[Dave Rice]

Boris is desperate to have anything that makes us look like a player, sign up at any cost.

The Liz Truss copy and paste trade deals have exclusions about Freeports in them, oops. But the re-adoption of the imperial measurement system will smooth the way with Liberia and Myanmar, the Murcans of course having their own idea of imperial.

I see that in PMQs Boris said he wants to encourage high wages and high skills. The cabbage pickers of Cornwall will be delighted. In a FB discussion with a mate who says that Brits must do these jobs now, I asked him which one of his children he thought should aspire to a career in the fields as opposed to going to University or following him into the Police. No answer of course because it’s always NIMBY.

 

[Dave Rice]

John, I have two AMD CPUs here with pins so bent I actually killed one attempting to straighten them. So I’ll decline the chance to screw up another bit of kit with a needle 🙂

Yes the motherboard can use your M2 SSD, I don’t know why they don’t use them, saving a few £ I expect. Your M2 drive is advertised as “gaming” as it’s ideal for that, but it’s nothing special, just very quick.

By all means use it, but to make your life easier unplug the 2.5″ SSD before you install Windows so you know you’re installing to the right one! After Windows is running you can plug it back in and use it as extra storage or put it on E-Bay. IIRC it was a well known make, they don’t sell crap ones anyway.

[Dave Rice]

I bought an AMD one for a customer a few month ago when CPU were hard to get hold of. Absolutely fine.

[Dave Rice]

Amazon are a very good source of refurbished machines, search for Amazon Renewed. However you are unlikely to get anything that will be capable of W11.

Another option is to buy a motherboard bundle, CCL do lots of them. That way you get the tricky CPU installation done and you still get to build it yourself.

Option 3 is a mini PC, I’m using lots of them commercially. They are quite hard to get your hands on at the moment, only the extreme ends available – Celerons of i7 / R7.

Option 4 let me assemble what you have and supply a new motherboard, or if you’ve sent it all back I’ll build whatever you want and put Windows and other software on there if you wish. The difference if I do it compared to one of the shops is you’ll be getting exactly what you want and not from a list of parts. I’m not going to charge you for doing it and you’ll get whatever warranty is on the parts rather than a basic year.

[Dave Rice]

MSI games orientated motherboards, like the Mortar, include a heatsink. As do some of the faster M2’s, but I forget which ones!

[Dave Rice]

I’ve just been building a couple of PN50’s (I love them) and one had a dodgy HDMI port so had to go back. I wasn’t sure if it was the cable or the port, so once I’d got a stable picture I did install W10 and all the software.

Once I realised it was the port, I immediately disassembled it to put the M2 drive into the other and boy was that hot! I also get regular warnings from Syspectr on clients PCs about SSDs getting toasty, and that’s in normal sized cases. Might be worth installing it as you can have a remote peek at the temps when it’s fully loaded.

You should be able to set the fan profile to a more aggressive setting in the BIOS, but if it’s regularly 100% probably not much point.

[Dave Rice]

Every SSD I’ve had fail (not many and none for a good while) is an obvious bin job so I’ve not had to do this. I do use HDD Scan for generic testing of HDDs and it supports SSDs too, but to what extent I don’t know. Free and worth a go.

[Dave Rice]

That’s made my mind up. Photoshop on the way.

[Dave Rice]

It is an authorised reseller called Buy Kingston. It is a registered company in England & Wales that’s based in Halifax and it’s been about for 11 years. They have a better Trust Pilot rating than Kingston themselves.

I’m finding deliveries are generally taking a day or two longer, so I wouldn’t panic just yet. They do have a contact form on the website.

[Dave Rice]

Thanks Ed

[Dave Rice]

Yes that’ll do it. I believe the extra pins are only needed if there is a monster power guzzling CPU.

[Dave Rice]

I think you’re worrying too much 🙂

I think the dots are there to cushion the screw head from crushing the mobo.

[Dave Rice]

Phtoshop? Tempted myself.

[Dave Rice]

Onboard graphics of a modern CPU are still fine for anything but gaming, and the new AMDs are making inroads into that. For i3 and above, the UHD630 graphics are better than the GT710 cards, so if you want a bit better the next step up is the GT 1030 2GB at £70 – £75. And it’s a big step up, much more than you need for the desktop but still not enough for gaming. However it does give a boost to games like Civilization 5 and anything that can use a graphics card for specialist processing.

The difference between an i3 10105F and a non F is £52, so that’s a big chunk of the cost but it’s not essential and you must makes sure you get the DDR4 model and not the rubbish DDR2 models that are being peddled about. MSI and Gigabyte are the ones to look for and I use the passively cooled versions.

There is nothing Ryzen with o/b graphics at the moment and in any case the latest Intel’s are just as good as CPUs. The AMD graphics are between the UHD630 and a GT1030, so there really is no point in buying a discrete card. In the Mini PC world the Asus AMD series are much better VFM than the Intel NUCs or Gigabyte Brix never mind the better graphics. If you can get your hands on any of them!

[Dave Rice]

This customer has five desktops; 2nd, 3rd and 4th generation Intel’s, nothing more than an i3, and a J2xxx Pentium SoC which is just past any hope. Only one has an SSD, so the HDDs are well into end of life territory. The boss also has a 13″ Elitebook with a 3rd gen i5, 8GB and an SSD, but that is only used on customer visits.

All their self generated data is stored on a Synology NAS and in this last year we have worked out a WFH model that suits them, just the one last big LOB app to be migrated to the Cloud and we can wave goodbye to the VPN. They are moving to a hybrid office / home model at the moment. First day back in the office yesterday – no BT phones working. That’s convinced them to move to VOIP which has been faultless during WFH and of course extremely flexible.

Given their work cycle, this time of year is the only quiet time they have to do major business changes, so I have to plan around that. Everything must be running smoothly by October 1st as after that they will be flat out for months, so it’s an annual 4 week window. Therefore W11 will be Sept 2022 at the earliest, probably 2023, maybe 2024 with an old estate and limited funds (wholesale replacement not an option).

So I need to keep it all capable of reliably running W10, Office and their LOB software at a decent pace for maybe two years. Take 8GB+ and an SSD as a given whatever the CPU and, although everything is subjective, I’ve found that  CPU Benchmark is a good yardstick with a Desktop Score in the late 70% or more being a good target to aim at.  So I’ve just ordered appropriate i5 CPUs from E-Bay for £20 – £30 each and 250GB SSDs for £30 each. All but one have 8GB of ram and the Pentium J will be donating that.

To replace the Pentium J and to provide a WFH PC for the boss, I’ve gone back to the Asus Mini PC that I used so successfully on my last big project, with 8GB of DDR4 3200 and a Corsair MP510 NVMe PCIe x4 Gen3. He’s grown to love dual monitors whilst WFH and this will support 4 x 4K as well as zipping along. That also gives us two W11 capable machines on which to trial solutions, especially the WFH PC, when the time comes.

The joys of supporting small businesses. Much more satisfying than working in Corporates.

[Dave Rice]

Try here

[Dave Rice]

You only need 1 fan John. If it came with the case it’ll be set up in the right direction which blowing out if it’s on the back or blowing in if it’s on the front. Adding fans can muck up the airflow and compared to older PCs, this thing won’t be running hot anyway.

Don’t worry if you miss a screw on the motherboard mounting, we’ve all done it. Believe me, when I’m scrapping old PCs the single screw I’ve forgotten to undo is enough to keep it secure!

[Dave Rice]

Either, but use the one next to the graphics card slot, it will keep cooler. I believe the mobo comes with a heatsink that just sticks to the drive. Not essential but helps. The tiny screw will be in a small bag in the mobo box, don’t drop it on the floor, you’ll never find it again 🙂

Any questions ask away but it sounds like you’re getting on with it OK. It’s my favourite thing to do. I have a couple of new PCs coming up for a customer, but they’re barebones Asus Minis, not the same. However I’m upgrading the CPUs, ram and SSD on three of their old PCs to see them through to this time next year when we can think about W11 and more new PCs. Almost as good as building.

[Dave Rice]

I’m still very meh about the whole thing. As long as it will be a free upgrade from 10 to 11 I’m going to keep my business customers on 10 for a year or so to let the dust settle.

[Dave Rice]

Should do.

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