Hurican7

Thank you Skiwee! This is what I was trying to find. SN is 601-7B46-020B1803001090, indicating a manufacturing date of 2018, March (1st?) ish. The BIOS update for this board for 9th gen CPUs isn't until 2018-07-12. Looks like I've got to go to the shop tomorrow.

I am aware that Asus boards ship with a serial number that indicates the BIOS version (although they will sometimes ship with newer BIOS versions that what the SN on the box says). Is there a way to do this with MSI boards? I have a Z370 SLI Plus and I'm trying to see if it shipped with the Intel 9th gen CPU compatible BIOS or if I will need to get it flashed (I do not currently have an 8th gen CPU to power it up/flash it with)

This has been going on for years. I'm sure you guys can top this story, and I'm all ears. He who has the best, true PEBCAK story wins. Wins what, you ask? I dunno. Glory. Honor. Bragging rights for enduring through the greatest tests and tribulations of the tech and IT world. Have you ever put the P in PEBCAK? Meme illustrations are appreciated.

I think the best way to proceed here is to let the owner maintain admin status, but move everyone else into a less-privileged user group. Make it clear to the owner that he still has the keys to his kingdom, but these elevated user rights should be used as a nuclear option for rare occasions. This way, he can lock out fired employees or retrieve any material he wants without having to go through an individual IT guy. This way, even if he fires the IT guy, he still has the ability to give the new IT guy the tools he needs to pick up where the previous guy left off. However, outside of these circumstances, he shouldn't need to use the full admin privileges often. I think I could get the COO to do a departmental audit so the different groups of people stay in their wheelhouses more - including himself, the owner, and the one/two other main managers. This frees everyone up to do their jobs better - business management, sales, engineering/CNC programming, and to a lesser degree production. If the business managers aren't doing much engineering, they can focus on business decisions. Engineers will have more time to prep production instead of looking for misplaced files.

Hi all! I am attempting to make some informed decisions and persuade certain individuals in a manufacturing company, but am looking for some data to see if I am on the right track or not. I will be posting this on reddit later to try to get as much insight as I can. Background: Small American metal fabrication business, roughly 20-30 employees throughout my time here. Our goal is to be scalable for growth. I’m going to simplify things here for the sake of brevity. From a traditional point of view, an office worker would do everything to complete a sale. (He would set up the sale, do the engineering/pre-production work, and then pass on the needed documentation to the production floor so the parts would be made.) However, the business has grown, CNC machines are involved that require technical knowledge to run/program, and the company has expanded into making more sophisticated products. People need to collaborate on the same job, but there is no enforceable workflow standard. Each person stores their mission-critical network files in whatever way they want in an open Windows environment. Files have been moved/renamed/deleted/lost many times. To combat this, we are trying to implement SolidWorks PDM to lock down the engineering workflows and documentation standards. However, a lot of this is still predicated on network permissions since some people will need to look at/physically print documents that they have no business altering otherwise. This includes senior management, who sees their ownership of the company as a God-given right to Admin status to change whatever files they want whenever they want, install software, etc. (IMO they do not have the technical ability to do network management or for the CNC machine files, but as the owners, I guess they do have the legal right to rip the servers out of the racks and burn them whenever they want. Example: A secretary had a problem with a piece of software, so a high level manager called tech support and then needed to enter network credentials. He got mad that he had to enter a password he didn’t know, when in reality he has two network admin users/passwords that he didn’t even recognize would work for this.) There are about two full time engineers, as well as two to three seasonal or part time engineers/CNC programmers on the network at a time, usually working on related projects. There are an additional 5 network users in the office/management. Please vote at the links below: "Should the owner have full Admin privileges on the company network?" https://www.strawpoll.me/17082111 "Should the different departments be separate or intertwined?" https://www.strawpoll.me/17082119 Please feel free to explain your opinions or suggestions. Thanks for everything and for reading this post, it means a lot to me. Thanks!

Picked up a used 980ti from a friend who took great care of it and had no issues with. However, I am running two monitors and he was using only one. I am using an MSI Gaming M5 mobo w/ 6700k. The monitors are an Asus vs248 (secondary) and a Dell S2417DG (primary). Problem: On some boot ups, neither screen is sent any signal. Usually, a reboot will pass signal to at least one of the monitors, occasionally both. If only one monitor is getting signal, I have to switch the display port cable positions in the IO of the card. This usually sends signal to both cards. Obviously, I don't want to wear out the display port IO in the card itself. I will be trying older Geforce drivers and the two DVI ports for the Asus monitor (right now it's on a DP to DVI adapter since that's what I had to use on the previous card. DVI ports don't seem to want to put signal through to it atm but I haven't tried to make them work correctly much). Any ideas?

Good point. I'm in a similar boat, but it's also tempting to upgrade to a 1080, save hundreds of dollars (even though I might be willing to shell out for a 20 series card) and call it good.

The performance differential compared to the 10 series seems acceptable for enthusiasts who have larger budgets, but for the rest of us the cost added from the ray tracing tech doesn't seem worth it yet. It seems worth waiting to adopt ray tracing until 2nd or 3rd gen ray tracing cards are released , at least for those of us with modest budgets.

Modern technology depends on space-based infrastructure and its improvement (GPS, telecommunications, weather observation & prediction, you get the idea). Also, there was a lot of concern over the weaponization of space during the 20th century since it could possibly be a huge tactical advantage. Hence the space race. inb4 space force EDIT: I forgot that mining and tourism are now becoming ever more viable reasons as well. Plus anything related to space is pretty cool, so some people just want to go there to see what's up (Get it? What's up...the sky? ok I'm done with jokes now).

Turns out the firewall provider has a reasonable setup that should be up and running soon. Thanks for the suggestion though!

I work for a small business as a manufacturing engineer and used to use a Dell SonicWall VPN to remote into the LAN from home when I needed to. However, Comcast "upgraded" some of the business hardware [insert derogatory ISP joke here] and changed the firewall. Now, the SonicWall VPN is broken and the new firewall is apparently super difficult to configure for it. The business owner wants us to use Splashtop Business to remote in to available workstations since its license is supposed to be cheaper, but this doesn't work well with SolidWorks/CAD software due to the 1 second lag. Also, it is difficult to impossible to transfer files from the LAN to a local machine (apparently you can do it now, but the process still doesn't look quite as nice as the VPN setup). Lastly, it requires a workstation to remote into. None of us should assume there will always be one open, especially if the company grows and they hire more people. Is there an inexpensive VPN option I can suggest to IT and management? Splashtop Business is $60 per year, per user from what I understand. https://www.sonicwall.com/en-us/home https://www.splashtop.com/business

This might be an unpopular opinion, but ergonomics > macro capabilities for people who are heavy users. To me, it's better to stop or relieve RSI. Macros are definitely a part of that since they reduce the number of physical actions you have to take, but if your equipment is geared completely towards productivity you can become worse off. I've been getting into macros recently and came across a clip from Taran on LTT saying he uses a simple, no-macro mouse because it allows him to move in such a way so that it doesn't aggravate his RSI. Not every mouse shape is for everyone so unfortunately you might have to try a couple to get the right fit. Look into grip styles and mouse dimensions/shapes to get a better idea of what will work for you. If you're a light user I don't know if I'd worry about it too much, but if you're going to be logged in 4-8+ hours per day you should consider this.

With multiple users, will they be working on the same project or related projects? If so, do you already have a LAN with appropriate storage and backups, as well as a media file management plan? If you think some of the users will work from home, do you have remote access or VPN capabilities on the LAN?

Depends on the games you're going to play. A few can use those extra cores but most won't - four cores is usually all that is needed for gaming.

Exactly - thank you for reminding me of this. I have drawn up some of the functionality but not all of it. When I approach a programming challenge I usually write the process out by hand so I can find intrinsic flaws in the overall logic. It only makes sense that this method should be applied to DB choice and development. From my limited understanding, MS Access is a dumbed down database system designed to appear more user friendly for Excel users. Since the company does have a Windows server, it looks like SQL Server Express might be a good alternative to look into. I need to verify if it will be a good fit for the data types and relationships, as well as log keeping and some sort of user-friendly GUI to make the queries. Just to note: we did try a basic Access database that worked better than the alternative (which is literally almost nothing - max LoLz) and even made a basic GUI for it but certain individuals were so turned off by it in its GUI-less state that they avoided it (to the detriment of the workflows involved). The way the Access DB was set up does have some intrinsic flaws but we never had stability issues in the last two years, at least to my knowledge.