CtrlAltELITE

Ah, didn't realise you even got 15.6" laptops without a numpad, but yeah, I need a numpad

Hey folks As per title, unfortunately looking for a new laptop as my 6 year old Gigabyte has finally give up as the board soldered DC in will no longer function. In the replacement I'm looking for: -Rtx 3070, really wanting the upcoming gen, prepared to wait a month or so for the spring releases -AMD Ryzen preferred -15.6" preferred simply as it will fit in my current bags ~1tb of SSD, no HDD req. -£1500ish budget (~us$1500 when you factor in our taxes & market) -Not too fussed about monitor, keyboard & battery, it'll be plugged in at a desk most of the time Really looking for thick & heavy over thin & light, will be used between my home desk & work desk for prolonged periods so have no real need for portability, in fact a itx build with a carry handle is something I was also considering but I think it'd be too much faff. Usage case will be engineering heavy compute tasks (single core intensive but often GPU accelerated flow simulations) and light gaming, so not wanting something that will throttle like my current laptop if sat at full load for a few hours. So far I've been looking at the new Dell G15 being released this month, and the thick xmg, although they seem to be up in the air as to when the 3000 chips are coming. Like the idea of the dell as its something of a household name here.

Envelope full of glitter, on the way.

Yeah, I'd much rather run something that is natively supported over an adapter though.

Hey folks I have an Intel AC7260 in my laptop which is giving up the goose (same problem as this guy https://forums.intel.com/s/question/0D50P0000490S66SAE/intel-dual-band-ac-7260-continually-losing-network-connection?language=en_US) have been looking for a replacement card, ideally I'd like to go for something different as I have had nothing but problems with this 7260 over the ~4 years I've had this laptop, Intel has also dropped support for the card as it is long discontinued. However I am finding that most manufacturers don't currently have any mPCIe cards on the market. I am wondering if you folks can suggest anything that is still about? Or would a mPCIe to M.2 adaptor be my only option? Thanks CAElite

Hey folks As per title, looking for a phone for my mum, historically she has always had peoples hand-me-downs, she likes flip phones, recently she has been lumped with family members ancient iPhones. I bought her one of the new release Nokia 3310s when they first came out, but she said she just couldn't get used to number pad texting again, but other than that the phone was perfect for her. Just wondering if anyone knows of anything decent on the market with feature phone simplicity, but a touch screen for the keyboard. She doesn't use apps, she doesn't have a 3G connection, nor does she even bother connecting her iPhones to wifi. I have toyed with picking her up a Nokia 1 or other Android Go based phone, but to be honest, would rather aim for something even simpler than that if available as she really doesn't use any apps. Any suggestions welcome Ctrl.

Ah well, I figured, since you get mice optimised for FPS/MMO you might get gamepads optimised for FPS/Racing, as there are loads of features that would make a pad better in racing, but a pain to use in FPS (like really long travel analogue buttons)

Hey folks As per the title, does such a thing exist? I am a fairly massive racing/sim fan, I own a wheel (Logitech G25) and use it often. However more often than not I like just lying in bed, casting my game to the TV & playing an arcade racer with my gamepad. The old Thrustmaster GPX I have has finally packed in & my Nvidia Shield controller doesn't work on Forza so I am needing to pick myself up a new one. I pretty much exclusively play racing games with my pad, shooters/MMOs I tend to use mouse + keyboard. I am just wondering if there are any gamepads about with racing optimised features? Long travel triggers & left stick would be nice, maybe analogue stick inputs too for use for binding to a clutch.

Hey folks Been having really strange issues with my wireless adapter on my laptop. The symptoms of which I am struggling to explain. Generally 2 things are happening. 1. The wifi will just stop, my open wifi list will empty, windows says I am still connected but no internet. If I try to disable/reset the wireless adapter the menu will hang for ages, even stranger if I try to restart the PC it will hang during the shutdown menu, looping seemingly forever. The only way I have found to resolve the issue is a hard reset holding the power button, or by allowing windows diag tool to reset the adapter, however the tool can take 2-5minutes to do so. 2. The laptop will lag, the sound will jump like it where about to BSOD, it'll do this, and like the other issue the wifi list will empty, however the stuttering will stop & the windows will correctly report that there is a problem with connectivity, I can reset the adapter fine when it does this, or use windows diag tool to reset. I have a diagnostic log from the windows diag tool of instance 2, however it appears to have stopped doing instance 1. The problem has been recurring once or twice a day for the last couple of months, but as of yesterday is now happening every 2-30minutes. I have tested the laptop on different routers & the problem persists. I have updated the driver for my wireless card (Intel AC 7260). But really do not have any ideas what could be causing the issue. I am on windows 10, the wireless card is an Intel AC7260, the laptop is a Gigabyte P35Xv4. I have included the diagnostic log from the windows diag tool on the network adapter below, as well as a DxDiag of my system. Net Issues.txt DxDiag.txt

I would love to see a comparison of the 2019 prosumer ultrabooks. I know Linus uses a Razer Blade Stealth as his daily driver so I imagine this is a topic where he could offer a great comparison for. The current competition that I know of would be, the Blade Stealth, Dell XPS 13, HP Spectre 13, Lenovo Thinkpad X1 & Macbook pro. I know it is a hell of a list, but I think they would be great to compare, all come with fairly high end intel low power chips (plus the Blades discrete GPU), thunderbolt 3 & CNC machined Aluminium chassis (with the exception of the Lenovo with a Carbon fibre design). No current large comparisons exist on the market for many of these laptops, It would also be great to see an LTT performance comparison when hooked up to eGPU via thunderbolt for video editing, CAD and even gaming workloads. Particularly with the 2019 Blades price bump I also wonder if one of the compared systems could unseat it as Linus' daily drive machine.

Don't want a mac, also the 4 core versions are extortionate. XPS 13 only has thunderbolt x2, so not great for eGPUs That Clevo, I never actually realised that existed, the UK Clevo resellers only sell down to the 14" model, that being said, having a 2.5" bay instead of a bigger battery in an ultrabook is pretty old hat. Is having a specifically designed dock beneficial, or does any eGPU dock work with any thunderbolt laptop? Toying with a blade stealth and maybe a Gigabyte Aorus, or HP Accelerator

Hey folks As the title implies, really like the idea of a small ultrabook, but with a docking station with desktop GPU + I/O ports. I am wondering what other solutions are out their other than the Razer Blade stealth & Razer core. I am looking at those, but the wierd core lineup and price are somewhat off putting. I know Alienware offer a propriatary solution in their Graphics accelerator, but none of their compatible laptops could exactly be described as an ultrabook (the 13 is about the same size most 15" laptops, and comes with its own discrete GPU). Are their any other dock & ultrabook combos out yet? Ideally with a laptop that'd fit in a small 13" laptop bag (which seem to be modeled after Macbook 13 & XPS sized laptops) with a rough dimension under 31x22x3cm. The laptop would seldom be used for much more than office work, watching movies & light CAD when out of the dock.

Well, on an unrelated note. Might be new laptop time. Thought I'd just pop the back off to see what sized thermal pads I'd need, and to check if my heatsink was copper. Aaand 2 of the heatsink screws are completely rounded off. Not quite sure how I go about this, all the screws are attached to the heatsink by a small screw, I am most definitely going to break something if I try to drill these out. EDIT: Managed to get them out, used my smallest slot drill to take a bit of material off the head of the screw, then managed to ease it off with a flathead. Little bit of metal swarf never hurt anyone.

Yes, dust it every 6 months or so. Sorry if I phrased what I said badly, my query was; when I first got the laptop I ran a -64mV undervolt stably. Now it will only take -55mV before instability sets in. Can high temps coupled with undervolt reduce stability? Or could this be a symptom of component fatigue.

Hey folks Looking for some opinions on this. Have had my current laptop just over 3 years. At a good age where I could reasonably replace it without feeling like I'm throwing money away. Thing is though it serves me fine for my current purposes and the games I play. However it has been running really hot, a few months after I bought it I replaced the stock thermal compound with Noctua NH1. This made a noticable difference to the level that it thermal throttles, even brought gaming CPU temperatures down into the 80s. However in recent months I have noticed temps going up again, and occasional BSODs have actually led to me reducing the degree of my CPU undervolt. (was at -63mv stable, now down to -55mv). Under gaming load CPU temps are sitting well in the 90s, GPU in the 80s. Laptop itself has 10500 power on hours. Laptop gets dusted every 6 months or so, although to be honest I have never seen a big problem in it with dust buildup. So, I have a couple of questions 1. I know I am reaching the EoL of the Noctua thermal paste (3 years), I am assuming this is causing the increase in temps, is it reasonable to see decrease in cooling at this age? 2. Would high temperatures effect the components ability to be undervolt, or could this be a sign of fatigue from use? 3. I am tempted to experiment with a liquid metal paste, if I kill the laptop at the age it is at it would be less painful than a brand new PCB, but are you likely to see a increase in cooling efficiency in a slim laptop cooler? (a difference which looks like between 12.5W/mk and 73W/mk, between cermic and liquid metal compounds, looks dramatic on paper) 4. As per the last question, does anyone know if laptop coolers tend to be aluminium or copper? Don't want to take the lot a part to find I can't use the aforementioned coolant.

Hey Guys So I find myself looking for a NAS, for the last 2 years my home media solution has been a RPi3 hooked up to a 2TB Hitachi 7k3000 on a USB drive caddy, this being used in a NAS configuration mounted to my TVs Nvidia Shield hosting and encoding plex. So far I have been happy with the performance of this extremely cheap method, the RPi also hosts a mail server and only begins to bottleneck when I am trying to maximise network throughput through it, I believe this is a consequence of its USB sharing the bus with its ethernet connection. However I have now ran into the issue that 2TB is simply not enough storage. I would like to expand to 6-8TB. I was about ready to hit the buy button on the new Synology 418j, which I believe would serve my purposes ideally with a rack of 4 2TB drives in raid 5. However the price of nearly £300GBP is really rubbing me the wrong way, I was also strongly considering a Synology 218j with the same internals but only 2 4TB drives offering less redundancy but cheaper storage. I was deliberating between these 2 devices when I find this: https://www.ebuyer.com/796583-hpe-proliant-gen10-873830-421-entry-opteron-x3216-1-6ghz-8gb-ram-microserver-873830-421 and this https://www.ebuyer.com/770312-lenovo-thinkserver-ts150-70lv-pentium-g4400-3-3-ghz-8gb-ram-4u-tower-70lv003eea Small servers, offering slots for 3 or 4 drives in raid, with full x86 CPU functionality, allowing for more wider range of hosting options. I will admit, I was fairly sold on the ARM based Synology systems, my own mail and file server I host via my RPi would work ideally on them and really doesn't require more power. However I can't see past the fact that for the same price, or even less, I can have a 'real' server with modern, energy efficient hardware and the option to occasionally host, literally anything I want within the limitations of the processor, as well as having the option of expansion with things like SSD caching. My question is; whats the downside? I am really struggling to see it, I imagine the power differential will be there, but the opteron based HP had a TDP of 12-15w, I can't imagine the power consumption would be THAT much higher than the synologies quoted 9-21w. Even if say there was a 20w difference in power consumption, That would cost me a total of £2.50/month, hardly the end of the world. So, is there a downside I am overlooking for going for a full x86 small server platform with FreeNAS or Win Server, over a purpose built low power NAS?

Shit I miss this thing actually... the good old days.

So... yeah this might be a wierd query. Was clearing out a cupboard the other day, and in it was my first ever phone, a rather beaten up Phillips C12, no charger but the battery is in it. Anywho, obviously in the ~15 years it has been sitting in a box the battery is flat, and likely completely dead. I haven't torn down the pack yet but it feels like the old 'cells in bag' style battery, so may be able to just make another one using cells & the existing contacts. (3.6V, 700mAh, Ni-MH). With it being nickle metal hydride I can assume it is completely shot by now. Have actually looked online for a charger but there are none floating about, would it be possible to butcher a USB or other lead to give a charge? Or would charging a 3.6V battery with a 5V USB result in a rather spectacular fire? Finally, with the phone being designed for BT Cellnet, would it even be possible to use the phone if I was able to power it up? I can't seem to find any information regarding what bands they operate on, I believe it is new enough (late 90s) to be GSM? Any advice would be welcome, no real reason for putting this much effort in for an old brick, I just think it would be hilarious to whip it out and call someone with it in a social setting.

Ugh, my mums chromebook has been acting 'wierd' for the last week or so. I bet she's managed to get something like this on it, specifically bought her that thing because it seemed like it would be hard to break.

Cheers guys. So I threw together a dual 580 build on pcpartpicker. From what I've read these are the best bang4buck card as they have around the same power but for 2/3rds of the price. That Etherium calculator was a great link thanks for the resource. So about £800 for a basic rig (Ryzen 3, low end motherboard, 2xsaphire 580s) would return $4.27/day at 52MH/s so about £3.30/day. Could probably overclock them, one of the bonus's of living in a frozen wasteland of northern Scotland is my workshop is <10C for the majority of the year so reasonable overclocking gains should be achievable but it's likely to just be splitting hairs at this point. Income equals close enough to £100/month so a ~12% monthly return, which is actually a reasonable amount, it'd pay a good portion of what I pay for that whole shop. Most of the encoding I do is CPU based so it'd be able to to do that at the same time, would mean I don't need to leave my laptop on 24/7 trying to turn my movie collection from divx/avc to hevc. As for the value of cryptos, I have already have eye watering amounts invested in BTC, if they go tits up I'd have more than a £800 PC to worry about. Although the continuity of the mining value is important to me, I assume as they become more difficult to mine the values will increase somewhat to compensate? Or would that be wishful thinking as I do notice the return on BTC mining appears to be tiny.

Hey guys Wondering if there is any good recent guides to all the ones I have came up with online are very dated back from '10-'13 when BTC was just taking off. I rent a small workshop and pay a flat rate electricity cost, there is a fair usage level but I could very easily leave single ~300-700w mining system running 24/7 without it costing me anything so it seems like I am leaving money on the table by not doing it, I know the basics but really would want some advice before I put money down, my biggest points of contention are: 1. What is a realistic setup cost within the UK for a basic miner, which can also double as an encoding, rendering or facebook rig on the odd occasion 2. Is there a high network throughput from mining? I have 5gb/month mobile dongle for use on that property, it is neither fast nor plentiful. It could be increased up to about 50gb but costs are around an £1/GB 3. What is a realistic % investment return on the components without factoring in the energy costs, which I pay for anyway. Any advice welcome thanks

My rig circa ~08 I kicked the front of it fumbling about in the dark, hurt like a bitch and snapped all the clips on the front of my cheap NZXT case, so when you looked at it funny the front would come off. I think it sat like that for about 4 years. Had a hardrive precariously balancing on top of a case with an SSD hanging off it on the rig I built after that one, mainly because a drive caddy didn't fit around my radiator I think it sat like that for the best part of a year, the HDD did in fact fall off the top of the case on more than one occasion... it's still running to this day ~6 years later in a family members PC. I'm an engineer so it's ok. Trust me.

Right, fixed the image, Title page, content page and our BS/ISO kites page at the end still technically have page numbers on them but the pages in the bulk of the procedures manual are all correct since I appear to have somehow got the page break to work. I am implementing an engineering solution, I've sent the document to the copier, I am in the process of tipexing the page number, Serial code and header off of the 3 pages where it is not needed, I will then copy the document back in using the scanner and distribute it as a pdf. It's not like any of our apprentices are going to read the bloody thing anyway.

On a second note. WHY THE FUCK DO IMAGES BREAK EVERYTHING TOO!!!!! I have one which decides to move itself above the page title every time I save the document. I'm on OO 4. The version of MS word on this office PC is ancient

Seriously Open Office Writer, MS Word, the apple one. Why the [redacted] are they all so [redacted] awful the moment you need to format something in a specific way, I've spent my whole day writing up operational reports and seriously it seems to be the simple things that are made SO NEEDLESSLY [redacted] COMPLICATED, tried first in Open Office, now in MS Word. My intention? To add my company header and a footer with a page number and a serial code, this header/footer must not encompass the cover & index page, page 1 starts at page 3 in the document and ends at page 18 (out of 19) The Problem? Formatting word documents is [redacted], seriously I could've manually added in text in a footer box for each page with the amount of time I spent fannying about with formating pages to specific specification, whenever I try to add a page break it makes a blank page, sometimes in some irrelevent place in the document, when I try to change the formatting style of a page it seems to want to change HALF the document to that style, but when I change the erroniously changed pages back it changes other pages. Is this a new puzzle concept? Does MS think I am trying to play some form of game? Seriously its like a [redacted] elder scrolls wall puzzle. Pro-tip. If you ever happen to be a dept. head of a company looking to sign up to some form of quality management standard (ISO9001 in our case), just hand in your notice there and then, it's not worth whatever they are paying you. I swear to god if I this [redacted] doesn't start working within the next 20 minutes I am hand writing all of our operational procedures manuals. It seriously would be easier. /vent