Jay Deah

The filters are there to stop dust from outside being sucked in to the case. Only intake fans need to be filtered. The rear fan is usually used as exhaust, so it does not need a dust filter.

In windows 10, you goto Settings > System >Power and Sleep > Additional power settings 
There's on option on the left 'Choose what the power buttons do' 
Select an option that works for you.

Got myself a lancool2 from OCUK plus the usbc and vertical mount options and I love the thing. So much so I want to do another build in one... but... they’re retailing for about 100GBP at anywhere I can find them. So it’s not quite as cheap as I’d like it to be.
 
anyone know of a UK supplier able to sell them at closer to the US retail price?
 
cheers

I would stick with kryonaut, you shouldn't need to be replacing it every 6 months, you should get a couple years out of it.
 
These graphite/carbon pads require a lot of mounting pressure to make good contact due to it being a solid pad instead of paste, most laptop probably don't have the required mounting pressure.

Firstly, i'm an ESXi guy... so im biased towards it...
 
what to use would depend on what you want to learn and why... if its's just the Microsoft certification then use Hyper-V. as that's far more relevant and all the lab things interface with that super-easy. infact you dont even need windows server they have labs for all their exams that will run off of windows 10.
 
If on the other the and you want to learn about enterprise virtualisation then use either Hyper-V or ESXi. these are the 2 big players in the market. vSphere is arguably better but comes with a huge pricetag so you'll tend to find it in larger and/or older organisations. Hyper-V is catching up to ESXi in the functioanlity space, but sicne it is included with the windows license you buy anyway to license the VMs it has a much lower licensing cost, and so is VERY attractive to organisations.
 
If you come across things like proxmox, unraid etc. in the workplace they'll tend to be smaller,  crappier companies.

Get a 144Hz monitor and find out if your CPU is up to the task still (it probably is)

Hi I just upgraded my Dell 9020 mt that came with a i5-4570 to a xeon e3-1231v3. No problems, just remember to enable hyperthreading in the bios.

Considering that , dell has no reason to add xeon compatibility to this board....... So buy one at your own risk. I'd sooner just pick a compatible i7.

I’d keep an eye out for good deals on 3770s
 
the 
motherboards of 3rd gen Intel seem to by dying off regularly around this age and so there will be a few people selling their 3770 chips on when their mobo dies.
 
if you can do the upgrade for cheap then by all means do it, but if you’re paying strong money you’re probably better off selling what you have now and buying a Newer platform.
 
 

Seriously.
This is like worrying about a robber digging a tunnel under your house to break in.
 
1) Almost all criminals have no idea how to dig tunnels underground that won't collapse
2) The tiny percent that do would never bother doing it to your house, they would do it to a bank or something actually important
3) There's a million easier ways of getting into your house like breaking the door or window
 
Hopefully you can understand this analogy and maybe understand what these "INTEL CPU EXPLOIT!!!!11!!" really are.

Truthfully, people that are exploiting that likely wont go after the individual person... I wouldnt worry to much about the HT issues. They want to go after the big fish they can make money on.. they likely wont get money off the small person here and there. 

This zombieload thing is getting blown out of all proportions. Honestly it’s not worth factoring that into any buying decision it’s just background noise.
 
When choosing  your next processor definitely consider AMD but choose based on real reasons of what best meets your requirements and budget. 

Don’t get too exited about these HT vulnerabilities. This isn’t a serious concern for the average consumer. The amount of media coverage is not equal to the risk of the vulnerability.
 
for example there was a windows rdp bug found recently so scary that Microsoft even went back and released a patch for XP... 10000000000000x higher risk to people than these HT issues yet not interesting for the tech influencers so no coverage.

Just changing the graphics card to a more powerful one won't magically reduce CPU load by making the game more GPU reliant. If anything, it would increase the load on the CPU.

That's not how it works. Like, at all.

You forgot about the other three laptops and you ignored my other two points (form factor, and that those are not strictly gaming laptops).
 
And you ignored almost every single point that people tried to make in this thread, replying with random (usually unimportant) statements.
 
So congratulations, you've officially won the award for the being most annoying person on the LTT forum! 
 
I'm done with this thread.

i think the best thing to remember here is that you want to K.I.S.S
 
Keep It Simple Stupid
 
i agree with everytihng dalek has said, a QNAP/Synology will do what you need it to do PLUS they have some very simple and easy to use modes on them so that you dont need to be a GURU to set it up.
 
if for whatever reason you can't do that, then i'd be looking at running Windows Server Essentials:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server-essentials/get-started/get-started
 
it's somewhere in between the NAS option and the "proper" server option, it simplifies a lot of things
 
the opther thing to bear in mind is that with this centralised server setup you introduce a single point of failure, all your data is on this one server and if it breaks, everything breaks.
 
for this reason make sure whatever you use had redundancy! and backups! hard drives fail... its not a case of if, its a case of when... make sure at the MINIMUM you go for a solution with redundant drives. make sure youre in a position so that when it breaks your biggest stress is getting the thing up and running as quickly as possible, as opposed to worrying about writing your CV when you realize the data is lost forever and the company's about to go bankrupt!

i think the best thing to remember here is that you want to K.I.S.S
 
Keep It Simple Stupid
 
i agree with everytihng dalek has said, a QNAP/Synology will do what you need it to do PLUS they have some very simple and easy to use modes on them so that you dont need to be a GURU to set it up.
 
if for whatever reason you can't do that, then i'd be looking at running Windows Server Essentials:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server-essentials/get-started/get-started
 
it's somewhere in between the NAS option and the "proper" server option, it simplifies a lot of things
 
the opther thing to bear in mind is that with this centralised server setup you introduce a single point of failure, all your data is on this one server and if it breaks, everything breaks.
 
for this reason make sure whatever you use had redundancy! and backups! hard drives fail... its not a case of if, its a case of when... make sure at the MINIMUM you go for a solution with redundant drives. make sure youre in a position so that when it breaks your biggest stress is getting the thing up and running as quickly as possible, as opposed to worrying about writing your CV when you realize the data is lost forever and the company's about to go bankrupt!

30 up is 100 percent okay for gaming. I know people who game on 2 mbps up. 

Honestly I’d buy an old switch off eBay and just use that, any old layer3 switch will do as long as it’s not so old it runs catos!
 
however when it comes to passing the exam you really don’t need any hands on experience it’s all very hypothetical. And infact often hands on can harm you as for the practical sections you have to solve them using certain commands that in the real world you wouldn’t bother with and you’d just do a ‘show run’
 
as for subnetting, again practical doesn’t really help it’s all maths. Best advise anyone ever fave me is learn how to draw out a grid of subnetting like a cheat sheet. Then the first thing you do when you get into the exam is draw out your cheat sheet and use that to look up all the answers for the rest of the exam!

Why do you want to swap the board? Is it faulty?
 
if not you can fit the dell motherboard into a standard atx case and with a few minor adaptions have it work fine. 
 
If if the board is dead then buy the cheapest 97 chipset you can. You don’t need a Z series as your chip isn’t overxlockable anyway. The dell board is a Q97 which is actually pretty good!

Unless you’re allergic to money don’t do either.

Forget all this ‘bottlenecking’ talk people repeat from YouTube videos. 
 
Buy whatever card fits your budget and use case.
 
Maybe a high end card like a 1080ti won’t be able make 100% use out of it you’ll still get a great experience.
 
then when you later come to upgrade your CPU, you don’t need to replace the GPu you just carry on using the one you’ve got.
 
i personally ran a 3770 with a 970 and it was a great experience. Pubg’s uniptimised nonsense made me upgrade to a 1080ti and it performed great.
 
later I went to an 8700k and yes it was a better experience than the 3770 but by no means was the 3770 ever bad.

Unless you’re allergic to money don’t do either.

Neither, the CPU upgrade isn't worth the money, and the motherboard alone... is it giving you a feature you want?
 
I'd look into SSDs or peripherals, personally.