PC Tech Thread

Yeah, that's what I based my assumption on.

If anyone else can use it, I have 2x8GB and 2x4GB of Corsair XMS3. Free to collect from N8 or will post at cost.

Possible dibs on the 2x8gb if you get no collection requests and can be arsed posting
(Desktop ram yeah?)

I'm considering buying one of these Lenovo ideapads. Decent discount at the mo.
The 5i abyss blue is reduced.

The cheaper one has 4gb ram 128 SSD for £329
More expensive one is 8gb 256 SSD for £399

https://www.lenovo.com/gb/en/laptops/ideapad/500-series/IdeaPad-5i-14IIL05/p/88IPS501390

It will be used for light office work, web browsing and a little streaming TV.

Will the higher spec one be noticeably better in use?
Thanks

I'd pay the extra.

Performance will be better and it will probably extend longevity a bit. Good chance that they won't be updatable after purchase so best to do it at the start.

@Aggi thanks

Samsung are currently doing an offer for free copy of Dying Light 2 on steam if you buy a 980pro 500/1tb/2tb M.2 drive.

best price for 1tb from participating retailer (ccl) is £153 delivered. lowest price i've seen the drive was £125 on amazon in jan (which I missed out on waiting to be paid) but if like me you were planning on picking up DL2 and need more storage this works out pretty nicely.

Ta, didn’t know about the promo but got a 980 Pro recently so sent off the claim and already approved. Cheers :)

Remember my sponsoring an 11y old to cook for their mum each week and each time they did it earned them £40? Well we've been doing that for 6 months and they've earned £1,220 so far.

So I've just ordered them a load of components as this is what they wanted to achieve... they wanted to build their own PC.

The kid has taste:
https://nzxt.com/product/h510-elite

With:
https://nzxt.com/product/kraken-z63-rgb

We've blown the budget though, so I'm salvaging bits from my old HP Omen desktop to make it work for him. Specifically the RTX 2080 Super still beats most 3050 and 3060 GPUs for FPS on the games he plays (Minecraft and Fortnite) at 1440p... and I had a load of spare RAM.

So his config: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/buro9/saved/6dBLcf

• AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
  
• Asus TUF Gaming X570-PLUS
  
• 64GB RAM
  
• 1TB M.2 SSD
  
• RTX 2080 Super
  
• AOC Q27G2U Monitor (27" gaming thing)
  
  

It's not bad at all.

The old HP Omen though... nice GPU, the RAM upgrade was good... but the rest! It had an Intel 660p 512GB M.2 and the performance was about 1/4 of a mid-range Samsung and about 1/8 of the fast Seagate Firecuda or top Samsung. There's also virtually nothing else salvageable... it's the cheapest thing I've seen... and HP must have some very healthy margin on it too.

So good.

I have first hand experience of what something like this can do for a young kid in a tough spot...

growing up I was the only person I knew whose mum had to lease their computer from rumbelows (was a pentium 75 in around 1995 and of course twice as expensive as if we could have afforded to buy one by literally any other means) and getting it put possibly one of the biggest strain on our finances at the time even though my mum was in full-time work we still had numerous months where we nearly lost it as we couldn't afford the payments but my mum worked some absolute magic to fix it.

looking back it's probably the one bright spot of that period in my life growing up with an undiagnosed parent with bipolar and depression.

Left to my own devices with that computer I figured out how literally through trial and error to access a local BBS no I found in a computing magazine using the terminal app before we could afford a proper dial up internet account and through the bbs I found newsgroups about stuff like hip hop and the nba that I was obsessed with but asides from one maybe two media sources for each were impossible to truly follow from a council estate 25 miles outside of london plus it gave me my first email address that worked with the outside world.

after we got the internet I had the tools to basically teach myself everything I needed to know about computing to the point that on reaching college the a-level IT class I was most excited to take literally had nothing to teach me about anything IT related and the teacher basically turned me into a teaching assistant helping other kids after i finished everything he'd prepared for the first few terms in a couple of weeks and he had nothing else to give me.

shortly after that I dropped out of college (picked all the wrong courses, hated the social experience, had over 2 hours of travel a day to commute and most importantly needed to start earning some money as our family was skint), I had a brief stint at a freight forwarding company as a lackey to the IT guy but he had woven such a profound amount of bullshit with the owners to make himself indispensable that my very presence put his scam at risk as I was doing tasks he'd spend days pretending to do in a few minutes or fix things he told them were unfixable because he couldnt be bothered to do it (including one of the manifest printers which they relied on literally every working hour of the day). he even reprimanded me for playing one of the games he'd quietly installed on the network on my lunchbreak (that he played when he was meant to be working) so I was fired at the end of my probation period despite knocking every single thing I'd done for them out of the park.

I then found myself at a itec training college where I scored 100% on the entry aptitude test and blew through the materials for the first few nvq/gnvqs in a few weeks and ended up placed as an intern in a small software house making careers/recruitment software where I used all the stuff I picked up with my home computer to learn programming on the fly with little bits of piece work (a few weeks after joining I handcoded a full html website for them in notepad using the sales brochure for the written content and some digital assets I scrounged up off the shared drive as something to do and the owner saw it passing by my desk and without my knowing announced it's launch as our main website at a training weekend we had soon after while I was out of the room. at that point my primary responsibility was updating an access db they'd built to track the office fantasy football with the points from the paper each week but in the 3 years I was there I basically learned how to make my own batch data migration tools from scratch and that has been about 70% of the coding work I've done for various clients in the 23 years since.

beyond that I left to go to another company where I applied in the final hours of them making a decision, had a last-minute interview the next day and at age 19 beat out a short list of graduates with comp science degrees and since then I've still got a running streak of being offered every single programming job I've interviewed for (after being made redundant at carpetright after five years I had 4 job offers in the one day I took off whilst the process was still ongoing, which was chef kiss levels of enjoyment when they asked how I was getting on in one of my exit interviews).

none of this is particularly impressive in the grander scheme and as I get older I see many many missed opportunities or wrong turns in my career I wish I'd done different but literally my entire adult career is owed to my mum getting me that computer, chances are without much else as an option for me I'd have ended up doing carpentry with my dad instead and I'd still be in a council house in essex somewhere.

none of this is particularly impressive in the grander scheme

Bollocks. It's wholesome & and impressive af. You deserve to own it.

^ what he said.

I have first hand experience of what something like this can do for a young kid in a tough spot...

Yup, this is exactly why I'm doing it. Future me giving the help I wish past me had.

And your story... it's awesome. You've come a long way and you should be damn proud of that (I think you are from your words).

Love stories like this!

Mine is similar; came to London in 1990 as a 6yo refugee from Soviet Ukraine with my mum & baby sister, raised in poverty in a council flat by a single mum with two/three jobs.

She bought me a C64 with a tape drive and a BBC Micro from a car boot fair in 1993, on which I dicked about making useless programs in BASIC.

Got given a second-hand 386 DX2 66MHz PC by a family friend a few years later, then built a Pentium P60 machine from brand new parts with money I made working as a 12yo carney on weekends cranking ancient roundabouts by hand with a travelling Victorian fairground. Bought a 33.6K dialup modem not long after that, that led to spending every spare penny on my mum’s phone bill, constantly on newsgroups & making websites featuring Quake mods I’d made.

Got permanently kicked out of school at 15yo before I could take GCSEs due to bad home situation and getting into car crime & drugs, never got a chance to go back. Spent the rest of my teens and majority of twenties doing and selling a lot of drugs in squat raves.

But I never stopped being a dork. Started building computers for friends & family at 15, went on to run a home AV installation business, then freelance consultancy in live event AV, and now am a network, infrastructure and broadcast engineer for a big AV company.

Been trying to get my daughter into pushing buttons but she’s more into climbing trees and digging for worms...

Been trying to get my daughter into pushing buttons but she’s more into climbing trees and digging for worms...

I wouldn't worry, you can't win.
As a kid that was more interested in pushing buttons I now wish I'd spent more time climbing trees and digging for worms 🤷‍♂️
Give 'em the option and support for either and they'll be fine.

I need some windows advice please.

First question is, I just purchased mrssacred a new windows laptop.

She does most off her work on a remote desktop (I think that's the right term, she logs into their portal and access' their word, excel and cloud)
Does a little personal work on her own word/excel too.

Should she carry on paying for Microsoft 365 to have her own copies of word and Excel or is their a better option?

You can get by with Google docs/sheets/etc.

I did have some issues with the google word doc formatting weird when loaded with MS Word, but largely it was fine.

Agree with DethBeard, a Gmail account gives you all you need and is good enough.

You only need to think about a Microsoft 365 subscription if you're not on Google.

@DethBeard @Velocio ok that's good to know.

I was asking in the Linux thread about switching from Windows the Linux. Consensus was there could be problems sharing word and Excel docs between the two OS. I gues that isn't an issue if using Google online services?

Next question:

What's the recommended cloud service?

It depends exactly what you're doing in Word/Excel, whether you're sharing with other people, what version you're sharing with, what formulas you want, etc.

A variety of the more recent Excel formulas like xlookup just don't work in Sheets and give errors on import. Neither do things like the data model, macros, etc

But, if you're just doing more basic stuff you're probably OK (until you're not). Same with document formatting in Word.

Personally I think O365 is pretty good value if you need cloud storage. It's cheaper than all of the other popular options just for the storage, not even counting also getting Office.

Otherwise you can pick up a key for £20 or so from one of the key resellers for standalone office.

What's the recommended cloud service?

Too vague a question.

For file sync: Google or Microsoft both do great here.
For office versions of Cloud: Google or Microsoft again.

The edge cases are where the clarity is needed... do you need to sync files to Linux? Do you need perfect Word doc compatibility?

Google is "good enough" for office things, and great on the sync things.
Microsoft is great on the office things, and "good enough" on the sync things.

If you know nothing at all... an MS 365 subscription is worth it.

Sorry. I missed this, but yes.

Laptop ram.

The amount of Excel use is the key imo.

The open source equivalent for Linux (I forget the name right now) is really good and will do things like pivots, link website data, etc. Pretty sure Google still can't do that, but could be wrong.

In the grand scheme of things O365 is good value imo, so if she needs to use excel herself and in conjunction with others to a medium or advanced level, (rather than just reading other peoples spreadsheets) I'm not sure Google cuts it.

You can always get around word formatting with PDFs.

One thing that I quite like, and I think you get with O365, is Publisher. Again Ymmv.

Thanks all. I'll confirm what the excel requirements are and report back

open source equivalent for Linux

Libre Office? It's not just for Linux

That's it.