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From Have I Got News For You:

‘As they are fined £42m for delayed high-speed cable installations, BT issues the following statement:’

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I like the idea of the facial recognition on the camera. Link it to Facebook and LinkedIn, and recognise the delivery driver  B-)

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Richard wrote:

Wow, I cannot draw the pretty pictures you can

You can now that you’ve got a smartphone  :yahoo:

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That’s a bit crowded! :wacko:  This is what Aberdare looks like:

The ZyXEL has literally just been turned on for the first time, while I was scanning for this post. What are the odds? :unsure:

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Dave Rice wrote:

Use the 120GB SSD for the system disk and the 1TB spinners for the data in whatever amount makes sense.  

This is what I’ve got, but with a 3TB spinner. The OS and any programs that take a while to open usually, like Photoshop are on the SSD, and everything else is installed to the spinner.

I’ve found that with older games like HL2 and GTA, they’ll run fine on the spinner. They load a big chunk of the map in one go, so it’s not too bad having a slightly longer loading time relatively rarely. Games that I play more often, or load maps more regularly go on the SSD though. I’ve got 16GB RAM too, so I keep meaning to try out a RAM drive for a smaller game*, and see how that goes.

 

*The free version only supports a 4GB drive

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Dave Rice wrote:

I’m surprised you got more speed out of the same fibre from a different ISP as it’s all the same Openreach product.

I’m guessing that it’s just down to crappy Sky hardware. I had to set up a Sky repeater in one end of the house because the signal would get really spotty, no problems since I’ve switched though, and a fraction of the dropouts I used to get from the tired old copper lines between us and the cabinet.

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Drezha wrote:

So it seems I can’t edit my original post. Vodafone looks reasonable – £31 for 76Mbps and only £1 setup fee. Better than the £32.50 and £107 setup fee that Plus Net are looking at!

I’ve recently switched to Vodafone and had no problems. I’ve gone for the 40Mb package, but because of my location I get about 15Mb. Still much better than Sky, who gave me 8 on a good day with nothing but the router changed

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Apologies for not coming back to this over the weekend, but my brother’s girlfriend had a baby on Friday  :yahoo:

I’ll try to have a play around tonight or tomorrow 🙂

 

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I use QR Droid:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=la.droid.qr&hl=en

It does ask for a few permissions, but like Duke says, it’s for the functionality. There’s a version that needs less permissions too, but I haven’t used that one.

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Thanks for the tips guys, and the link Dave 🙂

The dozy bugger went out and bought the laptop this morning before he spoke to me though! He was supposed to ring me to let me know when he was going as the staff in Currys tried to con him into buying Windows 10 yesterday  :wacko:

Never mind. For what he needs it’s still a decent deal, and I may end up getting Office just for the storage, so it’s all good:D

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Thanks both 🙂

The Sky router and any wifi extenders are now gone, with just the new Vodafone router plugged in. The computers are all now connected through wifi, but it’s made no difference to the speed compared to homeplugs, or both computers on the same switch with the router on a homeplug to it (just realised that I havent tried it wired with the new router yet). I use Windows Defender on all the systems, and they auto update drivers through Windows Update, but given that it’s wifi and ethernet, I suspect something else.

I’ve set some torrents running on the media system, and they’re running at full speed – roughly 1.5MB/s which I learned from a few years on the dark side as being about right for my roughly 15Mb/s fibre connection. I’ll try some torrents on this machine tomorrow and see what the speed is like, then start eliminating programs and changing hardware if it’s not up to speed.

I’ve got another media system in the other room, so I’ll also try a VNC session to the main media system to hopefully rule out either my main computer or the network :good:

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Sorry, you’ve just reminded me about this:

Dave Rice wrote:

I’m on Sky N. The only thing I have unticked is Wireless Isolation (can’t remember if it’s on by default). Wireless isolation just stops wireless clients from seeing each other, but they should be able to see wired. I’ve just logged onto the Sky SSID and deliberately disconnected the WAN. If the wireless had gone down too I wouldn’t be able to capture this.

With Sky, I could get to this maybe 50% of the time. As it is now, if the internet goes down I struggle to connect to the router at all. That’s been the same with both routers.

I didn’t post back last night as the baby woke up and decided that she wasn’t going to sleep until gone four :wacko: I couldn’t find anything that would explain the network dropping though. I did notice a different problem that I’d forgotten about thanks to the crappy Sky router:

My network speeds are crap around the house. I’ve got my computer and a media centre in the living room, and connections between them are really slow, whether it’s transferring files or using VNC. I used Homeplugs at first, then switched to wifi on both, and have even tried a wired connection through gigabit, and it’s made no difference. Last night I was copying a file to the media centre and was getting transfer rates of just over 1MB/s. I paused the transfer as it slowed the whole network to the point where it was unusable, and when I resumed it a few minutes later, it jumped to about 80MB/s with a peak of over 100MB/s, but only for around 30secs in total, as if the file had cached.

Is there something that could be slowing the network down that much from my computer? I’ve just done a quick test by using VNC to connect from my phone to another computer, and it seems faster than from my computer.

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Fairy Nuff 😀

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Dave Rice wrote:

As the WiFi is independent all I have to deal with is IP address changes in the workshop for servers etc.

I haven’t used Talk Talk, but when I switched to Vodafone recently, I just changed the router’s IP address and DHCP range to match the old Sky box. Saved messing around with trying to remember which kit had fixed IPs etc. 🙂

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I was getting it on my Sky router, and now I’m getting it on my Vodafone router. Both fibre routers, the Sky was N and the Vodafone is AC. It’s not just one system either though, it happens on all my Windows 10 machines, and only one of those has an MS account, so it shouldn’t be shared settings either.

I’ll have a dig through the settings on the PC and router now and see if I can spot anything. I’ve had a separate issue with my wifi though which I noticed last night, so depending on what I find, I’ll post back shortly.

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I can understand the reasoning behind Android, even if it is annoying, but why the hell does Windows 10 do it?  :wacko:

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Thanks both, but they’re only 512MB. I might put them on Ebay anyway though, as long as I cover the postage. It seems like a shame to waste the parts.

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Yeah, I know what you mean. I was working in Game when the DS came out, and I couldn’t play it properly. It felt like the corners were too big and too hard, and my fingers didn’t want to bend around them. Not great when you’re supposed to be selling it to people  :negative:

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Nice find, thanks 🙂

I’ve just installed it now, saves finding batteries for the Gameboy. I’m going to keep using the GBA though, there’s something about it that I like 🙂

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I was thinking about it, but I’ll probably end up using Ubuntu Studio if I ever get around to switching my main machine, so I’m trying that out for now.

Depending on how nicely my home network plays, I might put one of them in the attic or the garage and use it for document storage too, or backups, but I’m still toying with that idea for now.

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