[Dave Rice]

Have a look at the HP OfficeJet Pro 7740 A3 Colour Inkjet, I know someone who has the A4 equivalent and is very happy with it. It’s currently £128, which seems very reasonable, but there’s £60 cash back and a 3 year warranty. Printing costs with the XL cartridges is reasonable too.

Lasers you’re looking at £650 after £150 cashback and 50% higher running costs for a Xerox monster. To get running costs down to inkjet levels you’re talking £1200+

[Dave Rice]

You’ve got an Android phone, so get yourself the free WiFi Analyzer – we use it all the time for WiFi surveys.

As it says in the reviews it’s not a “real time” analyzer (nothing is) and takes a few seconds between updates, but wandering around mobile in hand isn’t how you do surveys anyway 😉

The Channel Graph mode will show you all the SSIDs in the area and what channel they are on so will help you to force a channel if the auto function of the router / AP picks a crowded one. Use the Signal Meter mode to look at your own SSID.

Strive for perfection by all means, but anything in the middle of the yellow zone (-70db) will do you just fine. Then you have 2.4Ghz vs 5GHz. I’ll let my Ubiquiti controller do the talking…

This is sorted by Ubiquiti’s WiFi “experience” rating and as you can see pure dbm isn’t the be all and end all as it’s a mix of a lot of things.

Basically, in the real world it’s fast enough then don’t worry about it.

[Dave Rice]

Don’t look at the headline price for the printer, it’s the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) that counts. The last printers I’ve bought came with fully loaded cartridges, not the “starter” ones. It makes one hell of a difference even in the first year of ownership. Your first set of carts could cost more than the printer.

Dell especially suck people in with cheap start up then bloody expensive ownership. HP Inkjets are definitely worth considering too. Quality these days is right up there and HP Instant Ink, whilst it’s a subscription service, is a very good deal with no tie ins and good flexibility – all managed through the cloud with the printer feeding stats back automatically.

Give me a day or two and I’ll have a look, but some idea of how many pages / month will help immensely.

[Dave Rice]

I would be surprised if the TPL router didn’t cover that area. Hold onto your wallet for a bit.

If it doesn’t work I’d go for the TP-Link TL-WPA4220KIT. Basically the same but with Wi-Fi at the other end as well as 2 Ethernet sockets and the same price.

I used one in an awkward house and it worked a treat. It has a WiFi clone button to make set up easy peasy. Speeds were so good I’ve for gotten what they were! It’s servicing a PC, laptop and wireless printer in a SOHO set up.

[Dave Rice]

One thing I’ve found is that you can’t change the DNS server in the DHCP server settings. Not a huge problem for most people and if you’re running a PiHole to get rid of adverts, get it to do the DHCP server duties too.

[Dave Rice]

My general rule of thumb is if you can connect it by wire do so. the only place this now applies is my workshop, however I do run an Ethernet cable from there to the loft where the AP is mounted. That cable and the Gigabit switch it connects to are the backbone of my network.

I agree with Richard, now we have AC WiFi it’s fast enough for me to shovel huge files between my laptop and the servers without feeling it’s too slow (although of course it’s slower than wired). That doesn’t mean you should rush out and buy an AC AP. If all you’re doing is access the internet your ISP will be the bottleneck and 300N will do you just as well. If you only have a handful of concurrent devices then the ISP’s router will probably do the job.

Having said that, Plusnet’s are usually dreadful and BT’s Hubs are buggy. I used a £35 TD-W9970 VDSL 300N at my cousins B&B. It’s been faultless and the secure guest WiFi covers the 3 storey Victorian house no problem.

[Dave Rice]

I have the B535 myself, I was thinking of replacing it at some stage because I wanted a router with more “business” features, like a VPN server. But I think I’ll now let the Synology NAS do the VPN and DHCP duties and keep it as it’s been rock solid.

As you can see getting the ultimate speed out of a 4G signal can take a bit of experimentation with location, but even then it never went below the low teens and the TV was quite happy with catch up services no matter what. I understand this isn’t so much the router but 4G itself and the speed has hardly wavered in it’s new location.

[Dave Rice]

Held the phone near the router and it got low 40’s compared to the router’s low 10’s. Hmm. Turned the router 90 degrees and a bit better.

Ended up wedging the router in the rafters with it’s back roughly towards where the mast is:

That’ll do me for now, better than the DSL line. I’ll get more picky when the final solution goes in. Next step is to make it the default internet connection for the house. I want to change the internal IP addressing so it’s time to start planning.

[Dave Rice]

I did have a peak at chillblast and pc specialist. The extra £ goes on the case and Psu. They still use the same motherboard, ram, storage etc. Still not a bad thing to spend your money on!

[Dave Rice]

The budget is going to dictate what sort of games and what settings he can play. You’ll be looking at an i3 / i5 or Ryzen 5 with a GTX 1650.

Probably not worth building yourself when E-Buyer have this for £499:

AMD Ryzen 5 2400G 3.6Ghz
8GB, 1TB HDD, 240GB SSD
NVIDIA GTX1650 4GB
WIFI + Windows 10 Home
3 Year Warranty

Or this Intel i5 version that lacks the SSD but has a “better” CPU:

Intel Core i5-9400F 2.9Ghz
8GB DDR4 + 1TB HDD
NVIDIA GTX 1650 4GB
WIFI, Windows 10 Home
3 Year Warranty

[Dave Rice]

I still know people who refuse to go near a Google account because of spying. I say it’s futile, it’s happening anyway, you might as well get something for nothing, you’re already paying the price. Amazingly most have Android phones but can’t make the connection…

As for “what happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone”, ROFL.

[Dave Rice]

These issues can often be down to DNS. Change the DNS server to 8.8.8.8 and see what happens.

If you’re changing it in the routers DHCP settings, devices will need to disconnect and reconnect to pick up the new settings.

[Dave Rice]

I moved it into the loft, made no difference. I’ve heard that chasing a 4G signal is like nailing a jelly to the wall.

I may be getting signals bouncing off other roofs, or the tiles are an issue, or I’ve just got it in the wrong place and the gable wall is blocking things. May just need turning through 90 degrees. Hey ho, it’s staying there now and I’ll play with it as and when, maybe get the compass out.

There’s plenty of places to put it including even higher up as there’s some (loose) boards up in the rafters from when they put the TV aerial up. That’s the beauty of the loft, I have the whole house footprint to play with, an Ethernet going to the workshop on the ground floor and the house WAP mounted under the floor (top landing ceiling).

I’ve been looking at VOIP to replace the landline and it looks like I can get an unlimited package for a tenner a month that includes the mobile. Being a “business” service it comes with all the bells and whistles of answer phones, redirection, etc. I’d be spending some £ to up the Mrs mobile contract anyway and she prefers a handset when yacking to the family, it also looks good on the business contact details.

[Dave Rice]

I get the same issue with fibre and a lot of disconnections.

Just looked up cellmapper.net to find I’m not on the mast I thought I was, it’s the other side of the house! Going to move the router, see what happens.

 

[Dave Rice]

Looks good.

Don’t beat yourself up on ram specs, you can only see the difference in benchmarks. I go for the best bang per buck which lately has been Corsair Vengeance LPX 3000MHz, but rams pretty cheap so going for the extra mhz isn’t onerous.

IMO the best NVMe are the Adata XPG SX8200 Pro range. Very fast and reasonably priced. Get a 256GB one, no bigger, then use AMD’s StoreMI Technology to combine it with a spinner. It appears as one large drive and the software keeps the most used sectors on the SSD. Works a treat and it’s free.

The 3900X comes with a Wraith Prism cooler which is damn good. If you feel you need more, for say serious overclocking then I’ve abandoned air for closed loop liquid coolers. Much easier to deal with and often cheaper. I’ve not found the need for anything over a 120 radiator and they’ll fit most cases.

Cases, very personal but the P180 is looking very old fashioned now. All those HDD bays getting in the way and staying empty. Decent cable management is now a feature of most cases. I use the Betfenix Nova series but my favourite are the Phanteks. The following pictures are of builds very similar to yours.

This is a Phantek Eclipse, the HDDs are front loading at the bottom. As you can see keeping it tidy is easy.

These are Bitfenix Novas, cable management not so good as it’s more of a traditional layout (like the P180) but a metal side so it’s not going to be seen. This was before the GPU was installed, an RX570, a bit messy at the HDD and motherboard connectors end.

Different build (Intel not AMD) but similar specs and an RX580. A lot easier to keep tidy with an MATX mobo.

[Dave Rice]

I’ve always thought it’s the fish that will go. “Fishing” is nowhere near as easy as people think it is, there is no such thing as a single British fishing industry. We export a lot of what we catch because we don’t eat it and vice versa. Shellfish to the EU (mostly France and Spain) counts for 25% of all fish exports (and 80% of the shellfish) , they’re caught by small scale outfits here in the West Country and Scotland. What do they do if that market is compromised? You can’t just change species like that, it’s like telling a carpenter they’ll be brickies from now on, it’s all the building trade isn’t it?

Plus the public don’t give a flying fig about fishing, mostly they have no idea where anything in the supermarket actually comes from, they just want what they want to be there and to be cheap. They can understand the concept of a massive factory shutting though and so can the media.

[Dave Rice]

It’s behind you!

[Dave Rice]

I just have a tub I tip left over screws and bolts into. I always use the motherboard box to pass on any manuals / documentation / warranty cards and I used to put the left overs in there saying “keep this safe, it’ll be useful if we need to do any work at a later date”.

They always lose the box and never do the warranty stuff so I just register everything in their name now with a new email account, which I also set up in whatever email client is on the new device. Even though I tell them all about it and may even show them, I usually get a phone call about strange emails appearing <sigh>.

In the case of laptops, HP and Lenovo will offer you very good extended warranty terms and prompt you to deal with emergency patches and BIOS updates. Just had one from Lenovo myself about some Intel exploit they’ve fixed.

[Dave Rice]

Sir Bedevere:
…and that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana shaped.

King Arthur:
This new learning amazes me, Sir Bedevere. Explain again how sheep’s bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes.

Marvelous.

[Dave Rice]

I got a Manfrotto MTPIXI-B, PIXI Mini Tripod with Handgrip as when it’s on you can, as it says, use it as a handgrip. That helps handheld too.

Rather defeats the idea of getting the TZ70 😀 which was to have a pocketable camera, but I only take it with me if I’m going out at night to deliberately get some shots. Geneva springs to mind as it was after that I got it. The Panasonic has an Android and iOS app which makes shooting with it a lot easier. I can put it down wherever needed then move myself to a more comfortable place.

 

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