My god, some of you must get in a right tiz when a new stem that is 25grams lighter than the one on your bike is released 😆

You do not need to get into playing the latest games at 100fps on ultra settings at resolutions above 1080p. Especially if you would be happy gaming on a console.

If you enjoy tinkering with hardware and drivers settings that’s one thing (like Gofasterstripes and I do) but I doubt you get anything extra game play wise playing at 1440p @ 120 fps compared to playing at 1080p at 50fps with a few shiny bits switched off.

Both the latest AMD APU’s and Intel CPU’s have half decent graphics built in. There are plenty of videos on Youtube of gamers playing Battlefield 4 with decent frame rates at 720p on them. That is enough if all you want is something more versatile than a console.

OP:

Here you go, a simple PC suitible for games @ 1080p for under £575 including Windows 8.1

http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/JcWfLk

I’m sure with a bit of effort that could be trimmed back or expanded to include an SSD or 16Gb ram.

I thought the Pluto pictures were faked because the department of the New World Order responsible for planning the mission accidently left the plans in Building 7 just after lighting the fuses.

Which nicely segues into why 9/11 happend – it was the only way to reset the atmosphere when they decided to change the mix in the Chem Trails to kick-start the change in global thought patterns into the correct 21st century mode which could only happen after Princess Di had been dealt with.

Ignore SaxonRiders thoughful post, he has clearly been speeding. Burn him 😀

Does it need to look pretty and what is your budget?

And prehaps you should contemplate why events like Srebrenica are why we actually need Armed Forces; and why not every single conflict is due to red faced shouty people?

I certainly understand why people may have strong feelings about the morality or execution of recent conflicts such as Iraq, but please don’t insult the thousands who have served, or those who respectfully remember the fallen.

Given all your previous threads about encrypted HDs I’m guessing some MoD / DoD proprietary language. Missile guidance systems etc.

In which case working at a snails pace and being able to closely inspect the contents of ones fingernails are the core requirements; actually being able to get on and do some work is secondary 🙂

Not that this is the developers fault, but they can’t work without the database and it’s going to take at least 3 weeks for the request for the new instance to be processed by the highly efficient managed service partner, another week for an engineer to be assigned, a couple of days to figure out that the engineer doesn’t know how to install it, and then 5 weeks for them to accept the bids from the consultancies that do know how to do it. When it finally arrives, said developer has worked out that persisting the data isn’t actually required and the project manager has de-scoped the requirement to protect his unicorn…

I have worked in a lot of institutions with unbelievable levels of incompetence (it seems investment banks value it…) so the fact that you continue to work in that antiquated way doesn’t surprise me.

There is nothing like going to a client and being introduced to a wizened old developer who everyone in the company looks to for advice; and then you quickly realise he has only 2 years experience repeated 10 times 😉

If you only need to encrypt individual files or folders you can try Gpg4win:

http://www.gpg4win.org/features.html

Sorry, I’ll offer you one next time.

Career plans never recovered, always busy, no spare cash

Definitely this, and listening to the 3 year old howling right now at not getting his own way nothing else 😀

😀 😀 😀 😀

I think Microsoft’s main consumer strategy is to nudge people towards the paid subscriptions of OneDrive, office 365 etc. and worry less about selling the OS.

I never had a problem with Vista and now much prefer 8.1 over 7. Quickly bash the windows key and start typing what it is you want in Metro to open it. Far faster than the older search tools or clicking through the start menus.

Gnome 3 is one of my favorite desktops environments now, it has some of the best bits of Win 8.1 and OSX. The less I actually have to use the mouse the better. Hopefully Windows 10 will be a bit like that, I’ve not bothered with the previews yet.

Just bought my 5 year old the larger 20″ frog bike. She really likes it and it’s a great fit. No suspension fork option on those but I’m not sure how much use one would be when the rider is only 20kg?

If it’s not recognised by a computer your options are limited. When it is plugged into the machine is it recognised in the BIOS? What about in Windows disk manager? A disk can sometimes be seen there but not in Windows Explorer. If that is the case you may be able to recover data with the right software.

If not there are a few companies out there offering recovery services, but in my experience they are not usually cheap – but that is subjective depending on what you have lost I suppose.

Can anyone explain to me who would invade Britain and why?

Foreigners, because they want jobs, housing and access to the finest health service in the world. Clearly we need to be able to nuke them before they get here 🙂

Windows 8.1 32bit is in my experience even lighter weight than 7 for older machines. But if you have to pay for a full licence it is probably not worth it.

For an old cheap PC something like the 32bit version of Puppy Linux or Ubuntu with a light weight DE are probably the way to go.

If you think you have a tasty processor then the chances ae it is one of the hex core Phenoms II X6 series released in 2010.

If that’s the case it is actually an AM3 CPU which means you are in luck;

http://www.dabs.com/products/asrock-970m-pro3-am3–970-ddr3-matx-B78M.html?utm_source=awin&utm_medium=affiliates&utm_content=AW00&awc=3044_1431356277_e09024205cab63f49a01ba26355bc219&utm_source=awin&utm_medium=affiliates&utm_content=AW00

If you don’t have an AM3 CPU then I think you should look at modern CPU’ s 🙂

If your CAD is GPU heavy and you want to virtualise on the server there are three solutions;

1. Use VMware Workstation or Oracle VirtualBox and enable 3D support – I doubt this will be up to serious CAD work. But is easy to set up.

2. Under Hyper-V on Server 2012 R2 you can use RemoteFX with a powerful GPU installed in the server to give the VM decent 3D acceleration. I believe this works well with properly supported Nvidia or AMD cards.

3. Under VMware ESXi or Proxmox (KVM/QEMU) you can use PCI pass through to a GPU and USB ports dedicated to the VM – this can be quite complex to setup but gives almost native performance as the VM is directly using the GPU.

Options 1 & 2 means the least work to setup the hypervisor and means the base Server 2012 R2 install stays as is. Option 3 requires the Hypervisor to be installed in the bare metal, and your monitor and keyboard/mouse are going to be sat near to the server to be directly attached.

I believe Xen are now offering a 3D acceleration solution similar (and probably better than Hyper-V’s RemoteFX), but I have not looked into it yet.

I don’t think there are any, there are some decent FM2+ ITX boards available and an Athlon X4 CPU’s are relatively cheap.

Your other option is to see if there are any MATX boards available that will support the CPU you have.

Server 2012 R2 includes Hyper-V, which is Microsofts equivilent of VM ware. You can enable it under the add roles and features and then create a new VM from the Hyper-V manager.

These links might help:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831531.aspx

http://www.howtogeek.com/196158/how-to-create-and-run-virtual-machines-with-hyper-v/

Fascinating (and scary) subject this.

Just to add my tuppence worth;

1)The UK deterent is independent. US support is needed to maintain it, but targeting and firing are controlled by the UK. So yes, if we had a PM with big enough balls, or a mental impairment, we could use it without Washingtons approval.

2)It is almost a certainty that the UK warheads have variable yields ranging from around 8-10kt (smaller than the hiroshima bomb) to around 100kt (large city and surrounding area gone).

3)If two subs are put to sea anywhere on Earth is in range.

Whilst nuclear weapons are IMO evil things, a purely conventional force would need to be massive to be able to threaten a potential enemy with near instant destruction of key assets. This is the draw for nuclear tipped missiles – cheap almost instant destruction.

When facing non-nuclear armed states I am sure the UK governemt (at least under Maggie) were happy to leave foriegn dictators wondering at what point the UK would consider using them. There is certainly enough evidence Maggie believed Saddam understood what the consequences of using chemical weapons against the allies in 1990/1 would be.

Should we replace Trident? My view is that with the current proliferation, Putin in the Kremlin (and the possibility of ever more hhardline nationalists) and the decay of our conventional armed forces I don’t think we really have a choice.

And finally, France has them, need I say more 😉

What’s Facebook?

There are some pics of him in this thread…

Other STW thread about Putin

😀

In my opinion you should do C# and do some refresher training on SQL Server. Hiring decent application developers that properly understand T-SQL, set based theory and the various features of SQL Server can sometimes be difficult. You might find you get hired for your SQL skills but your C# training will quickly get used in most development teams (or vice versa).

Is this a fresh install of windows, steam and games?

You can move steam folders around a couple of ways, you either drop the steam folder onto the new drive and delete everything except the steam.exe and the steamapps folder and then run steam.exe.

Or you can copy the steamapps folder to another drive and then in steam add that as an addtional library and then select a game to download. Tell it to download to the location where it already is and it should find the files already there.

Both methods work well but a few games do have some files in odd locations in your user directory, occasionally this causes a problem like losing save game files etc.

If you have definitely installed all your steam bits correctly have you installed your graphics card drivers etc. properly?

The other thing to consider is, when you were poking about inside your case did you inadvertently pull out any cables? Many modern graphics cards have extra power leads, they might be fine in windows without them but the moment they try to spin up to perform 3D work the system could freeze or crash.

Lucky he didn’t leave the landing light on…

…it might have been a 747 that woke him up.

I like using Xmind when I start with bigger projects – you start out with a mindmap that you can then turn into a Gantt chart and export to other apps. It’s free for the basic version but you need to pay for the advanced features (which includes most of the exporting).

https://www.xmind.net/

I also dive straight in with Kanbanflow for smaller projects, again its free until you want to use the more advanced features.

https://kanbanflow.com/

I’m tempted to dig out the 486 just to give it a blast.

You don’t need to, you can just buy it again;

GoG

It used to be freely downloadable like a lot of old games and then someone realised there was a market in selling them and bought up the rights!

I’m in 8)

One of the first posts I read is;

What I find I interested is that the jokers here are Irish/English, the ones that really believe in the lack of dinosaurs are American and the ones saying all this is rubbish are a mix of English mums and Americans with no sense of humour.

Which suggest that some of you are already in there… 😆

Sorry can’t really help with this one but it does sound like it could well be a PSU problem to me (having experienced a few in the past).

You shouldn’t really need to pay £130 for a decent PSU unless you have insane power requirements (but knowing you, you probably do!).

W8 isn’t approved for work.

This is ridiculous, how long does an OS need to be out for? I hated PGP disk encryption on Win 7 too, I don’t blame you for trying to avoid it.

Windows 8.1, Bitlocker and Hyper-V are in my opinion a much better platform than what I had before for my work laptop.

[quoteCheeky ***** I don’t live in glebe!!!![/quote]

LOL, I used to.

I’ve had a flick through the linked thread, it looks like you have had a lot more patience with it than I would have had 🙂

You might have lost on the silicon lottery with this one though. You also don’t know the history of the chip, I think you said your mobo o/c your i7 ok so it probably isn’t that but I suppose the 6 cores could be pulling enough to overheat the VRM’s or some other component?

My Z800 workstation is now sat spare for the minute, if you are not far away you are welcome to extract and test the X5650’s in there and swap if one is better.

This was my favorite 90’s flight sim;

Which followed my addiction to this on the C64;

Anyone living two minutes from Ickenham station lives the wrong side of the railway track and probably drinks in the Coach and Horses, take that parking permit at your peril 😆

Awsum. Can you return the favor and tell me why the hell I can’t get this Xeon stable at 4GHz please?

That’s a shame, what have you bumped the voltage to?

IMO modded Cliffs of Dover is superior to both ROF and Battle of Stalingrad.

If you have a PC that can push it that is.

I agree with this, I own RoF but could never get on with the way you log in etc. Reviews of il-2 BoS have been somewhat mixed so far. I will probably only buy it when it’s on sale for a cheap price.

I’ve recently started playing CoD again with all the mods and all the horrible bugs are now gone as far as I can tell and it simply looks amazing.

Falcon 4 BMS is still going strong, but other than installing it for a quick look I’ve never really played it properly.

DCS gets my vote simply because you can at least try it out for free and then buy additional aircraft. If you don’t have time for high fidelity sims then the Flaming Cliffs 3 add on pack is a good compromise compared to A-10C.

It always concerned me that people could rack up real flight miles for their pilots license on MS Flight sim, or was that just an urban legend?

Urban legend with a grain of truth, real pilots can use the proper simulators (often built with commercial hardware) to gain experience: http://bit.ly/1KerTLG

I’m not sure if the hours are logged the same as real hours, Flaperon could confirm if they are in the airline industry.

X-Plane X is pretty awesome – if you get seriously into it. It is now 64 bit and will use memory like its going out of fashion if you start importing high-res ground textures.

FSX is older and 32bit only, it can be a bit of a pig to optimize and get running stably but there are some good guides out there. A slightly refined version has just been released on Steam and has been tweaked and recompiled, early reports are its more stable and runs with a better frame rate for some people but a few 3rd party add-ons no longer work.

In the pre-Christmas sales I picked up an F-15E Strike Eagle for FSX with fully simulated weapons, I haven’t got round to testing it yet but it looks like you can shoot down other aircraft 🙂

For proper combat simulation check out DCS World. The base pack is free and the included civilian P-51 Mustang is amazing – you will soon buy the military one to be able to attack tanks and dual it out with an FW-190.

As already noted this can become an expensive hobby and both FSX and X-Plane will see you develop an overclocking habit as they are CPU hogs and need fast processors. DCS world is a different beast and can run quite well on older hardware with a decent graphics card provided you have 4Gb RAM.

I haven’t read all the above replies but Denham main line station may be an option as it’s just off the M40/M25 and avoids all the traffic that builds up around Ickenham and Hillingdon. Mainline trains get in Marylebone in around 20 mins and then you can use the Jubilee line to Canary Wharf.