Mark77

Most student types should just get a business Dell (ie: Latitude) and call it a day.  Cheaper, great build quality, easy to find replacement parts, onsite warranties, etc.

Same 'problems' with the Alienwares, so don't anyone be thinkin that I'm just shillin for Dell.  The last thing a student needs is a laptop that's not perfectly reliable, maintainable, and has a relatively poor life cycle.

You're copying 12,000 files or so (I can't read that number for sure, but it was 11,xxx).  Lots of seeking is perfectly normal.  A defrag might help matters if you want to speed it up.  But other than that, I don't hear any noises that are abnormal on that recording.  Yeah, check the SMART data using smartctl/smartmontools or CrystalDiskInfo, but those noises are perfectly normal 'seeking' noises associated with copying large numbers of small files.

If its a truly serious matter, with your sister providing clear guidance to the serviceman that the communication is unwanted, you'll want to get ahold of the Military Police at your nearest DoD installation.  They will investigate based on the UCMJ, and lay charges (criminal, disciplinary, or otherwise) if warranted, for whatever offenses they believe the member has committed.  Other than that, the public has no access otherwise.

The recruiting station will do the same -- just refer you to the nearest Military Police presence to make a complaint.

33 minutes ago, H0R53 said:

I have a Dell Latitude D620. and seeing as the T7400 is compatible with it and the latitude already has 4GB of RAM and just needs a new battery, I'm gonna pull the T7400 out of her mac and put it into my Dell. it already has a T2300, so the 7400 will help. I may or may not put Hackintosh on it, she's used Windows before. I just wanted to see if her Mac would even be worth upgrading at this point.

"Worth" is highly subjective.  A SSD and more RAM will probably make the machine lightening fast compared to what it was like.  Still quite usable for web browsing, word processing, etc. 

Don't know about the D620, but my D630/D830 laptops are nearly a decade old and still going strong.  I really only upgraded because 4gb wasn't enough! 

3 hours ago, H0R53 said:

She's got the C2D T7400 model in hers.

Oh.  If that's the case, then there likely isn't much of an upgrade path, at all.  The T7100/T7300/T7500/T7700's can usually be upgraded to the T9300/T9500, but the T7200/T7400/T7600's don't have a similar path because they're one generation older. 

Put a caching DNS server on your gateway.  Replace the hosts file of the caching DNS server with a host files that inhibits DNS lookups of the ad-serving websites.  Have your DHCP server 'point' to the caching DNS server by default.

Problem solved for every device on your network!

Good riddance to those who are ruining the Internet with their ads.

I never saw much point on 'consumer' machines, but in the enterprise for for industrial applications, multiple interfaces are very useful for redundancy purposes.  And in some cases, for additional bandwidth, although people needing that capability really ought to be upgrading to 10gig-E.

3 minutes ago, BluJay614 said:

Even upgrading the RAM is kinda sketchy at times being as sometimes it is soldered on.

Pretty sure Apple didn't do that back then.   The Nvidia GPU's on laptops of that era are highly prone to failing though due to a known design defect.

If you can find the processor number, it is sometimes possible to upgrade laptops of that era to T9300 or T9500's chips.  Which is still a decent performance gain and definitely lowers power consumption.  T9300's can be had on eBay in the ~$20 range, maybe even less now. 

Don't know if I'd want to re-use the OCZ drive.  Some of them were pretty horrible.  Going to 4gb is a no-brainer. 

Intel will need to up the core count on their "consumer"-level CPU's to compete. 

They've certainly had the capability of doing so for years, but have withheld such for marketing/market segmentation reasons. 

The new boards should all ship with the appropriate NVMe firmware module already installed.  You could probably retrofit the module to your fx4300 board as well, if you are a decent BIOS hacker.

Don't know about Windows 8, but Windows 10 is remarkably tolerant of hardware changes.  I've swapped from AMD platforms to Intel, no problem.  Intel to Intel is usually pretty easy too. 

Oh sorry, didn't see your big screen requirement.  An E6540 is 15.6" and you could do all the same. 

Find a Dell Latitude E6440 on eBay (will have your required optical drive).  Throw out the CPU it comes with and buy an i7-4600M/i7-4610M and retrofit accordingly.  You'll probably have to upgrade the PSU to the 90W or 120W model as well.

Should get you into a true quad core for less than $700 all-in with your specs.  You might need to order a RAM upgrade as well. 

How about a nice 14" laptop like a Dell Latitude E7470 or E7480 (whatever you can get a decent deal on at the Dell Outlet with a 1080p screen and SSD) and a E-Port docking station (pick up on eBay for $20 or so!). 

You can hook up dual external full-size LCDs for a triple screen setup.  The laptop will come off the dock with the press of a button.  And you can have your printer, USB peripherals, networking hooked up to the dock at your dorm/apartment/home, attachable or detachable with the click of a button! 

If its better than your existing gear, then go for it.  Its still a great platform. 

The strategy I use, on dd-wrt, is to replace the default hosts file used by the caching DNS server (dnsmasq) with one which blocks the hosts in question.

So you probably could do a variant on that strategy on pfsense. 

2 minutes ago, ShadowWolf810 said:

 

Thanks for all your ideas though, appreciate it

No problem, I suffer computer boredom too.   Used to always be able to buy something much 'better', but these days, if you're established in what you need, then there's not a lot of point. 

The "Barracuda" brand name came out in the mid 1990s, as an upgrade to the 5400rpm "Hawk" drives.   Development was led by a team acquired from Seagate's acquisition of CDC's hard drive business.   The first Barracuda drive held ~1.6 gigabytes or so, and had 10 or 11 platters, 20-22 heads, including a servo head/platter (so 150*megabytes* per platter, contrasted with the >1,000,000 megabyte platters of today!).   The main feature of the "Barracuda" being that it had a 7200rpm spindle speed.  Traditionally Seagate only offered 7200rpm drives in SCSI until the mid 2000s when they finally came out with ATA drives and focused most of their enterprise efforts on the 10kRPM "Cheetah" and 15kRPM "Cheetah X15" lines. 

For the two drives you are comparing, it appears that the "1" and "6" refer to the variants at a certain capacity offering. 

Basically put, I wouldn't get too caught up in the numbers.  HDD performance within a given rpm speed (ie: 7200rpm) hasn't changed much in the past 6-8 years.  So buy whatever you need, but do doublecheck reliability surveys like that offered by Backblaze to make sure you're not buying a total dud older model. 

delete

1)  A SuperMicro Mobile Rack (or similar).  This takes up 3 x 5.25" drive bays and allows you to hot-swap the drives in and out.  You can also see what the drives are doing as there's a LED for each drive bay.  Also comes with a very powerful fan to ensure proper airflow over the drives, rather than the not-so-optimal setups inside cases. 

2)  Similar for the 2.5" drives (ie: your SSD).  I personally use a "Venus" brand 2x2.5" in a single 3.5" bay adapter.  Between the Supermicro Mobile Rack, and the Venus dual 2.5", all of my storage can be removed and replaced without opening the case at all or messing with internal wiring.  If you run proper RAID, you can even replace all the storage in your computer without shutting down or rebooting!

3)  A good 4K IPS display.  $500 gets you into the Dell P2415Q or similar. 

4)  A proper multi-monitor mount for the desk.  Personally I use an ATDEC VFS-D-AT which hooks up to the desk and mounts 2 screens, elevating them above the desk and managing the cables associated with them.   You should be able to find something even better!

5)  Colour calibration equipment.  If you're a content creator, you should have some way of calibrating your monitors' settings against a verifiable reference.

miniPCI-E is only 1 PCI-E lane, AFAIK.  Don't really think you want to put a video card on that. 

If you want to get through "Computer Engineering", ditch the gaming, ditch the fancy graphics card, get yourself a solid desktop machine with a non-k processor, or even build yourself one of those E5-2670 specials.  Load Linux on it, and go on your merry way.  Make a VM or something for those rare times you actually need Windows for things like Matlab and/or the other design packages.

I'm serious.  Gaming is a colossal waste of time if you're trying to master this stuff.  3D modelling software, really?

Go into the laptops BIOS and make sure hyperthreading is enabled.

There is always the possibility that you need a BIOS upgrade and/or the motherboard just was never provided with full firmware support for the CPU you are installing.  Celeron usually means a fairly low-end laptop.

One thing to keep in mind about 'mobile" i5 and i7 chips is that they can be the same CPU's, only changes in clock speeds, but same number of cores.  We're used to thinking for desktop PC's "i5 = 4 cores, i7 = 4 cores + hyperthreading", but for laptop chips, you really need to check exactly what you're getting. 

For instance, my i5-4310M is actually a dual core chip with hyperthreading.