davethetekkie

+1 for Wordpress... I've tried a few others (including Joomla and no... Just no) and it's definitely one of the easiest out there. PyroCMS was promising but needed a lot of poking and prodding so I've since moved back to WP.

I did some benchmarking of our older gear to establish what would be worth the upgrade and what wouldn't. Our Toshiba NB510s showed a slight improvement but with a little bit of a test drive it became apparent that the test unit was still just too sluggish to make any investment worthwhile. Our 2nd and 3rd gen i5 machines (Viglen Genies and Lenovo M72e Tinies) showed a VAST improvement over their spinning rust though... The drive used was a 120GB Kingston V300 (current stock so I guess it's the hobbled version).

With older cars I get tax monthly; that way if the worst happens I'm no more than £20 out of pocket RE road tax when I switch. I had an X plate Volvo S40 that did a 60 mile daily trip for me for 2 and a half years. Spent £400 on that car (was an old taxi from my father in laws company) and then someone ran into me. Insurance paid out £375 and all it needed was one replacement alloy wheel (I bought a full set at £100 for the good tyres on them). It ran for another full year and would have give longer had I not made the mistake of parking it up so my wife could run her first car and build up some no claims. Figure out the (theoretical) monthly payment even without the payout and the lack of depreciation left on it and it soon makes sense. Working air con, plenty of passing power and decent economy if you're light on the pedal. Our current car is a 1997 (really) Ford Maverick. It's £300 worth of rusty old bucket, but it's reliable and worth far more than we paid for it (especially with the £600 of mud terrain tyres that are on it right now) and surprisingly running locally costs about the same to run as the S40 (painful watching the fuel gauge on the motorway though). Given the choice between saving for a deposit on a house or paying monthly for a car? I'd take the rolling scrap any day of the week and use what I'm NOT paying a landlord (because my £500 monthly rent would be a £350-ish mortgage according to the calculators I've used) on something with shiny alloys. Would I like something newer? Sure, but at the rate newer cars depreciate it seems like a mugs game to me.

Out-flippin'-standing!

We have a few Lenovo Tiny units (most are attached to Hanns-G monitors rather than the proper Lenovo docking monitor thing) and generally I really like them (the ones we've retrofitted to the underside of our pop-up desks really look the part)... BUT the number of hoops I had to jump through to convince their service department that a hard disk had failed on one were beyond belief! By the time their engineer eventually attended (because I couldn't possibly replace a drive on one of those myself, oh no!) I could have been through the entire process with Viglen or VeryPC five times. We're just lucky that the Lenovos seem to be pretty reliable for us otherwise!

I'll be there on the Thursday... First year ever (hopefully not the last!)

Is it just me but 38 feedback with a 0% positive rating seems a bit on the fishy side? I also can't believe they'd just eBay it rather than auction it off for Children in Need or summat...

I'm presuming the displays are feeding their info back to the GPU and setting it accordingly... but what about refresh rates? Is the screen limited on what refresh rates it'll accept and behave itself? Most flatscreens are built with digital connection standards in mind rather than VGA... Maybe worth a try dropping the rate right down?

How long are the cable runs in the locations where you're having the issues? Sounds like a weak analog signal and the display isn't getting sync. Do you have a powered VGA splitter or switcher you could put into the circuit for testing purposes and see if that beefs it up a bit? Maybe the Dells just aren't kicking out quite the same level of signal you're getting from your other machines?

I've been running a VeryPC ThinBook for the last 6 months or so (spec: i5, 8GB, 240SSD, 15" FHD IPS) and it's a lovely piece of kit. Yes it'd be nice if it had the aluminium unibody of a MacBook, but really it's a tool and as long as it can run the software I need (and it does, with aplomb) and looks the part (custom vinyl top lid branding FTW) then it's got everything I need. The VeryPC Ultrabook was ALMOST mine but missed out due to the lack of a TPM chip.

I did an upgrade install from 7 Enterprise on my tech laptop and it made an absolute horlicks of the network drivers to the extent that I had to do a restore and lost all my installed software anyway. I'm sure I'm in the minority but it didn't get my relationship with Windows 10 off to a brilliant start! The laptop lasted a fortnight on Windows 10 but is now back on our standard Windows 7 image. I had trouble getting offline folder sync to behave and I just didn't have time to waste on it!

In the name of all that's good and holy do NOT rely on anything less than a purpose built lighting desk for a show. At school we run a Fat Frog and a cheap nasty little ACME/Chauvet thing to run our 4x moving heads... It's never let us down. At church we originally had a Frog and I arrived one day to find it replaced with a piece of software called Showmagic and the worst 15" touchscreen display I have ever had the misfortune to use. With one solution if I need a little extra light on demand it's a simple fader... On the software? You have to be on the right page... What should be a simple action turns into a few seconds of pratting around and by the time you've sorted it you've lost where you were in the script. Noooo spankyou. Gimme the right tool for the job any day of the week.

I'm interested in the AiO chassis' please!

Moss!

That's a shame... But at least you've managed to sort something! :-)

Does the unit have an optical drive? If you still get HDD LED activity with no drive in it is it a shot optical drive playing hell with the SATA controller maybe? Other than that +1 on the complete drain of power... just to note I had an HP a couple of years back that I did a 15 second drain with no battery and holding the power button with no success... I found a guide stating that it had to be a MINIMUM of 40 second on that model for some reason and it worked! Possible worth trying the same here...

We have 1x RISO ComColor 7150 and a few RISO ComColor 3010 units kicking about... they seem reliable enough unless someone feeds them damaged paper (or label sheets... but that's another story). Looking at the images I found the main chassis on the 9150 looks pretty much identical to ours unless you go for all the additional accoutrements to go with it. They're nice and fast. Quality on the 7150 is fine for most purposes but doesn't hold a candle to a dedicated photo printer (as you'd obviously expect); large panels of flat colour are sometimes slightly inconsistent when put next to output from a good quality colour laser. Text is lovely and sharp. Overall I like 'em... and for the occasional times when I don't the RISO engineer turns up pronto to put everything back to rights like clockwork.

How old is the screen? If it's done a bit of mileage it sounds like possibly some dud caps in the screen itself on the power board... Does the screen behave when connected to anything else over HDMI or is the symptom the same?

Airserver here... Though there are a few Apple TVs left floating about...

Hi all, We currently have a number of mobile cases for sets of classroom iPads that are made by LEBA; the cases themselves and the sync units are in perfect working order but the foam inside them has died a death to the extent that no matter how long I spend with a glue gun I ain't going to be able to bring them back to standard! Does anyone have a contact who may be able to help us out with some replacement foam? My colleague has already been in touch with LEBA themselves but so far no joy! Thanks in advance! Dave.

Major cuts!? They're taking the same amount from me annually as they always have. Multiply that by the number of households who watch (not-necessarily-BBC-produced) live TV as well as all the other premises that are liable for the license? If they need more than that tidy sum to operate then it's time to review some pay packets.

Well... petition signed; hopefully it'll have some small effect but my confidence in the BBC to act responsibly or with any pride in the 'British' part of its name is pretty much nonexistent.

I'm running a VeryPC ThinBook 15 on an i5 with 8GB, 240GB SSD and 1080p IPS panel... And she's a beaut. One of my primaries has taken a few of the ThinBook 14's with 4GB and smaller SSD and they are perfectly capable and should be well within your budget. SD reader is integral so should do the trick for your additional storage. Unfortunately for that money the only ultra portable you'll get will be running an Atom or Core-M CPU... Have a chat with Colin at VeryPC; he's a top geezer and he'll see you right!

It depends how much room you have for trying things like that out...

I can't see why not; you'll probably just find some errors turning up in your event logs once you've done it...