PC Tech Thread

I use W10's built in window tiling. Just drag one window to the left edge of the screen and it'll take up the left half. Then click another window and it'll take up the right half. You can then drag the divider if you want to.

Windows Snap, no? Use Windows key with an arrow key to send a window to whichever side of your monitor you'd like. This works well if you have more than one monitor, otherwise just drag the window to the far right or far left of your display.

Oops. New page fail. Beaten to it.

With the option I posted. It's like having one keyboard for two laptops/computers. So you can't transfer files and stuff between but if you want to jsut have a reference page on one screen and work on the other you'd be okay.

If it helps anyone, I’m still selling my gaming PC as it’s no longer needed.

EVGA X99 Micro version 2 Mobo
Intel Core i7 6800K
Corsair H80i V2 liquid cooler
8GB MSI GTX1080 GAMING X
16GB DDR4 2666 VengLPX
250GB Samsung 2.5 750 EVO SSD
500GB Samsung 750 EVO SSD x3 (1.5TB)

£700 delivered.

I'll take this please

Cheers for the W10 tips. Clearly need to utfs and up my W10 game.

Was built into the first public build of Win7. In 2009. Hehe.

Agreed with getting a larger SSD. I had a new PC built Dec last year ( some folks will remember my daily rant as I was probably one of the worst luck people out there... long story)...

Anyway, I was gonna get a 256GB +2TB HDD, but ended up with a 1TB SSD, it was about £20 more, totally worth it.

Also, I know you said your son is gonna build it himself, but I wasn’t as brave so I got OCUK to build it for me, they charged me £160, customer service was a bit shit but the technicians who actually built my machine was pretty good. I think Scan quoted £150. Both come with 3 years warranty for the whole thing. For me, it was worth the money.

How did I not know this?! All I know is the annoying auto full screen when I accidentally bump into the top or bottom (while trying to make it fill half)

I use this which gives a few more options around desktop layout then the native Windows ability. I run one monitor in portrait so being able to sub-divide that to top and bottom is handy.

https://www.benq.com/en-us/monitor/software/display-pilot.html

It seems that Windows Home Server 2011 has reached it's end of life so I need to decide what to do with my server. It's an old HP microserver which has about 28TB of storage (4x4TB internal, 1x4TB and 1x8TB USB), all as NTFS.

Pondering whether to just install a new OS or upgrade to something newer. I've been gradually offloading what it does so it is mainly just used for storage now so I don't have any issues with it in terms of speed, etc

Any thoughts?

My XPS15 came with "Dell PremierColor" which as well as doing something with colour spaces, pops up a rectangular drop target per screen when you start dragging a window. The rectangles offer full-, half-, quarter-screen and other subdivisions. Higher resolution screens get more options.

In this screenshot I'm dragging the Explorer window, my mouse was over the upper left of the rectangle and it shaded the section of screen the window would occupy when dropped.

Don't know if Dell created this in-house or if it's based one someone else's widget.

Edit: Choosing "Check for updates" from the trayicon linked to a 404, but this seems to be it http://www.portrait.com/display-control/ so I guess it's a whitelabel product. This is their page for Dell Premiercolor now, don't know if it actually has to be run on a Dell... https://www.portrait.com/dtune/del/enu/index.html

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Going to give FancyZones a go for Window 'tiling', part of the MS PowerToys reboot: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

I suspect the answer to this is no; but is there a way (short of just cloning the whole windows install) to copy an installed programme from one machine to another?

The company providing the software has a default "installer" which is just a script to download files off the internet, and they no longer support Windows (even though I paid for a "lifetime" licence), but I still have an old version on another machine so wondering if I could copy it in some way.

Any got a USB or KVM switch they can sell me? Would probably need posting.

It may be that just copying the folder from program files or whatever will work.

If it doesn't you may need to go searching for config files in AppData or something (and possibly edit them to reflect new paths) or registry keys that would need to be duplicated.

It seems that Windows Home Server 2011 has reached it's end of life.

Similar with me. However the HP micro is still working (and assuming you are still using my Plex account) and doing good.

Has MS stopped doing security updates for HS 2011?

I think they have. It changed to vital updates a few years ago but all I've had in the past 3 or 4 months is one update that refuses to install.

I may just get a cheap win10 licence whilst I ponder further. It's just the ballache of remapping all the drives and stuff

Don't bother buying a licence. Just skip the activation step when installing. You can still use basically the entirety of the OS

Isn't it restricted to 90 days in that case? I'm fairly sure that's been the case when I've tried it previously.

I'll need the full version with RDP as it's headless

Right, me again, it turns out that the app is still supported, but that I'd actually run into a separate issue.

It seems like the app is a node.js skin for open VPN, which runs fine when I launch it normally, but will not start if I launch with admin privileges. I have no idea what could be causing this issue so I am asking the hive mind (It needs to be launched with admin privileges so that it can set up a VPN).

Its actually a portable app; so I have tried copying the old install from my previous machine and it still throws the same error. So I'm left with it either being something missing in the config of the new machine (clean new build of Windows 10), or something weird in the set up of admin rights

I recently upgraded from win 7 and it was free - worth checking if you can do the same.

Cheers but you don't get the same offer for Home Server. A new licence can be picked up for about a tenner so it isn't too bad.

Is it just a VPN? Often they'll have config files so you don't have to use whatever their proprietary app is and can just use OpenVPN.