Mark77

500gb HDD, good lord, get rid of that, go with a SSD. Its practically criminal that Windows 10 will even allow itself to be installed on anything but a SSD.

Overclocking has been a waste of time since the days of the Pentium II.

With SSDs and a decent amount of RAM, still perfectly viable and capable machines. Only need much better than that if you're doing very specific tasks that peg out the CPU.

Games use incredibly little bandwidth. And the Marvell or Broadcom ethernet chips (which are usually installed when a vendor is too cheap to use Intel) really aren't all that bad CPU-wise.. I've pushed full saturation of gig-E speeds overall of them with relatively little CPU utilization.

I think the Dell Bluetooth 370 is a PCI-E card. In the miniPCI-E format, although there's plenty of adapters available to adapt such to full-size PCI-E. Tons of them on eBay for cheap, like $3-$5. Of course, if you go through the trouble to 'adapt' such a card to a full PCI-E slot, you may as well just do a combo miniPCI-E 802.11n (or 802.11ac) + BT 4.0 card anyways.

You'll probably have to provide us with a lot more information on your VPN client software. Its probably possible, but you might have to do some PowerShell stuff to make it work. Alternatively you could just bind your VPNs to something like pfsense, and bridge them right onto your network. Or expose them as separate VLANs within your network, to which you can create separate virtual access points.

Do you have access to more than 1 in Thailand? Perhaps if you obtain 2 independent ISP connections, you could build a load balancing tunnel between the Thailand and the Australian office that would give you higher effective bandwidth. That is, assuming that your two (Thailand) ISPs use independent paths. Doing multiple load balancing tunnels may be a good idea anyways to increase the number of packets that are contending for the same overseas connections. MPLS is most likely overkill. But I think you'd be better off, if you can, ditching that Cisco stuff and going with pfsense / OpenVPN for your VPN needs.

You'll want a CPU that supports AES-NI. I'd suggest something based on an Intel "Q" chipset, and a CPU that supports Intel AMT, so you can remote into the machine with VPro. Haswell is probably the sweet spot these days in terms of used gear. If you can live with a single Gig-E, then eBay is full of Lenovo M73's with Intel i5-4570T CPU's, Q87 chipset, and some RAM for $120-$150.

4x40gig-E or 2x100Gig-E networking gear is crazy $$$$ though to actually run into those limits...

Linus and friends: Please check this video out from Puget Systems: Basically sounds like what you're trying to do, albeit its on FreeNAS, not Windows Server. Isn't one of your big 48-drive rackmount video servers already running on FreeNAS? They seemed to come out with some pretty decent/impressive results overall, and that might be applicable to the sort of workloads that occur internally at LMG... Completely plug and play as well, no Linux/*BSD/Unix or Windows magic involved either...

Terrible advice. RAID-5 is slow and far less reliable. I have 4 drives in a RAID-10 in a 'far' configuration -- they're 150mb/sec drives each, and I'm able to read off of the array at 600mb/sec.

RAID-5 is basically obsolete. For your application, I suggest a software RAID-10. With 6 x 8gb drives, in RAID-10 "far", you should be able to almost saturate a 10gig-E connection with 24TB of space. 200mb/sec writes shouldn't be a problem with such setup. RAID-5 tends to be very slow with writes because it has to read back existing data, and then recalculate the parity, and then rewrite. Its also not very reliable at such large drive sizes.

So I have an Intel 330 240gb (Sandforce), and a Crucial 250gb MX200 drive. I've been using Bitlocker, which relies upon the in-drive routines for encryption on the MX200. The 330 is sitting on the shelf. The Intel doesn't have built-in encryption. Any encryption would be derived from the host executing routines. So basically the moral of the story is that I should probably convert the laptop to the Intel drive, right?

Most business-grade laptops have 2 slots. One for WLAN, ie: WiFi cards, and a second one for WWAN like those 4G cards. So it depends upon the machine you're using. Remember that a SIM card slot has to be available as well.

Of course, just like any other 4G device that you want to connect to a network.

Basically its a M.2 or miniPCI-E card that, attached to appropriate antennas in the laptop, allows your computer to get onto 4G (and perhaps even 3G) networks. You will need a SIM card from an appropriate carrier. I personally use the Sierra Wireless modules, rather than Huawei. Don't know if there's any differences in performance. The best modules implement LTE-DC, for potentially 200mbit/sec bandwidth on a supported network. The WWAN cards are installed in a separate slot, so there's still space for a WLAN board such as the Killer that you describe.

The giant mistake Microsoft made was keeping the Windows 95/98/ME kernel alive, instead of just transitioning everyone over to NT4 and beyond when they were able to do so early. I don't know if Ballmer was around when that was happening, but it seriously damaged Microsoft and its reputation. They had a Rockstar of a product in NT4, but they were still pushing that 95/98 crap.

I wouldn't use a single HDD these days. Always RAID-1 (or RAID-10) HDDs. Which means you'd need a pair. HGST > *.

I'd personally suggest getting one of the Latitudes, not the XPS, for school. The Latitude line are true business-class qualify notebooks. The XPS is more aimed at 'consumers', and accordingly, has a lower warranty period, less availability of parts, etc.

If you're accustomed to a T61 and that quality of build, going to an Inspiron will be a real let-down. Look at the Dell and Lenovo outlets for a Latitude E-series or a Lenovo T-Series.

What about the spyware like Chrome?

A 1080ti basically will consume your entire budget, but probably wouldn't be worth plugging into your existing board. So it'll have to be something less than that. If we assume you need $200 for a brand new 1050Ti, assuming that's acceptable, then you're left with $500 to spend. Figure another $200 for cheap screens. So $300. For $300, probably your best bet would be to find a Haswell or Ivy Bridge machine off of eBay with an i5 or i7. I see a few examples for $300 or so w/128gb SSD, 8gb of RAM. Doubt you could come anywhere near that even assembling your own parts off of eBay cost-wise.

Enabling virtualization allows newer builds of Windows 10 to more effectively isolate processes, and hence, hypothetically increases the security and stability of the machine. Its not just about running VMs anymore. The newest Windows kernels use the features to provide memory protection to even ordinary uses running ordinary processes.

I'm not specifically familiar with the Sonys, but I know with the Dells, when they are retrofitted with quad core CPU's, the higher spec power supplies (ie: 90W and higher) become mandatory and the firmware will throttle them to avoid power-supply-induced instability when use is attempted with a PSU that cannot be verified as having a high enough rating. So you'd probably want to research whether that's the case for specifically for the Sonys, and acquire a higher rated power supply adapter accordingly.

HDD in a laptop? This isn't 2008 dude. SSD has pretty much been mandatory for years now. Hit up a site like Dellrefurbished, find a off-lease or open box business laptop. You might have to do with 8gb of RAM until the ridiculous prices come down to Earth. But you should be able to get something very nice for $500-$600. There's coupons on Twitter often for dellrefurbished. I wouldn't obsess over getting a true quad core or not, compared to, say, a hyperthreaded dual core. CPU power really isn't a big deal for a laptop -- energy efficiency is. If buying a Dell, do your best to get one with the proprietary docking connector on the bottom, and go onto eBay and pick up an E-Dock for $30, and hook that to your external monitors/printer/ethernet/USB devices. So you don't wear your ports out. Oh yeah, make sure you get at least a 1080p screen -- that pretty much guarantees an IPS panel with most Business class Dell machines. And pick up, on eBay, Amazon, etc., a second *genuine* Dell power adapter. Not a knock-off.