PC Tech Thread

Really useful response. Thanks mate.

Good advice, I know exactly what you mean.

I use 4k monitors at work and I know that I get on with them for my purposes though.

you don't gain anything in terms of screen space.

It's not about space, text in hi-dpi-aware apps looks so much nicer than on lower-dpi screens.

Combining two of the topics on the last page, anyone using 3DS max on a 4k screen and can confirm whether it's total shit? It seems that's the consensus, so I'm thinking a QHD 21:9 monitor might be best for my needs.

Lol.

Also this.

Still dreaming of building this...

just talk to @dbr

who? what? why?

Is this @dbr lad a PC case building genius?

That's for other people to decide really.

ps. I make bespoke furniture, probs not gonna make a PC case, so the world will have go without that genius.

Oh totally remember talking to you about it a while back. Nice furniture. My quest continues...

Actually, jokes aside, what would it take to twist our arm? It would be a bit of furniture rather than a PC case...

I do like making smaller things to a really high finish so it'd probably be cool. If you can organise the layout of components inside I'd be happy to make the case. Very busy just now though so it'd have to wait a bit - I suppose the interior will take some thinking time anyway.

Windows question.

I've upgraded to a new HDD and at the same time I upgraded to Win 10 so did a clean install and have my old drive in a caddy.

Trying to access folders like Documents and Settings I get error messages that I don't have permission to access them. I've tried to change the permissions but I didn't have permission to do so. Any suggestions how to access these? I have the username/password but don't see anywhere to give me the option of entering it.

Is it possible to right click Explorer and choose to Run As Administrator? That may be the way forward.

Sorry, ignore me, that wasn't the issue at all.

I'd forgotten that the Documents and Settings folder is actually just a shortcut to the actual location (in the Users folder), although it doesn't show up as a shortcut when you look at the properties and gives you error messages about permissions.

Copying the actual folder works fine.

New PC build time. Building up a fanless, headless Plex server. Cost about £250, took a couple of hours to build up. All pretty straightforward apart from forgetting to plug in the 4 pin, square power supply to the motherboard (which I've forgotten on pretty much every build I've done for some reason). Trouble shooting power issues on a PC with no fans and no HDDs is a bit tricky as you can't tell whether anything is actually turned on or not.

The CPU cooler, one of these http://www.nofancomputer.com/eng/products/CR-80EH.php , is pretty sizeable, need to see how it actually performs as to whether I can get away without a case fan. Seems to idle at about 50 degrees which seems a bit high but I haven't tested it much as Virgin decided to turn my internet off last night so limited on what I could install.

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Passive / silent home NAS setups. Any recommendations?

Is RAID still a thing for home NAS setups? I like redundancy and backups.

Nice to see this build... thats one massive empty box!

May not quite be silent, but an HP microserver running FreeNAS is cheap and works well. It'll run on anything but the microservers are a nice starting point (mine is a HP G7 N54L. FreeNAS runs ZFS - think of it like RAID but better (incremental backups, scheduled checks of data integrity etc).

Yeah, there were a limited number of cheap cases big enough for the CPU cooler and with enough ventilation for fanless. There's a caddy that goes down that empty bit at the front for 4x HDDs which I didn't bother with (although it was described as extremely compact on the blurb, it's a Fractal Design Core 1300).

Only one SSD, SFX size PSU, no optical drives and no video card makes for an easy build and lots of space.

Processor seemed to work fine cheers.

Microserver is pretty quiet and good quality/reliable. Always money off offers as well.

Not totally silent though, can't hear it with the tv on but sometimes in a quiet room you can hear a few quiet fans (upgrading the PSU fan seems to be one of the suggestions to make it quieter).

Is RAID still a thing for home NAS setups? I like redundancy and backups.

ZFS is the new thing, and people tend to run http://www.freenas.org/ and build their own system.

But... foregoing that, because it needs a fairly hefty build with a lot of RAM, then any QNAP will do and just use RAID6 if you have lots of drives, or RAID5 if you only a few drives.