[Dave Rice]

Yes Bob it was me. Dickies work wear every time. You get yourself on the mailing list and buy when the items you want come up.

The quality is superb, you can’t have work wear falling apart. When they say something is waterproof it absolutely is. I’ve got one of the winter jackets, far better than anything else I’ve bought as is the footwear.

[Dave Rice]

Yeah, don’t panic it will arrive. They’ve never failed me yet.

[Dave Rice]

I’m sure my kids are signing the cards now ?…. seriously I couldn’t care less about these silly “days”.

Will it fit on a FAT32 drive? Depends on the application, but IIRC Windows backup will only save to a USB drive if it is formatted as NTFS.

Is that an issue? No, all you do is re-format as NTFS if you have to.

[Dave Rice]

They come from Switzerland and take 3 to 4 days usually.

[Dave Rice]

A single screw holds them forever, they weigh almost nothing.

[Dave Rice]

I’ve never used LO or OO that seriously.

But with Office 2016 licences so cheap now on E-Bay, maybe time to go back to the evil Empire?

[Dave Rice]

It needn’t be as onerous as you fear. Download and run https://www.advanced-ip-scanner.com/ 

That will give you a list of everything that’s live on your network. Anything outside of your DHCP scope will have a fixed IP. Check the DHCP server to see if you’ve reserved any IP addresses that way.

On the new router use the same IP subnet, DHCP scope and reserved IPs; set the WiFi networks up with the old SSIDs and passwords and everything should just reconnect. Your Windows machines may identify it as a new network and ask you to select private or public.

[Dave Rice]

This is how the Vigor goes about setting up a Guest WiFi network.

Firstly set up the LAN subnets, this is a 2762 so we have 2 to play with. IP address ranges are whatever you want and setup on the details page. We’ll use the second for the Guests. All subnets can access the internet, but here we also say if they can see each other. We don’t want them to.

Now we set up the WLANs. We have 4 SSIDs available but we only need 2 here.

Now we tell the Ethernet Ports and SSIDs which virtual LAN(s) and subnets they belong to. Our Guest SSID is Billy No Mates in all respects.

A bit more convoluted than just ticking a Guest Network box, but I’m sure you can see how powerful this can be especially as with the more expensive models you could have 8 subnets.

[Dave Rice]

I prefer Draytek Vigors even here at home. They aren’t straight forward to set up as you can make them do any number of wonderful things. They are totally OTT for most home users but the build quality and technical support is superb with plenty of How Tos. The 2762 range is my current favourite.

The BT hub at my cousins B&B started playing up and I replaced it with a TP-Link TD-W9970 http://tinyurl.com/ybexkrya. It supports VDSL, ADSL  and Ethernet (they have FTTC 80 / 20). The wireless is “only” 300 N but has 2 x 5dbi antenna, so it serves the top floor of a big 3 storey Victorian house http://brookdalebandb.co.uk/ (one of Lee’s websites) from a cupboard beneath the stairs and has an isolated Guest network. It does have USB sharing but I couldn’t get on with it and as I didn’t need it I didn’t try too hard. There are business functions such as IPSEC VPN tunnels (LAN to LAN not dial in though). There is also a basic parental control option via MAC addresses and a timetable.

So a step up from your ISP router with decent enough wireless  and £35 is a bargain IMO http://tinyurl.com/y7rff8gr

As you know I favour a separate dedicated WiFi set up (my Vigor 2760 has no WiFi) but if I were looking at an xDSL with AC I would certainly consider the £77 TP-Link Archer VR400 AC1200 http://tinyurl.com/ycaxf5av, but once you get over £100 I’d just go straight to the £145 DrayTek Vigor 2762ac AC1166 http://tinyurl.com/yc3rljzf and be done with it.

[Dave Rice]

ED, the reason is my experiences with local DNS are so hit and miss that’s why I use IP addresses. They always work. It’s not the DNS server at fault.

That’s the network tab on my laptop. No sign of the other PCs currently turned on. It’s found the two Synologys as “other devices” and the DLNA server on one of them but no sign of the shares.

If I want to go to the Synology servers I need to type \\servername or quite often \\ipaddress to get to the shares. They open up straight away so it’s not a permission thing.

After they kicked WHS in the head MS said just use MS networking built into W8, then workgroups. Now they have just dumped people into this mess.

[Dave Rice]

John, it’s down to the installers 99% of which are what I call the “nail it to the wall” brigade. They have no real knowledge of what’s behind the technology they’re installing. They learn one way of doing it and that’s that. No other way exists.

They learn how to nail the boxes to the wall, how to connect them and how to do a basic setup, which is little more than turning it on.

[Dave Rice]

I’m glad I mothballed my Windows 10 based file server last year. I have totally given up on Microsoft Peer-to-peer networking. It always was a PITA and they were always moving the goal posts.

BTW don’t worry about the name that Windows gives the network on each PC, it’s just an internal label and they’ll all be different even though it’s the same network. You will probably be better off trying IP addresses rather than computer names. However if you have a BT Home Hub that can add all sorts of “fun” to the mix. I regularly have to replace them when they decide to stop parts of the network seeing each other.

The easiest way forward for documents is with a shared Cloud storage account. For large files, like videos, it’s with your own server like a Synology. Another possibility is if your router allows the sharing of a USB drive but this can be slow.

[Dave Rice]

Sky Q can still be wired.

£65 per socket isn’t a rip off. How much do you charge for your time when working?

[Dave Rice]

Spoke to them earlier, very helpful.

Parts are now in the warehouse and they checked they will be available for dispatch today. Explained why I needed them yesterday (hectic and potentially random schedule this week depending on others, like TT & BT, doing their bit first) and they bumped my delivery to a pre 10am tomorrow.

[Dave Rice]

CCLOnline cocked it up. 2 items out of stock yet I specifically chose items they said were in stock.

Emailed me yesterday which I missed. Why they couldn’t pick up the phone is beyond me.

[Dave Rice]

I know of all of those from my time on BAE Systems. It’s none of those.

Doug is 60ish, been in the business for a long time. I trust him to know what he needs.

[Dave Rice]

They seem quite happy with a GTX 1050 Ti. It’s way more powerful than anything any of them have and is literally the last thing anyone mentions.

A lot of these guys use 17″  high end i7 laptops with GeForce graphics and stuff it with as much ram as they can. They like 2 x HDD, an SSD for the working set and a spinner for archiving.

[Dave Rice]

They have digitisations of entire counties topography. All I hear from them is more ram, more ram! The graphics cards they use are nothing special at all.

Ironically I’ve just started refurbishing a top of the range CAD machine from 8 or 9 years ago. H55 chipset, i7-870 and 8GB of DDR3 1333 ram, 2 dead 1TB spinners in RAID 1 and some monster NVidia gaming card that dims the lights when you turn it on. Probably cost a fortune.

It’s fine now I’ve put an SSD in it, but a modern Pentium Dual Core feels quicker. I think one of the new Pentium 2+2 would bury it.

[Dave Rice]

It’s going to be #2 with 64GB for now. Had to go with CCL Online to get all the bits and delivery date I needed.

Main change is it’s now a Gigabyte X299 UD4 Pro, Corsair Carbide 270R and Thermaltake Paris 650W 80 + Gold.

They do use Autocad but the main app is some line of business Civil Engineering CAD I forget the name of.

I’ll take some photos.

[Dave Rice]

I think it depends on the theme of the website. Ice blue and gray wouldn’t be appropriate for a summer sun fun site for example.

Ask Debbie, she’s good at these things…

[Author]

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