PC Tech Thread

Yeah, I was thinking of giving that a go, been meaning to upgrade anyway.

Do it, from a non Windows user, w10 is pretty good.

Just bought a monitor. AOC IPS thingy. Cheapish. From PCWorld. There's a cluster of six or so pixels which have a dark grey tint to them. They're not black, not white, not a colour. They don't seem to be visible when displaying black, and they do show colour through them (if I paint one red pixel on one of them, it looks red. If I make the screen red, you can see that it's a darker grey spot). Everything I've read about dead/stuck pixels only talks about black or coloured. Help?

Take it back and get a replacement, it'll just bug you for life and may get worse.

Yeah, I was hoping there may be a way to fix it before having to lug it back. I'm not going to live with it. It's already made my life about 20% worse.

When I got my folks' last PC, there was one dead pixel. When trying to return it PC World said they had a threshold of I think 6 pixels (I can't remember exactly how many but it was a small number that still sounded ridiculous). They may have been bullshitting but it took a good half hour of arguing that the only thing I was concerned about was that they had sold me something brand new with an imperfection and I was not leaving without a refund or a replacement. They eventually replaced it.

It's at least six. Two rows, and maybe three in each row? I read somewhere that it's actually 8 near the centre. I'm just going to say 10 and let them try to count them.

If it's just the odd one or two, rubbing it a bit can fix it.

This is my solution for most things.

Yeah, thanks - tried but doesn't seem to do much good. Also tried blasting weird colour changes at it. Also no luck.

Any fucked pixels return it. It's not fit for purpose, you buy an IPS screen for colour accuracy.

Yeah, true. Such a pain in the ass.

They didn't have another one in stock. So no new monitor :( It was so much nicer than this 10 year old HD TV!

Any reason I shouldn't pull the trigger on this?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/LG-25UM58-P-25-Inch-21-UltraWide-Monitor/dp/B01BFH18BG/ref=sr_1_1?s=computers&rps=1&ie=UTF8&qid=1465218057&sr=1-1&keywords=ips+monitor

34"...

Nothing wrong with that assuming you're not gaming and you particularly want a wide screen.

We're talking a different ball park here. It's for writing/reading and occasional video game. Not watching films.

Why do you say that re: gaming? It claims to be a gaming monitor!

5ms response time. I would want 1ms for games. The widescreen would be good for writing through as you can have other documents open on the same screen.

But then I'd also want 120+ Hz too

MLG in da house!

I can't imagine I'd notice 5ms. I'm currently using a 19" HD Ready (720) LCD TV from about 9 years ago.

240GB Sandisc Plus SSD at ebuyer for £44 if you use the code 'SSD' at checkout. Today only.

I'm thinking it's time to update my Plex Server. On @Velocio recommendation I'm separating out the Media Server from the storage. Storage is fine, I'll continue to use my existing server.

I need more grunt for the plex server though. Planning on running a ubuntu headless server with only plex running on it, ideally able to transcode a couple of streams simultaneously.

Any suggestions on hardware. Ideally looking for cheap and quiet which obviously isn't an easy combination. Either something ready made or I can build up. Most of the searches I've done are a year or two out of date.

PC engines APU2 looks interesting. I've been considering it for router and nas duties. Not sure if it's powerful enough for meaty transcoding jobs

Cheers, but after looking at them I think the processor is a fair bit too slow. I'm looking for something with a score of upwards of 5,000 on Passmark-CPU Benchmark.