[Dave Rice]

The white box doesn’t contain any credentials, I know of no way to access them. AFAIK it just presents the VDSL as an Ethernet connection.

They were a stop gap until VDSL modems became common in routers. When you get a VDSL router there is no point in keeping them. All it does it use up an Ethernet port.

[Dave Rice]

There are no credentials required. With or without the white box it’s set up the same way, a VDSL MPoA dynamic IP connection.

The difference is with the white box you assign one of the ethernet connections as the WAN port rather than the RJ11.

EDIT – to clarify, I’m talking TT and this is my connection. Other ISPs may use different protocols. BT I know needs a name / pw but it is generic.

EDIT 2 here’s a BT PPPoE / PPPoA setup.

[Dave Rice]

Well there’s a review of routers in this weeks PC Pro  and it’s confirmed my view that splitting the router and WiFi is the best way to go.

The best router there, costing £400, couldn’t match the WiFi capabilities of my £95 Ubiquiti AC1300 AP (although it came close). A £40 TP-LINK TD-W9970 router will do what most would want out of the broadband side, that is make a secure connection and provide local DHCP & DNS. Link them together with a £25 quality 5 port gigabit switch and you have a network to take on all comers and all flavours of internet connectivity.

[Dave Rice]

Steve, any decent make xDSL ac1200+ WiFi will do what you want. You can junk the open reach white box too.

Asus still have a very good name.

[Dave Rice]

Ed, it happens on the boot screens, no o/s is involved. When I’ve seen this before it’s a particular mode the chipset can’t handle any more. Last one I had was 2d OK, 3d not. It was only 15 months old.

[Dave Rice]

I’m in a travel lodge at the moment (Tower Hill). I use a 3 Huawei E5573 these days then I know I can connect what I want in the way I want. £23 for 12gb sim that lasts up to a year (from my memory) but you can get contract too.

[Dave Rice]

2 x Pack of Arctic Cooling F12 120mm £8.97 http://tinyurl.com/y7pwbdns

[Dave Rice]

I had a Lenovo with a similar issue and it is the graphics hardware not coping with certain modes.

[Dave Rice]

I suspect it’s something flash related.

[Dave Rice]

Yes and no. It’s not in event of no deal, it’s got to happen otherwise every single law will have to be brought back in individually. Clearly there is no time for that and most of it we’d want as is any way.

You have to remember that countries can add to the EU rules as we do with things like Health & Safety. Go to a Belgian hotel, you’ll find electrical switches and sockets in the bathroom. They can also create laws (or trade) where it’s not covered by an EU rule. The deals Cameron & Osborne did with China fall into that category.

The objections are over two things the Govt has slipped in to the bill:

• “Henry the 8th powers” which would allow ministers to change laws without going though parliament. I don’t think even the EU has that power. It also doesn’t fit with bringing back parliamentary sovereignty (which never went away anyway).
• Some of the laws are currently devolved to Scotland and Wales (probably N.I. too) but Westminster isn’t going to pass them on. It’s to allow consistency across the UK apparently, which seems total bollocks.

As usual MPs take the piss. They propose something that on the face of it seems reasonable and makes sense, then twist it to obtain more power for themselves. They all do it, always have, always will. By the time you get to vote them out it’s too late.

[Dave Rice]

I’m afraid Ed that Brexiteers will only listen when the shit is hitting the fan and even then they’ll say it isn’t their shit nor their fan.

[Dave Rice]

I would be fairly certain each card has a single controller.

[Dave Rice]

TBH Ed I won’t be straining them that hard.

Now the i5 laptop has 12GB of ram it was only being held back by a 120GB SSD which just wasn’t enough for anything of any size or multiple VMs.

Just found an interesting snippet on heavy disk i/o here http://tinyurl.com/yacqvr2v

Contrary to popular belief (if you’re a nerd like me), Windows OS does I/O queueing by disk controller, not by drive. So do the hypervisors – all of them, KVM included (what’s underneath many of the hypervisors out there if it’s not VMware or Hyper-V). By adding additional disk controllers for VMs that are incredibly heavy with I/O demand, we provide more I/O queues for Windows to leverage to independently channel the I/O out of the OS. The hypervisor works in a similar manner, and with both of these in place, we can reduce the latency induced inside Windows and the hypervisor and improve performance. You can see this on very hungry for I/O VMs by looking at Windows Perfmon disk latency metrics, and compare them with the hypervisor-layer metrics. You’ll notice that during heavy I/O windows, Windows will probably show greater latency to disk per drive than the hypervisor reports. This is the Windows layer queueing up and delaying the I/O requests slightly.

So, do your testing and due diligence on your particular environment, and if you find that spreading out your workload among multiple drive controllers improves your performance, make it your standard!

[Dave Rice]

It’s yesterdays technology now. USB 3 has seen it off.

Earlier I cloned my laptops’s 120GB SSD to a larger one via a <£10 USB 3 caddy in less than half-an-hour.

[Dave Rice]

It was from Byte I learned about vertical and horizontal interrupts on the Atari 400 / 800.

With a bit of assembler you could change the value of a colour during the horiztonal interrupt i.e. the time between line 1 being drawn and line 2 being drawn etc So what was red on line 1 would be blue on line 2. You could do some interesting animation effects, like waterfalls or scrolling landscapes, and appear to have many more colours than you actually had.

[Dave Rice]

Does this help? The formula in Column B is shown in C.

Excuse the typo, I moved things about. It’s A1 not A4

[Dave Rice]

Might as well just run a cable outside of the case, that’s all this is really doing. This will not solve the hot swap issue, that’s down to the motherboard, nor will it supply power.

[Dave Rice]

Looks like they track E-Buyer, it’s now the same price.

Mine arrived this morning, just decrypting the laptop drive ready for cloning. I can then get into some serious virtual machine tinkering.

[Dave Rice]

There’s a 480GB for £69.99 http://tinyurl.com/y8q8chtf

Quite tempted by that one.

EDIT – temptation was too much ?

[Dave Rice]

It’s not like USB, it’s like SATA. It’s basically like running a SATA cable from your motherboard.

What that means is that drives may not be hot swapable i.e. you may not be able to just plug them in like you do a USB drive. You would hope a laptop was a hot swap port though.

 

[Author]

Posts