Mark77

2 minutes ago, Joe_MacDougall said:

Didn't know that was a thing.

Yup, toss 4 miniPCI-E radios in one of these (or even 4G radios if you want, along with a SIM card and USB port attachments if needed for the 4G), and you're good to go:

Looks like it uses a PLX chip.

3 minutes ago, Joe_MacDougall said:

It's hard to run a PCI-E wireless adaptor if you have more than 2 cards because all of your PCI-E lanes will be taken.

Otherwise PCI-E adaptors generally are faster and more robust than USB adaptors.

PCI-E lanes can be shared with ease.  Not sure why people keep making such a big deal out of this.  You can even get PCI-E expander cards, like the RB14eu, which allow for 4 PCI-E WiFi cards in a single physical 1X PCI-E slot. 

Not really an upgrade path out of that CPU.  You'll probably have to replace the platform to get a meaningful performance boost.  PSU should be re-usable, case, etc. 

All I can suggest, from a usability point of view, is make sure you have a SSD as the boot drive.  That's something you can upgrade, if you're still using a HDD, without committing to hardware that's not going to be re-usable in a new build. 

HGST if you can.  Toshiba if you can't.   And why not a 2 or 3Tb model?  Personally not a fan of WD.

Just now, corrado33 said:

Matlab does seem to be multithreaded, at least for the functions listed below.

 

Sure, but does the simulations that the OP's proposes to use actually use those, and to what level of significance? 

This is why some idea of the performance of said analysis on existing hardware would be useful. 

Does she have a platform that she already does these tasks on?  What is it, and what sort of performance is she experiencing?

I agree with your sentiment, its not worth buying a lot of hardware arbitrarily unless its really needed.   Only an extremely small amount of software uses CUDA or even OpenCL. 

Also worthwhile finding out is whether or not the simulations she wants to run or analysis is multi-threaded or not.   If they are, then you can build, for instance, a dual E5 Xeon machine for not a lot of money using eBay parts and achieve some really awesome performance with 16 cores/32 threads.  If they aren't, well, a Skylake i3 (or its Xeon equivalent) will actually be faster. 

You can determine if something's threaded or not by running it on an existing multi-core machine, opening up the Windows Task Manager, and looking at the CPU utilization percent.  If it pegs out at 50% (or 25% for a 4-core or 14% or so for a 4/8 core machine), then you know that its not multi-threading capable, and you're wasting money buying more cores. 

BTW, if she studies/works for a university, they're likely to have far better machines and even clusters available to run simulations on than you can really hope to have "at home". 

I have heard rumours that the Sandy Bridge chips' onboard graphics have some sort of problem that reveals itself with age.  Has the laptop been used heavily in the past ~5-6 years?

LGA2011 platforms have crazy numbers of PCI-E lanes compared to the LGA115x platforms.  NVMe SSDs work just fine on the LGA115x platforms, so not a problem on LGA2011 platforms from that perspective.  Firmware support for booting may very well be the issue if you want to use a PCI-E SSD as a boot device.

People get way, way too caught up on PCI-E lanes.  Only relevant, really, if you're running a server that needs crazy I/O. 

A simple one -- a HR employee loses a USB stick which contains names, home addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, gender, and salary data for the entire company due to leaving it unsecured in a rental car which is then burgularized.

cause of the problem:  a dumb HR employee who mishandled information outside of company procedures.  And ill-defined company procedures for such information.

why is it a problem:  confidential information, could expose staff to identity theft.  could impair company's internal competitiveness if salary data were widely known.  could expose company to lawsuits based on racial or gender discrimination.  etc.

where is the risk most critical:  you'll have to use your thinking for this.

the financial impact:  cost of investigation.  cost of mitigating controls.  Cost of an identity theft monitoring service for the entire affected workforce.  cost of dealing with concerned employees.  cost of refresher training for employees with access to such information on the rules.  cost of auditing all of the same for compliance.  cost of proper security.  etc., etc.

In real life, this is the sort of situation that is far more common than generically "hackers" breaking in from the outside.  Employees, particularly non-technical ones (but even technical ones) very frequently create security breaches by mishandling information.

20 minutes ago, Mooshi said:

Any standard work computer given to regular employees from a billion dollar company. 

They're usually not that bad.  Its all the scripts, spyware, virus scanners, etc., and complete and utter lack of basic windows tweaks that they load onto them that makes them a giant problem. 

I had what was, at the time, a very nice 19" CRT.  A Sony GDM-400PS.  Used to get lots of headaches from it.  When I replaced it ~11 years ago with a Dell 20" screen, my headaches went away. 

I developed moderate myopia as a kid, largely coincident with staring at a computer screen for hours at a time.  My sister still doesn't need glasses even to this day because she rode horses instead of playing on CRT-based computers.  So there might very well be something to the whole idea that CRTs are bad for people.

Can you maybe find a used case for $20 or something?  I think you'd be much, much happier, at least in the short term, with ditching that slow HDD, and installing a proper SSD, a 250gb or a 512gb model.  Using a HDD on such a modern/fast system as you're proposing is like trying to swim in jeans and thick leather shoes.  Sure, you can do it if you really have to, but it won't be very comfortable.

As far as the laptop, can't you just buy a new battery for it? 

The rest is pretty cookie-cutter, although the keyboard and mouse are strictly matters of personal preference.  But I'd seriously do whatever you can to get into a SSD and not use a HDD as your main boot device.

In a laptop, no.  The limiting factor in laptops is usually the cooling system, not the CPU.  I doubt if you put each laptop side by side, that you'd be able to tell the difference.  Save your $200 and put towards your next laptop (unfortunately no CPU upgrades these days on laptops due to them soldering the CPU's in!).

If you have the sort of skills to do all the software for that, why not apply for a real job where you get paid? 

I'm sure someone suitably motivated could do this all up, although there's still manual intervention required for the captas. 

And really, how much macaroni and cheese do you really need?  Is food really that much of an expense for you? 

If that CPU isn't enough for you, then I suspect you would want to move onto the LGA2011 platforms.  Sure, you could do an i7, or a Skylake i7, but the performance increase are relatively marginal. 

I rebuilt my Dell Latitude D830 with that stuff quite a while back.  No issues to report.

Yeah have you bought any of the parts?  Why are you going with older generation stuff? 

Laptop screens are generally either eDP or LVDS.  LVDS being the older standard.  eDP being the newer standard.  That laptop in the picture looks highly likely that it would be a LVDS, not an eDP just based on its age (eDP is a newer standard that only started really being used 3-4 years ago!).  Screens themselves are generally fairly standardized.  You should be able to look up the exact screen used in that laptop and order an identical replacement without a lot of trouble.  As another person stated, with laptops being so cheap, used, these days, might want to consider whether you'd be better off just eBay'ing a replacement laptop or the shell of one, and transferring over whatever re-usable parts (ie: RAM, HDD, maybe even keyboard and WiFi radios) you want. 

How about laser eye surgery, ie: PRK, LASIK, etc.?  Could be anything from a full-fledged video of a LTT fan getting their procedure done at one of the local outfits, to a techquickie segment describing the difference between PRK and LASIK (ie: surface ablation versus flap and corneal ablation!).

Especially with the VR goggles and Google Glass these days (which tend to be incompatible with glasses), there's bound to be at least some interest in vision treatments.

There's lots of stuff I've ordered from Amazon which has never been shipped.  I've also cancelled orders a couple days later just prior to shipment and re-ordered the same item at a lower price.  Especially for "slow-moving" items, when Amazon places an order with the manufacturer, they often have to order in crates of 12.  So if you order a single item, they'll have 11 in stock, which their algorithm sees as being over-stocked, so they chop the price significantly. 

Note:  if you're buying stuff like this, and need multiple items, just order one at a time (as long as its free shipping).  Very high chance the second time you order, the same item will be cheaper because of Amazon's inventory management system.

Well, 1.2TB over 4 HDDs tells me that the drive size is ~300gb.  They're probably SAS drives if its a 'server'.  You should be able to put SATA SSDs on a SAS controller (the opposite isn't true).  

6 minutes ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

install Steam, Discord and chrome

Do you know if he even needs those programs (or spyware in the case of Chrome?)? 

2400 baud (2.4kbit/sec).  Upgrading to 9600 baud (9.6kbit/sec) was very nice as that's when the perceptible text terminal lag mostly went away.

Have 2.4Gbit service now.  So technically, 1 million times faster.

edit:  this is about a span of 30 years!

31 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

There is quite a bit of difference between 95 and 98 that can lead to quite a number of compatibility issues.

Please elaborate.

Yeah sounds like you'd need a PLX chip.  Really, how much FC stuff can you possibly have anyways?