Oh, and while Windows may not have broken the kernal/graphics links – they sure as hell break lots of other things. Every time I look at theregister there’s another story of a Patch Tuesday disaster.

That serves anyone right for not properly testing – regardless of OS 🙂

I had to deal with one client’s SQL Servers which were in a right state. This was strange because I knew their Oracle systems on RHEL were well managed. It turns out that all they needed to do was start treating their MS estate with the same operational & security procedures as their *nix estate and the problems would never have happened.

This guide worked for me in a round about manner;

How to install the latest Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr

I had similar problems with Ubuntu freezing up at login. After getting myself into a terminal and purging the offending driver I had downloaded I then reinstalled from a trusted repository. I still managed to get into a whole package dependency nightmare on another Ubuntu install with AMD propriety drivers. I nuked that one and just used the Mesa OSS drivers after that which worked well enough for my needs.

I agree with retro83, Windows is technically more mature in many areas and often worth using unless your politics dictate that ‘free software’ is a must – fortunately work is all SQL Server and .Net so few Linux shenanigans there 🙂

Are they still allowed to provide health based information? I think in the states at least they can only do ancestry stuff. I looked into it a while ago and the really interesting information (pinpointing a country/region rather than Europe) only came at a far higher cost.

I’d like to find out why eastern Europeans always assume I am German!

BaronVonP7 – I think you are referring to the developer edition of SQL Server. It costs around £50 and does not expire. The evaluation versions are free and time limited to 180 days use I think, but are fine for labs use.

It’s a real shame they got rid of tech-net.

I wouldn’t bother with buying VMware Workstation, in your shoes I would build a machine around an AMD FX 8 core with 16GB RAM (32GB if you have the cash) and then Windows 8.1 Pro or Enterprise Editions. These editions come with Hyper-V 3 which IMO works really well.

If you are not up for forking out on a full windows licence you could use the free bare metal Hyper-V install and then evaluation versions of Windows server.

VMware also offer a free bare metal hyper-visor and there is also KVM/QEMU for Linux – Proxmox is definitely worth a look if that’s your bag and you shouldn’t have issues running windows VM’s on it.

As already stated when running VM’s it is usually RAM and Storage IOP’s that are the limiting factors rather than CPU power. I recommended the AMD CPU because its cheaper than Intel and all 970 and 990 motherboards fully support the processor virtualisation instruction sets. Most ASUS boards can also support unbuffered ECC memory too. All of this can be a little bit hit and miss with some Intel boards, especially those usually aimed at gamers and ECC memory requires more expensive boards and Xeon (or bizarrely i3) processors.

Good luck with SQL Server, it doesn’t have as many configuration options as Oracle and its default concurrency model may seem odd at first but you will find it far simpler to deploy in clustered environments, although there is no direct equivalent of Oracle RAC.

Yes, it’s an i5-3210m which is two physical cores with hyper-threading, 2.5GHz base clock and 3.1 GHz turbo. I sold my i7 model for more than I paid for it (the RAM in that little monster got upgraded to 16GB). The 2012 minis are great little machines.

So I’ll go for Rick Dangerous instead.

Its not quite the same but go and look up Spelunky – it can be very frustrating the way R. Dangerous was with the disadvantage that you can’t actually learn the level maps (they regenerate).

OP – hope you don’t mind I will send you an email regarding:

link to ad

See if you can get odds from the local bookies on the ship sinking.

I better step on it with the swimming lessons too!

*I say relationship because the character in the dream may not necessarily represent the child’s mother, but rather a collection of beliefs that combine to become ‘mother’ in his interaction with the world.

Well, he recently said goodbye to nappies for good – fits the Frozen time frame too. Not even pull-ups at night time, maybe that’s what it is 🙂

I’m not worried, it all started when his sister got given Frozen on DVD and watches it at least twice a week – the girls in it get orphaned when their parents ship sinks at sea.

When I was about his age I used to have nightmares about hands coming out of the ground and pulling me down, that one still horrifies me!

Are any universities looking into cloud computing yet, i.e. AWS or Azure?

Rather than having to buy lot’s of extremely powerful workstations or servers there must be a cost benefit to pay-as-you-go cloud computing? Switching off the cloud servers when not in use, and whacking in more CPU/Memory when you need it sounds useful for the kinds of usage patterns that have been discussed on this thread?

It’s easy to see why cloud computing is catching on in companies where operational expenditure is fine but capital expense avoided – even if its not actually that much cheaper in the long run. Would that extend to education?

Another World, that was artistic 🙂

The Intel HD 3000 graphics in the Lenovo meets the minimum requirements for war-craft. I have no idea if they are better than what she currently has.

Quite a few on the forum have been quite pleased (my Mrs included) with the refurb Lenovo laptops scan has been selling:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/141-lenovo-4180a32-b-intel-core-i5-2520m-25ghz-8gb-320gb-hdd-dvdrw-bluetooth-windows-7-professional-

It’s no where near as powerful as my desktop PC’s but with an i5 processor and 8GB of RAM its no slouch for most tasks and can handle many older 3D games. What games is she playing?

OOH STEAM SALE!

*Downloads Mirror’s Edge and Bioshock Infinite*

I just got all three BioShocks for less than £7. Now to find some spare time…

• C*: Supports four (4) modules inserted into the orange slots (A1, B1 and C1) and the black slot A2 as one set of Triple-channel memory configuration

If you find a 16GB set of 4x 4GB sticks it sounds like you could use them all as Triple Channel 😀

I was thinking to keep the 3×2 already in 3 of the channels then add 2×4 that would operate as dual channel. The 6gb that I have at the moment isn’t enough these days it is definitely a bottleneck.

I don’t think that would work, safest approach would be to buy 3 x 4GB sticks which match the speed of the ones you already have (same vendor and latencies would be best). Then you should get 18GB; if the new and old memory are incompatible with each other (sometime happens) you will still have 12GB and you can sell your old memory.

Today is a good day to look for RAM. If you are lucky you might find a deal on a 4 x 4GB set that is cheaper than buying 3 x 4GB sticks separately.

On this subject anyone know where to get some cheap triple channel RAM? Why does this stuff cost the same amount now as it did 4 years ago?

If you need triple channel you just buy the sticks in threes. What you really need to know is it;

DDR3?
Speed?
ECC?
Unbuffered or buffered?

Workstations like my Z800 need DDR3 at 1333MHz buffered ECC. This can be found fairly cheap on ebay thanks to the number of servers and workstations being decommissioned were originally purchased between 2009-2011.

After reading up on overclocking socket 13636 Xeons I’m almost tempted to start another project since I don’t rarely use both CPU’s and all 48GB in my workstation – but I occasionally do so, no, none of you can have it 🙂

Reviewing results in Geekbench 3 an X5650 overclocked to 4GHz is faster in most tasks than an FX8320 at 4GHz but not massively so. Left at default speeds they are fairly similar.

I think I got that a bit wrong, you would need to overclock an AMD FX higher to match the multi-threaded score of an X56xx at 4GHz.

Oh, and sorry I’ve just checked, no spare desktop RAM, just a couple of laptop sticks. I did find a spare GTX 660Ti 2GB graphics card, a 2012 Mac Mini and spare 120GB SSD drive that I should have sold a few months back all gathering dust 😳

Also, what is the clockspeed of the two newer chips you mention? Because If I can get 4GHZ+ then I suspect I’ll be feeling pretty snappy then, too.

The i5-4570 is 3.2Ghz with a 3.6Ghz turbo. The i7-2600 is 3.4GHz with a 3.8Ghz turbo.

Take a look at my Geekbench 3 profile and sort by multi-core score, you’ll find results for most of my machines in there; Geekbench 3 Browser Link

You can probably set apps that you buy from the window store to automatically download to any PC you log into but the apps would still need to update their binaries separately – it would likely just do it in the background like Office installed under O365 seems to.

I haven’t bought any desktop apps from the store so I can’t actually confirm that.

From personal experience I have found the OneDrive documents sync between multiple machines to be flakey at the best of times – Dropbox has been far more reliable.

You might be able to get the X5650 running smoothly at 4GHz but you would need a decent cooler and you wouldn’t know the history of the 2nd hand chip.

If you can stretch your budget of £200 slightly you could just about buy a brand new AMD FX8320 with a motherboard and cooler suitible for overclocking with some fast DDR3 RAM.

I used to have an FX8320 and it happily overclocked to 4 GHz without touching the core voltage on a motherboard with 8+2 Phases like the one listed:

Motherboard bundle

Reviewing results in Geekbench 3 an X5650 overclocked to 4GHz is faster in most tasks than an FX8320 at 4GHz but not massively so. Left at default speeds they are fairly similar.

Win 8.1 user syncing with a MS account and using Onedrive will work up to a point for your user files/documents. Unfortunately you will have to live with the installed applications needing to be updated on both machines – even if you placed the app binaries in a folder that was synced there would be no way to easily guarantee that required registry updates would be made to both machines.

If you can access the desktop remotely from the laptop then you leave some applications just installed there.

BEB – just curious, like, but have you tried building a PC with one of the X56– series and a domestic motherboard?

Not yet, it would only be worth doing if it overclocked well else an AMD FX would yield a better performance/price ratio. These are the forums you need to look at:

Overclocking x56XX

X5650 on X58

Unfortunately I can’t overclock my X5650’s but I can tell you that a quad core Sandybridge i7-2600 is better for everyday usage thanks to its higher IPC ratio and a haswell i5-4570 feels like lightning. (I have N+1 on computers as well as bikes) Just be careful you don’t get so sucked in to overclocking an old chip that you should have just bought a new CPU and Motherboard!

This one should be compatible with your your board; I use two in my z800 workstation.

X5650 on ebay for £65

If you can’t get what you need and have to get a cheap rendering rig running look for an 8 core AMD FX in the sales over the weekend. Many of the ASUS boards can even use unbuffered ECC memory if you need the extra stability.

The story of the man-made Black Knight is far more interesting;

Black Knight

I thought this was funnier:

Falklands Cartoon

disco_stu,

If I was building a budget PC I would look at the K series Pentium. It may only have 2 cores but offers more than twice the single thread performance of your athlon and can also be clocked to over 4Ghz (at which point it will completely blow your Athlon out of the water).

Remember it would also be on a new motherboard with faster RAM, a faster graphics card and likely disks. You would also benefit from USB 3 etc.

Pentium K series

EDIT: It also has integrated graphics so you can save on a new card if you are not into serious gaming.

BEB, that last sentence sort of suggests that you don’t think Buckingham would be all that nice a place to live?

Sorry, I wasn’t saying it was bad, just that some of the smaller towns and villages near by seem really nice so have a good look around the wider area. I quite like some of the places off the A413 between Aylesbury and Buckingham, some great views and village pubs 🙂

There is off road riding not far away in the Chilterns, Aston Hill, and Chicksands and there are cycling clubs in the area. Cycling from your door around Buckingham is ok on the road bike but a bit sparse for decent off road.

I don’t think house prices are too expensive compared to places nearer London and whilst Buckingham doesn’t have a train station you can get into London and Birmingham from MK, Bicester or Aylesbury which all have more shops, cinemas etc. Oxford also isn’t too far away.

You might prefer finding a nice house in a village around Buckingham rather than living there or in one of the other near by towns.

The acid test is how many Mac converts ever think it was a bad idea and go back to Windows. Anyone here done this out of choice? Most PC fanboys I know have never even used a Mac and so are not in any position to compare them. I reckon most (not all obviously) people who regularly use both systems prefer both the Mac OS and hardware. I certainly do.

I spend far more time on my Windows machines than I do on my Macs (yes, plural for both, its like n+1 for bikes)

Main reasons are:

1. Hyper-V on Windows 8.1 is much better than any virtualisation software available on OSX
2. Windows does gaming so much better than OSX. Nvidia’s drivers for OSX are pants, OSX is a PITA to configure games controllers properly with (flight sim, driving sim, and even an xbox controller), any games that do get ported to OSX rarely run as well as their Windows counterparts.
3. I work with Visual Studio, SQL Server and Powershell, if OSX is on my main machine I need a solid hyper visor – see point 1.

I don’t really care for the prettiness, IMHO opinion there isn’t much in it. OSX certainly hides things away from an end user a little better, but thats not something that matters to me 😀

Meh, I think it depends on the industry you work in if you see it as a problem or not. I know of plenty of people who believe their wages are not going up because of cheap immigrant labour. The fact that their wages might not be going up due to other factors does not get in the way of a tabloid headline or populist politicians.

In my line of work its not a problem and beneficial – we send consultants to the continent and free movement of people without concern about work visas means more business for us – its a two way street.

Not sure if it exactly matches your requirements but I like the look of these:

Oxford Bike Works

I think they do custom builds so might be worth a call and a chat?

Supersonic travel is fascinating stuff. It really feels like we have gone backwards but the challenges of keeping 200 people alive at Mach 2 are expensive to solve. I’ve been told that we’ll likely see supersonic private jets appear in the near future and airbus are now working with a small american firm to help them do just that: Airbus/Aerion

Interestingly a lot of the modern climate concern was kicked off by the research that went into answering the questions about what would happen if there were several hundred supersonic liners flying at 60,000ft. I can’t imagine that Greenpeace et al will be happy with the prospect of the rich and famous polluting the upper atmosphere but I bet Al Gore will be one of the first to use a supersonic bizjet 🙄

All decent PC graphics cards come with Display Port or Dual Link DVI-D needed to run higher resolutions (above 1920 x 1200) and/or higher refresh rates (100 Hz +).

You’re not wrong about HDMI, it was designed with HDTV’s in mind and isn’t recommended if you are doing anything where graphics/colours matter. It can send a RGB signal rather than composites but it doesn’t have the bandwidth of Display Port or Dual Link DVI-D so best avoided.

Just flicking back through the Hackintosh guides remind me why its not worth bothering with – you finally get OSX up and running and then you change hardware or Apple release an update and you are back to square 1.

If you are considering it, do it as a hobby. If you need a machine for work stick with Linux or Windows on a PC and buy an Apple if you need OSX 🙂

Ok, I’m learning now, so way can’t you sell a Mac clone if it’s just based around UEFI compatible bits?

Well you can, but I wouldn’t give it very long before the letters threatening legal action appeared if you included a copy of OSX ‘hacked’ to run on non apple hardware.

– OSX does a check to see what hardware it is being installed on, if its not official apple the install will not proceed, if you stick a mac HDD in a PC it will refuse to boot all the way. To get it to run a couple of files have to be ‘modified’.

Apple don’t permit OSX to run on non-mac hardware but you can do it:Hackintosh guide[/url]

Macs don’t have a BIOS exactly the same as a Windows PC as most of you are thinking of, they use a UEFI. If you are considering building a hackintosh you select components like an ASUS motherboard that has a UEFI and a UEFI enabled graphics cards. Windows 8 can also boot from UEFI so its slowly pushing out the BIOS of old.

As far as windows drivers causing crashes you are either thinking of the bad old days or are too keen and installing uncertified crap onto your systems. Even if you do the Windows kernel will no longer allow an unsigned driver to take down the whole system. I haven’t seen a BSOD due to a driver issue since switching from XP to Vista. Since then I’ve had more Kernel panics on OSX than I have seen BSOD on Windows machines, and the ones I have seen have been down to faulty or incorrectly inserted RAM chips.

The argument that macs last longer than PC’s is an almost pointless, good quality PC hardware lasts just as long, cheap hardware does not – you pay your money…

Even arguing that Windows needs more maintenance is a subjective argument. I frequently come across very busy and important servers that were racked up 8-10 years ago running Windows Server 2003 (in effect XP). Sometimes I struggle to persuade IT managers they should be replaced – they are running their country wide point-of-sale system on something with less processing grunt than a modern smartphone on an out of support OS but their view is ‘it just works’.

Anyway back to the OP. Your machine is 4 years old and in effect a good desktop not a proper workstation. For a machine I earn money with I would invest in some new hardware, even after a fresh Windows 7 install and more memory a modern workstation (Mac or PC) would offer a lot more graphics and CPU grunt.

If you want to dabble with a Mac to start off with, look for a 2012 Mac Mini with a core i7 CPU. Those things are great, two drive bays and up to 16GB of RAM with a powerful 4 core/8 thread CPU.