[Dave Rice]

Sounds like your internet was down.

Just a hunch, try changing the file from .jpg to .pdf

[Dave Rice]

The problem the Indians have now is a shortage of suitably skilled staff.

CSC (now DXC after the merger with HP) India is absolutely massive. At the start Indian techs were managed from the UK, when I left it was often the other way around with some very senior EMEA positions filled by Indians and run from there. In fact as much as they could get away with under MOD security rules.

You have to work in the industry to really understand just what has happened and the impact it has (outsourcing that is). Of course the CEO will be in full CYA mode as will everyone else.

[Dave Rice]

I think you’ll be surprised Steve. Apple MacBook Air Intel Core i5 1.6GHz, 8GB RAM + 128GB Flash, 13.3″ LED + WIFI, Bluetooth + Webcam £881

Intel Core i5 Dual Core 1.6GHz, 8GB RAM + 256GB Flash, 11.6″ Display + Intel Iris 6000, Webcam + Bluetooth 4.0 £929

Compare that to this list of Ultrabooks on E-Buyer and the Macs seem good value.

[Dave Rice]

I think it may have review and review

Security
The IdeaPad 710S Plus offers a TPM 2.0 chip, and a fast and reliable fingerprint scanner for security-conscious and mobile users.

Likes: Light and slim, solid, very wellbuilt casing, stylishlooking surfaces, fingerprint resistant, good input devices, TPM, fingerprint scanner, bright and highcontrast screen with lots of elbowroom, no PWM, GeForce 940MX with GDDR5, good WiFi performance,

[Dave Rice]

I got the charity a couple of Asus Transformers T100TA-DK066H Atom Z3775 (1.5 to 2.4Ghz) Quad Core Processor, 10.1″ HD Touch Screen, Microsoft Windows 8.1, 2GB DDR3 RAM, 32GB SSD + 500GB HDD.

The HDD is in the keyboard so not available in tablet mode, but it has an SD card slot in the screen. You could not call it a performer but for some quick office work it’s OK. They really wanted a tablet like device to take into council meetings that could access the council’s sharepoint servers, so it sort of chose itself give the budget they don’t have. It would drive you nuts.

Personally I still think Lenovo make the best “road warrior” machines. If you want flash get the Zenbook, Spectre or Macbook.

[Dave Rice]

I think you have the short list right.

From what I’ve seen of the Surface with the keyboards they are nicely made and worth considering.

[Dave Rice]

Alan, the location of the problem isn’t the issue. It’s the recovery plan.

I notice some very careful wording in use already.  “Alex Cruz has said the root cause of Saturday’s London flight-grounding IT systems ambi-cockup was “a power supply issue. They have all been local issues around a local data centre who has been managed and fixed by local resources,” he said.”

I’m sure that sparkies were not flown in from Mumbai and again that isn’t the issue. BA should be able to lose an entire data centre just like that. We know they have two in the UK, both near Heathrow Waterside, and I can’t believe both were taken out. I find it unbelievable that even 1 can be taken out by a power issue TBH.

I suspect that some old systems from various sources being glued together by people who have now left will be at the centre of it.

[Dave Rice]

Cash flow. Tell me about it! The smaller businesses generally pay on the nose or smack on 30 days.

Larger ones and Govt institutions can really mess you about. Sometimes it’s policy, mostly it’s a don’t give a shit attitude.

[Dave Rice]

It wasn’t really aimed at a solution for you Ed, I don’t know your circumstances – every job begins with a survey.

It was more to point out that there are innovative solutions out there now that don’t cost the earth. With UniFi (and probably Auranet) once you have your site set up adding APs is as simple as adopting them. Whereas with the more usual home solution you have to configure each device separately. The new “mesh” home units take a lot of that away too, but come with their own gotchas like double NAT and trying to find a wired printer from a wireless client (it’s because they set up their own IP subnet and the “master” unit is in fact a router).

[Dave Rice]

I’ve used lots of WD Blues over the years, but this last year or so I’ve been mainly buying Toshiba internal HDD, SSD and external HDD (Canvio).

A 1TB Canvio lives permanently in my work bag.

[Dave Rice]

If you bought a real cheap one John they would have been refurbished. You can check the warranty status by putting the serial number in here. If it’s in warranty (doubtful) then follow the process to RMA it.

Amazon is often a good place to buy things if you know what it is you’re buying. I do my research elsewhere and then see if Amazon can do it any better.

So, hard drives for a P5G41T-M LX. Good news is it’s SATA. I use E-Buyer as they stock proper mainstream kit. Sort hard drives by price and for £36 we can get a Toshiba P300 500GB 3.5” SATA High-Performance Hard Drive. SATA 6.0 Gbit/s Interface, 7200RPM, 64MB Cache. Ticks all the boxes.

Have a look on Amazon and it’s exactly the same price.

Now have a look at 500GB HDDs on Amazon and ask yourself how anyone can sell one for £12 or even £25. There is no such thing as a “generic” hard drive, there’s only 3 manufacturers (Toshiba, WD, Seagate).

[Dave Rice]

I’d get them to drop some fibre rather than copper. Even now switches with 10GbE aren’t horrendously expensive. The TP-LINK T1700G-28TQ 24-Port Smart managed Stackable Gigabit Switch w/ 4x 10GbE SFP+ Ports is £264

There are some interesting new bits of hardware coming out to bring managed wireless to hard to reach areas via any Cat 5 you have. I’ve already talked at length about Ubiquiti APs and their ability to create a single unified network via many devices. Well there are now “In-Wall” WiFi PoE Access Point (150Mbps N) £60  and 1200Mbps AC (300Mbps+887Mbps) for £103 (needs POE+).

TP-Link do similar products that use their Auranet Controller Software and the prices look similar.

[Dave Rice]

There won’t be the broadcasting resources. Apparently the Japanese have managed to transmit UDHTV a whole 2.6 miles over UHF.

“After compression (NHK has developed a special codec for Super Hi-Vision), the entire stream clocks in at around 500Mbps. To put this into perspective, a 1080p TV channel signal (over the air) is around 10Mbps. The new 802.11ac WiFi standard can reach similar speeds (500Mbps), but over tens of meters — not 4.2km.”

Let’s face it there’s not much 4K about at the moment and people aren’t finding it as spectacular in real life as those carefully crafted demos in John Lewis.

[Dave Rice]

I can’t see why not.

[Dave Rice]

Nope. Cat 5e is perfectly good for Gigabit. Gigabit (1000BASE-T) is nothing new, it came into use in 1999 and Cat 6 wasn’t defined until 2002. There is even a 2016 standard 802.3bz that defines 2.5 Gbit/s up to at least 100 m of Cat 5e.

The only reason ISPs use fibre is distance. It’s the need to increase the distance of new speed standards that push the cable specs. It’s 10GbE that pushed Cat 6, not 1000BASE-T. That 802.3bz standard I mentioned allows for 5Gbit/s on Cat 6, but when are you going to need such speeds at home?

The home is all about wireless these days anyway. If you’re looking to get infrastructure in IMO it’s 802.11AC standard you should be looking at. Granted, like me, it’s going to involve some Cat 5e somewhere but as a backbone not to a wall socket.

[Dave Rice]

If you read the comments in the El Reg article there are some plausible scenarios where a power supply failure could trip a series of events. But of course the process design should never let that happen and that process should be properly tested. I have witnessed at first hand the fear of throwing the off switch and that has to be down to the culture.

I think the “brain split” scenario may well turn out to be the right answer, but we’ll never know.

[Dave Rice]

I gave up slipstreaming after XP. The amount of effort involved is greater than the sum of installing everything individually. Apps and drivers will be updated faster than you need to do reinstalls. Usually the first thing and out of date driver or app will do is get you to update it thus taking twice as long. It’s only of any use if you have lots of identical installations to do.

Ninite is a great resource for installing many common apps in one go https://ninite.com/ Everything else I download afresh from the OEM. In these days of fast broadband and PCs it really doesn’t take that long.

[Dave Rice]

Much less impartial than the management, believe me. I’ve been on the inside of outsourcing and it’s ALL about money.

The customer wants to save money and defers the pain / politics of redundancy and off shoring to someone else. The outsource company is after the assets, they don’t make money on the core contract. Both parties then only invest as little as possible, usually only in some shiny new things like apps that still run on the old core infrastructure.

It could well be a power supply issue that’s started a chain of events. But clearly it should never have happened. I have known a real case where a generator failover test failed because the diesel had been drained from it’s tank by the H&S brigade who didn’t tell IT. That was the London H&Q of a then Govt institution and thankfully would not have ground the business to a halt. All of my server rooms had a room UPS but they were never serviced or the batteries replaced (this was not in defence I hasten to add).

[Dave Rice]

Cat 6 needs specific crimping tools and RJ45 plugs because it’s thicker. I do not own either.

For any RJ45 plug you should also be using a strain relief boot to avoid an over tight bend unless you absolutely cannot. Some equipment, like APs, don’t have the room to accommodate them but they contain the last inch or more of the cable inside themselves so do the same job. Getting cables around bends and through restricted spaces is where it’s all at.

If anyone wants to put themselves through the extra pain and expense of Cat 6 then good luck to you, but you’ll gain absolutely nothing.

[Dave Rice]

It takes a while for the installer to catch up. What I do on a fresh install is install whatever version the media creator is at (usually quite quick on an SSD) and then run the Update Assistant straight away.

If you’re having problems with the Update Assistant crashing out that indicates some fundamental issues in your Windows installation. I’ve had this a few times and you can either go down the clean install & update or try a reset & update. I’ve found reset & update does do the same job, probably because that’s what it’s meant to ? The good thing about reset is no need to download the media creator ISO first.

[Author]

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