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Mark77

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  1. Mark77
    Microsoft software, by way of Windows Update, basically has a built-in "kill switch" which should be very worrying to people or nations that do not want to, or cannot maintain an ongoing relationship with Microsoft. Imagine the sort of havoc that Microsoft, or actors using Microsoft facilities, could inflict if they just released or caused the release of a rogue Windows Update. The Russian government isn't out to spy on people.
  2. Mark77
    Sustained sequential I/O is pretty rare on HDDs unless you're editing video. So no, Gig-E is rarely the bottleneck unless you have a giant RAID or a significant number of drives and users.
  3. Mark77
    Latitude E7470. Laptop GPU's are always going to suck due to the inherent design problems associated with laptops and their thermal constraints. Make sure you get a Dell proprietary docking station for those 2 external LCDs you'll want to attach. XPS is Dell's 'consumer' level line. Wouldn't consider it for serious use.
  4. Mark77
    Used to run 3 x 1920x1200, although I could only use 2 at a time. Now run 2 x 1920x1200, and a single 1920x1080. Can use all three simultaneously.
  5. Mark77
    If you're supporting someone remotely, I highly implore you to get a motherboard that supports IPMI, or, at the very least, Intel AMT. Supermicro's are nice. If you watch eBay, you can get some nice deals on them too.
  6. Mark77
    Yup, if you have the skills to actually do all of that, you probably have the skills to find a job in the field for which buying Acura parts pulled from a junkyard would be of trivial expense. But seriously, check out the junkyards or look at www.car-part.com for parts pulled from junkyard cars. Probably won't cost you $600.
  7. Mark77
    If you have one handy, and you're convinced the rest of the system is properly configured. With those sorts of boards, certain PCI-E slots might be unavailable if you only populate one CPU slot, so you need to read the instructions very carefully. Sorry can't really offer you much more, these boards are not for novices.
  8. Mark77
    Sorry, I couldn't say for sure whether you'd have any success at power-up with incompatible microcode. It might not fire up to protect against over-voltage. But then again, it might not be that sophisticated.
  9. Mark77
    If you have the space in your case, go for the biggest motherboard you can afford. Computers are lasting a lot longer these days, and an extra PCI-E slot or two could be the difference between being able to install upgrades in the future, or not. Especially with storage now using the PCI-E bus instead of the SATA ports.
  10. Mark77
    I've seen it in the SMART logs. It will set a permanent notation in the drive if its over 50degC. They could reject your RMA if they do an investigation (incredibly unlikely, but its possible). Get yourself a mobile rack, or an Icy Dock, or similar hot-swap enclosure add-in with fans. That's what I do for my drives (a fleet of 7K2000/7K3000s). Keeps 'em at a nice 30degC.
  11. Mark77
    50C voids the warranty on those drives and sets a permanent SMART notation for an over temperature event. 48C is hotter than I'd run a Hitachi 7K2000/7K3000/7K4000 at.
  12. Mark77
    Perhaps the Macs are deployed to subsets of users who are less likely to call "support" to have their problems resolved, versus PCs? For instance, you put a software developer on a Mac. They sure as heck aren't going to be calling "support" to have something fixed for them. But the travelling salesperson with the laptop and VPN connections on a PC may very well be constantly utilizing tech support because they lack the expertise to do much on their own other than use the standard apps. As far as AppleCare, you can buy that from the "PC" vendors no problem.
  13. Mark77
    YouTube is generally either Flash or, more commonly these days, HTML 5 video encoding. These formats require considerably more processing than merely passing the video to a hardware decoding accelerator. My suggestion would be to re-try your 'experiment' using the Windows-default Microsoft Edge browser, rather than the known-to-be-bloated Google browser. You may also wish to try 4K video that is stored on your local storage using a player such as VLC, rather than something that is played back through flash or HTML5 in a web browser.
  14. Mark77
    For $48, its doubtful that you're getting a new LCD. That might not even come with the laptop cover/backplate, so you'd have to retrofit your existing one. I'd definitely do a *lot* more research, as just below it, is an offer for what appears to be a completely stuffed/kitted assembly in excess of $200. Which seems more along the lines of what you're looking for and more in-line with what stuff actually costs for Apples.
  15. Mark77
    Sure. Instead of 50 years of theoretical life, you might reduce it to 48 years. Big freakin' deal.
  16. Mark77
    Err my apologies, that CPU does not support VPro. So you'd want to verify that the Intel AMT KVM feature still works on a non-VPro chip. Officially, "no", but unofficially it might.
  17. Mark77
    Chip is perfectly fine, and supports VPro. Motherboard is probably a piece of junk. RAM is RAM, hopefully its DDR3L, not just DDR3. Hard drive, depends upon your application, you'll probably want at least an additional for RAID-1. Don't see why you'd need a video card for a server. If its a Qualcomm Atheros wireless card, you can use hostapd to turn it into a wireless access point. I'd suggest getting a nice server board like the Supermicro X10SAE which supports Intel AMT for IP KVM capability. Or, at the very least, a Q87 board if you can't do a X10SAE. Other than that, you could have a pretty nice server there.
  18. Mark77
    I run the latest Ubuntu on lesser hardware and its still fine. Make sure it has a SSD if it doesn't already.
  19. Mark77
    Nothing technically 'wrong' with what you're doing. However, if your VM box crashes, your entire site will lose connectivity. Meaning that you won't even be able to get into your network, through a tunnel or otherwise, to access the IPMI console of your server to make any necessary repairs. For this reason, most often people tend to recommend that the gateway router *not* be run on a virtual machine, even if, through the miracle of VMs and VLANs, it is possible. However, on an experimental/research/test basis, it seems perfectly acceptable to me. You might want to take steps to fortify the machine with, for instance, a UPS, ECC memory, redundant power supplies, etc.
  20. Mark77
    I'd go a step further than the above poster and suggest that you could get yourself into a Latitude E6440 with 1080p IPS if you're really savvy on eBay. I know I did a few months ago for $299.
  21. Mark77
    BTW, for 10gig-E, you probably should be going with a platform that supports PCI-E 3.0 at this point. So that means Ivy Bridge or better. For a NAS, I'd also tell you to get a mobo that supports either IPMI or Intel AMT. Supermicro gear is nice.
  22. Mark77
    Do you have a motherboard in mind? NAS sorts of applications really don't need much of a CPU at all typically. Even a cheap $20 Ivy Bridge Celeron would be perfectly okay. Once you figure out the motherboard, you should be able to get away with literally the cheapest chip on a given platform. Although, in a given family, because of how well Intel handles power throttling, there's really not a lot of difference between the 'low-power' chips and their full-TDP cousins in actual use.
  23. Mark77
    Actually the numbers didn't seem that bad to me. Sure, rebuilds take slightly longer, but how often does one rebuild anyways? I wonder if a decent 'solution' would be to stick a 2-drive SSD RAID-1 as a bcache write cache infront of the RAID array? That would take care of the slow writes. Is bcache available with unraid yet?
  24. Mark77
    Its the concept that without certain parts being at a certain performance standard, installing other faster parts will probably be a waste of money. For instance, for many 'use cases', using a hard drive on a post-LGA775 system would be considered a severe bottleneck versus using a SSD. When applied to gaming, its the concept that you can upgrade the CPU all you want, but without a faster video card, your gaming experience won't be faster. Or likewise, you can upgrade the GPU all you want, but without a certain amount of CPU performance, you probably won't see an increase in performance. In a nutshell, I cringe when I go into the "New Builds" section and see people suggesting some sort of Skylake or Haswell configuration, with a HDD for the boot drive.
  25. Mark77
    If you're a 4-year EE grad, and you're being interviewed for a job where they're asking you those sorts of questions, you're probably not making appropriate use of your background. OTOH, if you're a 4-year EE grad, and you're having trouble coming up with answers to those questions in your head, on-the-fly, then I'd have to question how well you really did in EE. Overclocking in an interview question at an engineering firm? Seriously? Maybe at Linus Media Group or something like that, but overclocking has almost zero place at an engineering firm, lol.
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