs (that finish the story off properly, from what I can tell), and I reckon it's well worth the pennies if you've ever enjoyed a horror story, or just fancy something different from Angry Men With Guns In The Desert/In Space/In Front Of You Opening All The Doors. So yeah: Alan Wake. Thoroughly enjoyable. Also: To The Moon, wot I mentioned before, is on sale @ gog.com this weekend for $2.99.

A "cool" twist - do we have to undergo the Ice Bucket Challenge to get our entries? If so, I reckon I'd rather buy my own sweeties this time round...

Funnily enough I've just been doing that on my Nexus 4 to try and claw back some space (running out from installing so many VR apps for Cardboard ). Must've gotten rid of another few dozen monitor serial numbers, projector mounts, printer errors, blue screens, gas meter readings... Also had to clear out a load of duplicates from Google's auto-enhance feature - it's a handy trick (basically just auto-colour/auto-contrast done by the phone as a matter of course) but in the early days it left you with the original as well, so you had every photo twice over. The newer Photos app on Android deletes from the Google+ backup at the same time as it deletes from your phone (the older Gallery app only deletes the local copy). Still, been a nice excuse to go back over a load of old photos of the kids. And now I have space for even more VR crap

I think you've got Psychic Cat anyway, haven't you? Seen it on your wall in past photos. Pipe up if not and I'll re-upload to this thread, easier than hunting down the original post. I also have the following on my wall: Tech Support Cheat Sheet (because every office needs an xkcd, by law) Problem Solving Flowchart: Batman at the bus stop: Where do astronauts hang out? Who's the robot that won't cop out when there's danger all about? We have the Tesco Motivational Poster in the office as well; it's stuck up in front of the technicians though, because I Am A Good People Manager.

The second rule of EduGeek is you don't talk about... no, wait, that's wrong. The second rule is No Smoking. Don't ask why! We're not allowed to talk about it.

I'd split it just so that when something running on IIS starts playing up and needs a restart, it doesn't involve rebooting your DC as well. Server 2012 R2 has RAM deduplication so there's minimum overhead in running multiple OS instances. It's also a better idea security wise having nothing but AD/DNS/DHCP running on your domain controllers, though that's less a concern in a primary than some other places. Still, if you can do a thing right, you may as well. Get an AMD Opteron with loads of cores, fill it with RAM, job done. There are cheap ways of doing shared storage for a failover cluster between two servers these days, I think, but I don't know them.

Yeah sod CrossFire - it gives you grief with driver support, application profiles, only uses the VRAM of a single GPU, and you never quite get over the niggling feeling that the game isn't using both GPUs fully. It also demonstrably introduces micro-stutter, which can be invisible to some eyes, but was really, really annoying to mine. If you want to get really technical on micro-stutter, this is a fantastic article (page 9 goes into multi-GPU), but in brief: just get a single, powerful GPU. Seriously.

You shouldn't have to update Flash every month for security vulnerabilities. You shouldn't have to jump through hoops to disable update notifications for end users on everything. You shouldn't have to disable important security features like sandboxing in Adobe Reader in order to reliably open PDFs on a network, hardly an advanced use case. But: Adobe. Having to work out the download URL for the MSI yourself because Adobe haven't updated the page properly is, I'm afraid, par for the course. Needs doing more often than not.

$technician and I have just collected our gobs from the floor. Incredible stuff, especially that second to last one.

From my own year-end document, where I write down all these once-a-year-things that I always forget as well:

At that budget, I'd say stick with AMD for the CPU to be honest - the motherboards tend to be cheaper as well. You don't want to go any higher than a Core i3 (if you do go Intel) for your CPU on that budget, else you'll have to sacrifice on the GPU to afford the CPU, and GPU is still far more important. Given that AMD can compete with the i3, with cheaper motherboards to boot, you may as well stick with them. AMD GPUs are more powerful for their money at that point of the market as well. Just don't Crossfire really not worth the aggro (says the voice of experience). You can push to the 280; it's about to be replaced by the 285, which is pretty much equal in performance, but the 280 has 3GB RAM vs. 2GB on the 285. If, at any point, you find yourself with some extra budget, pile into the GPU: it's still what makes the biggest difference in the here-and-now (a more powerful CPU may future-proof you and benefit you In The Future, but a more powerful GPU will benefit you now). 280X is the next step up, about £200. Asus are my favourite cooler (DirectCU II), MSI/Sapphire are also good. Not a big fan of XFX, I've had hassle RMAing in the past. So I'd say, from some clicking around on PC Parts Picker: [ATTACH=CONFIG]26277[/ATTACH] Assuming you don't need to buy a Windows licence. DVD/RW, RAM, case, HDD are all interchangeable, they were just cheapest in the list. Motherboard is a fairly random pick as well, stick to Asus/Gigabyte/MSI IMHO. PSU, Corsair are a reliable brand - I don't know anything about EVGA as a PSU brand. Look for reviews before you buy any PSU though, especially if you can find a jonnyguru review. Can't really squeeze an SSD in at the moment, but it's an easy upgrade in the future - Corsair MX100 256GB are about £75 at the moment, which is a right royal bargain. 256GB will outperform 128GB and gives you a bit more breathing space, though with a 1TB HDD alongside you shouldn't have any problems. Set Steam to install to the mechanical storage, games don't get much benefit, and having to manage your library is a PITA. My tuppence, anyway! EDIT: saying that, I forgot to factor in the Pentium G3258. If you don't mind overclocking - and it's pretty damned easy with an Intel K chip - get the 20th Anniversary edition Pentium, a cheap Z87 board and a decent cooler and get top-drawer single thread performance at 4.5GHz (or thereabouts). Works out about the same price as the 6300 + mobo, but should perform much better in games. Only 2-core/2-thread, but it gives you ample here-and-now performance. Link to new build, the top now looks like this (and if anyone can genuinely recommend a cooler, as I have no idea atm, that'd be grand).

I've heard of some inadvisable finance packages in schools in the past - even cleaned up the mess afterwards - but that's pretty phenomenally short sighted, to still be paying for iPads in 2027 (the discussion mentioned above was Nov. 2012). By that point I expect us to have passed the singularity and to live our lives as free-floating webs of electrons coursing throughout a networked world, freed from the shackles of our corporeal bodies. Except in LA, where kids would be sat on an iPad looking only at Pearson apps still. No singularity for you, peasant!

https://www.oculusvr.com/order/ kthxbai xx

Alas, for most of us:

I did.

+1 to all of the above - my three go-to companies for PC quotes.

More than welcome - think I got them from someone on here last year anyway along with a few other docs. For the record, though, if you log in at advancedfirstline.com, there's a link to Latest Install Guides on the right that has that doc available so you really can tell Link2ICT to stuff it up their hoohahs, if the information is freely available as part of your support contract. Re-installing Facility onto a new server is your right - Advanced Learning don't mind you doing it, it's nowt to do with anyone else.

We have an official Twitter feed, almost by accident: I set it up one snow day when the website was down (again) and it later got official blessing and used more regularly. Actually works pretty well - we don't get complaints into it, but if we did I suspect the answer would be "Please can you email your concerns to [email protected] and we'll forward them on to the appropriate staff member" because dirty laundry shouldn't be aired publicly. It is useful for reminding people about parents evenings, plays etc. or for celebrating various things and showing off. One of the office ladies deals with it now and all goes smoothly.

I'd say hold off on PCI-E SSDs until Skylake (the Intel CPUs 2 generations from now, so the i3/5/7-6xxx models). Rumblings are that Skylake will have 20 PCI-E lanes on board, so you can have 4 for the NVMe interface (i.e. the designed-for-SSD interface, unlike AHCI) and still have the full 16 lanes for your GPU. Skylake will also bring DDR4 support and is generally the next exciting update from Intel. Skylake is supposed to be next year, though I wouldn't be surprised if it was more like 18 months.

Those of you who use e4education, schoolwebsite and other education focused providers: how does your website hold up when it's a snow day? Our current (inept) provider struggles every year, on the one day when everyone is wanting to check the website, and I'm sick of dealing with it. I want to be sure that any company focusing on schools - thus dealing with a spike in traffic from every customer - doesn't result in collapsing websites.

Worked for me last summer, can't think it's too different right now (PDF): Configuring IIS for use with ePortal.pdf