[Ed P]

If you really only want a PC for browsing and email, then an i5 is a bit of overkill. Any of the refurb desktops would do the job – Dell have a wide range of i3’s and include a 12 month warranty, but there are obviously other choices if you go down that route.

I excluded laptops as monitors are kinder on failing peepers!

[Ed P]

Everyone is playing a dangerous game of hard-ball. Imo a ‘Hard Brexit’ could well trigger a vote of ‘no confidence’. I’m not sure what would follow but it could be in Labour’s interest to get an election before the new boundaries come into force as Labour lose 30 out of the 50 seat reduction that has been proposed.

[Ed P]

Tippon wrote:

Where’s the fun in that though Ed?

The challenge of getting old floppies to read, and run in a vm. Also by making iso copies of the floppies you are preserving them for the future.

[Ed P]

I suspect that is Apple or Sony FUD!

As i said, it may pay to wait until (say) Black Friday sales. There may well be reliable reviews by then as well. As the bottom of the range is most likely to get plagued by Ads perhaps the Mi A2 is a good marker. (no mention of Ads in this review)

[Ed P]

Tippon wrote:

I’ve still got the remains of my 486 SX25 floating around somewhere. I’ve been tempted for a while to rebuild it and play some DOS games

No need for the extra power usage. Either install Dosbox or set up a VM Dos box using FreeDos. I bought a cheap  USB floppy drive from Amazon and then used Winimage to make mountable dos images of the old disks.

[Ed P]

No need for the extra power usage. Either install Dosbox or set up a VM Dos box using FreeDos. I bought a USB floppy drive from Amazon and then used Winimage to make mountable dos images of the old disks.

[Ed P]

You may want to wait a couple of weeks to see what impact the Xiaomi market entry has on UK prices (especially the silly top end ones!) link

 

[Ed P]

wasbit wrote:

Thanks. That’s £32 I’ll never see again. .

????

Not sure about your concerns. CPC Farnell are a very reputable International company. I have always had prompt delivery from them. They also have a big trade section on their site.

[Ed P]

Save your money and put it towards a better gpu. While 8Gb is the new minimum, 16Gb is overkill. If you are into gaming and you must buy RAM then a lower CAS is better, If you have surplus memory look at using it as a ram disk.

That said the GPU is today’s workhorse, and a better GPU/more GPU ram beats mobo memory every time.

[Ed P]

Tampering with the goods is sadly part of Western life. That is one reason why most consumables have anti-tamper security packing. Unfortunately this stuff will only protect store goods as most of it would be fairly easily overcome if you were to take it out of the store.

In India it was not uncommon to find bottles of ‘scotch’ where someone had carefully drilled through the bottom of the bottle, syringed out the scotch and replaced it with coloured water (or worse). The hole would then be sealed with wax or something.

[Ed P]

Retro would not be a bad topic addition. Most of the games I purchase are from Gog and fit into the retro category. I have all but given up on modern games as they require two or more hours of concentrated effort, and some idiot games only allow saves at points they specify.

Retro games + mods are very playable especially some of the Skyrim mods.

[Ed P]

Tippon wrote:

The Duke wrote:

Side note – The mija smart system is the cheapest entry into the start things world. Lots of kits offered too, the favourite of mine is their smart smoke alarm, and there cheap thermostats, which are about £4 each off a slow boat, and just work, £about £10 of you want one quick.

Have you got links to these please Steve? I could do with sorting the smoke alarms here

Amen to that! There are days when a couple of flat batteries occur simultaneously and I wander around the house trying to find which smoke alarms are giving the quarter second tweet followed by three minutes of silence! Idiot design – if they repeated more frequently maybe I’d stand a half chance of finding the errant ones.

[Ed P]

Thanks for the info guys.

[Ed P]

Steve can you get a ‘white’ out of the RGB bulb? I’m thinking of Christmas and cycling coloured lights, but would want a white for everyday use.

[Ed P]

IF the criminal investigators manage to pin down the alleged African sources of funds to the Russians then all bets are off. However those sort of investigations take years unless the CIA gives a helping hand and prod!

[Ed P]

“Why do people talk of the EU as a seperate body”

Just two words of dubious fame: Aaron Banks!

[Ed P]

Wheels-Of-Fire wrote:

What is with the HTML mark up ?

Are you drafting your replies, or using an email link. No problem here afaik.

[Ed P]

Odd – the link just seems to point to my GMail!

[Ed P]

Drezha is correct, but if for any reason you change the wifi server and associated passwords it can be a PITA resetting each switch/adapter and carrying out the changes on your mobile. BTW I do not know if it is a general problem but switches do not seem to respect summer time and stay on UT.

[Ed P]

D-Dan wrote:

Ed P wrote:

Not of any help, but for future reference never ‘copy’ a Windows VM always ‘move’ it. The act of ‘copying’ tells Windows that it is a new setup,

How does that even work? Surely an identical copy (retaining the old VM ID) is just that, an identical copy. ”’

It works because it is marked as a copy, but moving adds no marks. My guess is that this is ‘by design’ for large offices that have one master VM but the Administrator wants to discriminate between the various copies. The vm move handles this bit of admin automagically.

With respect to your second point which I interpret to be about the vms internal drive representation. Moving works for the following reason:

When you set up a Windows OS as a VM, the drive partitioning you do within the VM container you have first established, it bears no relationship to the real world. When you launch a Windows VM it takes the launching vm drive to be C. When you move the vm image, it is still C. Retention of the internal vm ids is essential to avoid unnecessarily triggering DRM.

A Linux vm behaves in a similar manner the boot disk is always (afaik) sda1 and sda5 is always the lvm, so a Linux vm does not care if is ‘moved’ either.

[Author]

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