PC Tech Thread

@busseynova That will probably be fine, I have a msi gtx560ti twin frozr in a lian-li a04 and everything fits fine. Unless you're talking a much smaller case than that? Also, just out of interest, why the slow RAM when the rest of the PC is such good spec?

Umm, because I'm a clueless goon. What would be a better option? might be a good opportunity to upgrade the Ram while I'm doing a few other bits. I basically want this to become my multimedia centre, whilst also being a 3Dmax machine, and I want it to be smaller / prettier /quieter so it can sit in my living room and not be annoying.

Thinking about this case:

http://www.antec.com/product.php?id=706927&fid=5022033

What's the best way to get it to be near enough to silent?

Either that, or I keep the whole lot in it's big tower, and run long hdmi and usb cables through the bedroom and into the lounge from by back porch. This is where the router is and is generally pretty cool at this time of year. This seems like a better option the more I think about it..... definitely much cheaper.

Just some 1600MHz RAM would be a good start. I noticed mine was running at 1333MHz recently and boosted it back up to it's rated speed and it made a good amount of difference!
That option may be the better one to be honest; I think it can be a faff making windows behave when you swap a motherboard out as it treats it as a different pc. I'm by no means clued up on that though, so it's probably worth a google

From what I remember in the past Windows "scores" your components and adds up the number that you swap. If you swap motherboard, ram and CPU for instance that pushes it over the threshold and it thinks it's a new pc. Just motherboard I think is OK, although you may have to re-authorise over the phone.

Nothing I've read suggests the difference between 1333 and 1600MHz RAM is even noticeable. Replacing the whole 16GB would be pretty pointless as far as I can tell.

I've had to do the Windows re-authorisation once before. It was all automated, completely hassle-free.

As it happens, I've decided to go with plan B, moving the tower out to my back porch and running cables under the floorboards through to the front room, taking the noise and the heat out there, and drying my washing faster in the process! It'll also leave space in the tower for extra hard drives, so I can effectively use it as a NAS too.

The cable run through to the front room should be about 5-8m for various things, so should be ok with the use of an active hub for USB.

you can right click on the folders in OneDrive on the device you don't want to sync and mark them "online only" or the whole OneDrive folder

also I just scored one of these:

24Tb of storage!
shame I use Netflix, Amazon Prime and OneDrive now, maybe I'll build my own cloud!

££?

Cheers, I seem to remember I eventually seemed to manage to figure this out (although it appears to take more or less space depending how it feels) but it's one of those where the options on the Windows app are totally different from the options on the windows desktop interface.

I've nearly filled 16TB, one of those could be the next step ...

How did you score that?
And if you're in the market to sell, what price do you have in mind?

I'll prob play with it for a bit with my home lab, as it has iSCSI but ill give you a shout when I realise its to much gigaberts for what I need! ;)

Windows 7 backups.

Although I've got my important files backed up, I'd prefer not to go through the hassle of reinstalling Windows and everything on it if my laptop HDD packs up. It's only 256GB so not that large.

One option appears to be that Windows Home Server (which I have running on another machine) does backups of machines on the network to a .vhd file. Can't find much on how reliable this is and information seems fairly scarce on how to restore the file (so far as I can gather, using dd to write the whole image to a new drive seems the way to do it but a cursory search didn't find a great deal of info).

Any other suggestions? I don't care if I'm backing up to a network drive or USB or cloud or whatever.
Cheers

I have 4x2tb hdds atm and I'm running low on space so thinking I should upgrade 2 of them to 4tb drives and sell the 2x2tb. Any reasons to hold off for a while like they are about to jump up to 8tb or whatever?

So I want a 2-in-1 laptop a la the Asus transformer t100. Anyone know of anything similar but perhaps a bit more recent?

Okay, how about this. Higher resolution vs larger screen?

Surface Pro 3?

@aggi
Have you thought about disk imaging software?
I use ghost at work and recently started using acronis true image at home.
Acronis can increment an image and can also run from within windows although I must admit I've not actually restored from it yet.
I used to use rdiff-backup onto a readynas which is great for data and it's it stores it's backups in reverse differential format but it's not so good for restoring windows OS files.

Bit the bullet. More than twice the cost, but it's just better. Plus work is paying. In my way to Stratford to pick one up.

And it'll get Windows 10 when it's released. Ah, the thrill of new tech!

Now walking around the mall looking at clothing shops with the mrs. With a new computer in my bag. Torture.

Man, I'd love a Surface. Let us know how it is?

So far, so good. The resolution really is quite nice (which answers my question about size vs resolution above). Got Office 2010 installed. Keyboard seems to do the job. I'll be using it most of the day today to prepare some classes, so we'll see how I get on.

I looked at acronis true image and similar but wasn't sure whether the cost was worth it given the basic functionality I require.