[Dave Rice]

An aside on boot drives. I know he has a 1TB SSD but I would still buy an NVMe drive as well as the difference is palpable and they are really cheap now.

The motherboard is PCIe 4 but it’s M2 slot is still only PCIe 3. TBH that really won’t make any real world difference worth talking about.

250GB is my favourite size for a system drive and the Crucial P2 250GB is my go to. Decent speeds, 5 year warranty, £28. But the sweet spot is now 500GB with even the mighty Western Digital Blue SN570 down to £42 and the 1TB £72.

[Dave Rice]

It never ceases to amaze me how incompetent some large organisations are. That’s not just my Defense Industry experience, we were just as diligent at the Post Office too. But that was then, I dread to think what it’s like now it’s been out sourced to the lowest bidder over two decades (this isn’t Royal Mail systems I’m talking about BTW).

[Dave Rice]

I used Zorin Lite on an old Celeron laptop, that uses XFCE too and is very pretty. Runs like a champ on a £16 120GB SSD but it’s new owner is only using it to record his drum practice with Audacity.

I did fire up Libre Office and it seemed perfectly usable.

[Dave Rice]

Sorry, been in Cornwall for family things. I’ve been looking at Beelink and Minis Forum https://amz.run/66Q7 and they are attractive propositions. I’ve used a lot of mini PCs in office settings.

For the more traditional PC, I’ve been looking at them too and graphics are the big issue. Even the basic graphics cards are still silly money and that has pushed up the price of CPUs with onboard graphics too.

Your entry level AMD is now the Ryzen 5 4600G 6 Cores,12 Threads and £115. Intel are worse, Core i3 10100 (2 generations behind), 4 Cores 8 Threads, are £145. The latest Core i3 12100 12th Gen is £162 and I have build a system using one (but not at that price) earlier in the year and it is stupidly fast.

However the latest 12th Gen Pentium Gold G7400 is what we would have called an i3 with it’s 2 Cores 4 Threads and is only £75. The onboard graphics are capable of running 4 monitors. The Pentium Gold benchmarks +25% over the Ryzen 5 3500H you’ll typically find in the mini PCs and is not a corner cutting compromise.

This is a £275 E-Buyer shopping list using my current favourite case, my Ryzen 5 4600G system lives in one, but there are plenty of other cases out there. I tried a screenshot of the case but the Forum isn’t having it.

CIT S503 2 x USB 2.0 2 x USB 3.0 Micro ATX Desktop Case 758995 £34.49 £34.49
CWT 300W TFX power supply 1142138 £34.98 £34.98
Intel Pentium Gold G7400 2 Core Alder Lake Processor 1414621 £70.98 £70.98
Gigabyte H610M H DDR4 mATX Motherboard 1415439 £81.77 £81.77
2 x Crucial RAM CT8G4DFRA266 8GB DDR4 2666 MHz CL19 Desktop Memory 1128689 £23.99 £47.98

 

[Dave Rice]

Yep, Draytek and port VLANs are the simplest way to do it. Isolate the IoT subnet but allow the main subnet access to it.

You still have the issue of WiFi separation, but Draytek SSIDs are also part of the port VLAN matrix. So you could allocate subnet 1 to Port 1 and SSID 1 and subnet 2 to Port 2 and SSID 2.

This is my design for a customers home network to keep his work and home separate but all accessible by him. The secondary WiFi access point is a Draytek unit that is capable of Mesh with other Draytek units.

The matrix is quite easy, just associate a port or SSID with a VLAN and subnet.

Then you set up the interlan routing.

He has a Vigor2762ac but we haven’t added the secondary WiFi yet as his building extension is on indefinite hold. But adding them is easy, they just pick up the settings.

 

 

[Dave Rice]

Windows caches all sorts of things when it has access to large amounts of ram. It can be hard to tell what’s actually going on, but browsers are turning into hogs. Chrome is almost a VM these days.

[Dave Rice]

No it has no modem. For Virgin you’d just put their box in modem mode then connect an Ethernet cable to the WAN port.

For Openreach xDSL connections it depends, but modem mode is quite rare. The Vigor 130 does just this, it totally replaces your ISP kit (not Sky though) and has an Ethernet out, so it’s a convertor if you like. You put your ISP user ID and password into the Belkin. I’ve not seen any BT full fibre kit so no idea there, but my Virgin router is exactly the same. I suspect the Openreach kit is too.

[Dave Rice]

ED – some are dished out randomly, some in order, but randomly makes more sense. You could expand the subnet to gain an extra 256 IPs. Change your subnet to 255.255.254.0, so your range would now be say 192.168.1.0 to 192.168.2.255, then expand the pool into it.

But you shouldn’t be running out of IP addresses so it’s probably the lease time. The default is usually 24 hours, but I’ve seen some a lot longer (and shorter). Try setting it to 6 hours. The IP address of a device won’t change unless it renews it outside of this time frame (it will try at half the time) and then only if something else has taken the IP.

So the request isn’t “can I have an IP address please”? it’s actually “can I continue using XYZ”? That’s why random lessens the chance of an IP address being used elsewhere, not that it really matters.

Drezha – welcome to the wacky world of WiFi. Your router shouldn’t be running out of ram to hold the NAT tables etc. which can happen with older routers and the new idea of connect everything including the kitchen sink. Neither should the WAX204 barf at that number of connections.

TBH I wouldn’t worry about the Zigbee and Synology interfering with each other and I think you should have a separate subnet for IoT devices if you can. The issue can be that the controller (an app on a phone or Alexa) has to be on the same SSID as the devices, which is the case with my TP-Link Tapo kit. You could however connect an Alexa to the same IoT network and it would still be able to access the internet.

I don’t think the WAX can do this for you; the Synology can but I believe only through the Guest network (I may be wrong). It’s a piece of pi$$ for Draytek and Ubiquiti though, even in combination.

 

[Dave Rice]

Must be using IP V6 because with V4 you would definitely go nowhere.

[Dave Rice]

I agree, 32GB is no longer unusual. I now view 8GB as the minimum and 16GB for “power users” – people like me who don’t really do any gaming.

I also wouldn’t dream of anything less than a x4 NVMe in anything, but gaming PCs still get a thumping great spinner for their Steam library. But with a 2TB WD Green now down to £115 (cheaper than a 2.5″ SSD) and second NVMe slots becoming common, that may change. It’s pretty quick too.

[Dave Rice]

As mentioned in anther post, the Btrfs disk format guards against bit rot by being self healing. The easiest way to implement an archive using this is with a Synology +series NAS where it’s now the default.

The bundled Photo app is a pretty good Google Photos equivalent and supports facial recognition and geolocation awareness “find all photos of Aunty Jane in Paris in 2018”. The + series all have desktop class CPUs that make processing this sort of data easier. All Intel until this year, embedded Ryzen “V” are now found in the latest models.

[Dave Rice]

Could also be bit rot.

Synology are moving from EXT4 to Btrfs as it counteracts corruption with checksums on files. The file is checked when it’s accessed plus you can schedule a “Data Scrubbing” task. I do mine monthly in off hours (which you get to define). It’s marketed heavily at Wedding Photographers where apparently Bit Rot is a real issue.

[Dave Rice]

Hi Dave,

I was up in July for Harriets graduation, I could have given you a hand with the new PC 🙂

As for the busted drive, the temporary profile is easily fixed with the registry hack, works every time, but the question is why did it happen? It is possible it just needs the bootloader fixing, instructions are here but I suspect there’s a hardware problem with the drive that’s also caused the profile issue. I feel you should check that first.

The drive manufacturers drive diagnostics are what you need but IIRC WD Lifeguard isn’t fussy about working with other drives besides WD.

If you need a new docking station, I’ve been using one of the dual bay jobs £26. I’d never heard of Fideco before, but on the back of it I now have some USB NVMe drive caddies by them, all good.

 

[Dave Rice]

Probably a bad idea.

[Dave Rice]

I’m seeing Kath at the pub quiz later, I’ll get her to ask Natasha.

[Dave Rice]

I’d need to see a lot more before I could comment, but you should be able to delete it using these instructions.

[Dave Rice]

I thought I’d have a go at some chillies this year. Grew them on from some seedlings from a friend’s daughter. Not doing too badly, the first chillies were starting to grow from the many flowers.

Then a few days later the sister-in-law asked if she could park on our drive to get the metro bus into town.

First degree chillicide! She still doesn’t know to this day she parked on the pots, just drove off. Another couple of inches and she’d have been through next doors fence.

I have made a pork and chorizo chilli with a couple that ripened and they smelled like they were going to be hot, unfortunately not. So I’m leaving them now for as long as possible, but this week is probably as far as I dare go.

This is the recipe I based the chilli on, you’ll never go back to beef chilli again. I do mix the beans up with whatever is in the cupboard, Cannellini work well, and often leave the red peppers out. It’s nice with couscous rather than rice too and freezes wonderfully.

 

 

 

[Dave Rice]

It now appears that all the non K 13th will in fact be based on Alder Lake giving another boost to AMD. They of course started this game of using old tech in new ranges.

[Dave Rice]

I’m all for pint sized devices these days. But as you say, keeping this cool will be fun.

[Dave Rice]

Non RAID PCIe SATA cards are pretty cheap these days. £15 for a 2 port, £30 for 4.

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