Off Topic Thread V2.0

ED E

We're not too bad I dont think.

UPC 120 via WNDR3800:
4x switches
2x APs
3x Desktops (one with double nics)
1x Old home server
1x Home server (triple nic)
1x Blade Server (testing only, dual nic)
1x NAS Drive
1x Chromecast
1x Netbook
1x Ultrabook
3x Laptops
5x phones

We've binned a few old boxes over the last few months.

Serephucus wrote: »

1x phone signal over ethernet yoke (wired)

You're talking about an ATA

Serephucus

ED E wrote: »

You're talking about an ATA

Yes, that!

I might actually see if I can convince my parents to move to a VOIP solution, as that's what they're basically on at the moment (serious signal problems in our house).

Even just Skype credit or something... Has anyone looked at VOIP for home use?

ED E

Talk to MrG on the VOIP subforum, he's a wealth of knowledge. There are quite a few options, and if they have data on their phones you can have the same number ring at home and on the mobile at once.

Headshot

Softphone is the way to go

the_syco

Serephucus wrote: »

I might actually see if I can convince my parents to move to a VOIP solution, as that's what they're basically on at the moment (serious signal problems in our house).

They Vodafone?

Baked.noodle

30Mb/s UPC

2 Desktops: one wireless, one wired using home plugs.
Laptop: wireless,
Original Xbox: wired,
Raspberry Pi: wired.
Printer: wired
At least 3 smartphones and a tablet: wireless.

Serephucus

the_syco wrote: »

They Vodafone?

That's what they have at the minute, and ideally I'd like to move them to something better/cheaper. Will give Softphone a look though, I'd heard of it before. Cheers Headshot.

the_syco

Connected to meh Eircom modem;
85mb Devolo Homeplug.
Eircom Devolo Homeplug (faster, but not the model).

The latter is used to connect to my Tronsmart Prometheus, and laptops & phones in the house. The former is for when I'm working in the shed, and need tunes from youtube.


Two desktop machines.
Printer.

I remember my 3meg line; I only had a ping of 10 on Irish servers :pac:

Probably going to fling the modem at a wall in the next few months, as it keeps randomly disconnecting internets, the printer, phones. Not my games, though. Internet could be offline for the house, and I'd still be happily playing meh Battlefield.

deejer

Calibos wrote: »

A tear ran down my cheek after reading that. You poor thing!!

3mbit ?? Jaysus!!

Well thats what I get for living in the sticks. Haven't they changed the definition of what classifies as broadband in the US to a minimum of 25Mb download and I am a long way off getting that. Hopefully in the next few years I will have caught up to the current average.

Only the two of us and the small fella in the house though so able to manage with what we have. Streaming actually operates ok.

EoinHef

SSD space started decreasing rapidly on me the last week or 2 without me installing any major games or programs,couldnt explain it. Had a bit of time today to have a look and see if i could see what was causing it. I had 40+|GBs free a few weeks ago and by today i had 9.7GB

Only major change i made was installing a few windows updates in a batch of about 10 from the optional updates,all installed no problem.

I still have pagefile and hibernation activated(8GB RAM) so that + OS and a few various programs accounted for about 55GB's of space. That all looked good but i couldnt figure out where was the other 55GB gone with only 9 left. Turns out system protection was allocating over 50% of disk space to back up and restore points:eek:

I set its maximum allocation back to about 25% and recovered a good chunk of space but found it strange it could have used nearly 40GB in a few weeks?
Anybody any ideas why that would jump so quickly?
I have restores/backups to run every now and then but dont understand how usage of disk space of it got so high in such a short space of time

Serephucus

Download Scanner, and have a look at your C drive. When you mouse over locations, you'll the the path up the top. Something I had taking up a craptonne of space on my SSD recently was Afterburner recording video on me. Apparently I had bound the "start recording video" hotkey to the same one as "show OSD" (for FPS). Chewed up 60GB on me pretty quick. :P

Gbear

EoinHef wrote: »

SSD space started decreasing rapidly on me the last week or 2 without me installing any major games or programs,couldnt explain it. Had a bit of time today to have a look and see if i could see what was causing it. I had 40+|GBs free a few weeks ago and by today i had 9.7GB

Only major change i made was installing a few windows updates in a batch of about 10 from the optional updates,all installed no problem.

I still have pagefile and hibernation activated(8GB RAM) so that + OS and a few various programs accounted for about 55GB's of space. That all looked good but i couldnt figure out where was the other 55GB gone with only 9 left. Turns out system protection was allocating over 50% of disk space to back up and restore points:eek:

I set its maximum allocation back to about 25% and recovered a good chunk of space but found it strange it could have used nearly 40GB in a few weeks?
Anybody any ideas why that would jump so quickly?
I have restores/backups to run every now and then but dont understand how usage of disk space of it got so high in such a short space of time

I noticed something similar recently - my computer started crashing after having at least 15GB free on my SSD the previous day.

As it turned out, there was a bug in one of the mods I installed for Civ 5 that created a 14.5GB cache file in my documents folder.

Deleted that and the mod and that solved it.

I've noticed it being a bigger problem on older machines in the past - the computer gets stuck into some sort of loop, usually when downloading an update, and you end up finding some random folder when you drill down into it being filled with 57GB of rubbish.

EoinHef

First thing i checked was shadow play,fraps and AB recording save directories. Was nothing in any of them. It was system protection taking up all the space with hidden restores. Back ups are save to a second HDD so it was just restore points taking up over 50GB! I just dont understand how it could go from using a minimal amout a few weeks ago to using over half the disk space in such a short amount of time

That program has a really nice,neat interface cheers man. Doesnt display the restore points on the C: though. Used a few programs now and tried from inside windows but these files just are not visible,even with hidden files and folders on. 50GB of restore points alone seems ridiculous to me.

Baked.noodle

Ya, I found system restore gobbled up loads of space on my SSD. I used to scan my SSD with SpaceMonger trying to work out what was happening but the unscanable space just kept getting bigger and bigger as time passed. I couldn't make sense of it but I eventually found if you go into System Properties you can delete all the restore points. It keeps the latest one so you don't need to create a new restore point. I got back about 15 Gigs of space.

zarquon

Use a utility like winderstat to create a graphical hierarchy of your SSD and you can easily see what is taking space and delete as necessary. It's also useful to use an application like CCLeaner which is good at doing automatic cleaning of redundant and temp files.

Gumbi

I'm looking into getting some home plugs for my desktop, but I'm pretty sure my socket upstairs is on a different circuit than the ones in the room with the router. I'm guessing this means I can't use the home plugs?

Serephucus

Depends. Honestly I'm not sure what works and doesn't, technically speaking. I'm pretty sure parts of our house are on two different circuits, and I tried, and got about 20Mb. I've since moved them closer (new ISP means new router location) and now get around 100Mb/s.

If you know someone who has them, see if you can try them out. If not, order from Amazon for a hassle free return.

Baked.noodle

I think as long as the signal doesn't have to pass out through the fuse box you should be ok. I'm using them and though I'm not 100% certain how the place is wired, I asked the guy who worked on the electrics how it was set up and he said the wiring downstairs and upstairs are connected via the fuse box. Modem downstairs, PC upstairs. I got my homeplugs, discounted, in PC World so I could take them back if it didn't work out, but they are fine. One thing to consider is interference. The signal can drop for loads of reasons and it can be quite infuriating trying to work out why. I managed to minimize interference just by swapping the plugs (same socket) I used to power the surge protector (PC) and the home plug. I figure the PC is now no longer between the the homeplug network. It isn't perfect, but I get full speed and it will probably tide me over until I get next gen wireless. They are a crappy Netgear model that claim to be 500 Mb/s but only have "fast" ethernet ports which limits the max speed to 100 Mb/s but I don't care as I get all the speed I'll need for a while, and only cost me 27 Euro and were defiantly worth it.

Gumbi

Thanks, it seems if they are all on the same fuse box it's OK, unfortunately, my house has 2 fuse boxes, the second is for the extension, where my PC is. I'll have to check to be sure, but I'm pretty sure they are on different fuse boxes.

I sometimes get a shaky wifi signal, as being in the extension means I'm behind a solid concrete wall, so sometimes the wifi signal hangs for a few seconds which is frustrating when playing a game. It should also help my download speeds to a bit I think. I might be able to put the receiving home plug in a plug around the corner and wire the ethernet cable from that into my PC.

Thanks for your help!

Serephucus

I take it a massive ethernet cable isn't an option?

Gumbi

Serephucus wrote: »

I take it a massive ethernet cable isn't an option?

Nope. It would have to be 10+m and cross over floors.

I think I've figured it out though. I can feed a 3m ethernet cables around the corner ro get accessto the receiving home plug. A 1.89pound 3m ethernet cable is aavailable from amazon and rated highly, is an ethernet cable something you can cheap out on like this? I imagine it's a simple piece of equipment right? (I've wired them in college, I should know this :P).

Baked.noodle

I picked up a 5m Cat5e in Euro Giant for 1.50. Can't go wrong

Serephucus

Yeah, whatever's cheap is fine.

Gumbi

Cable bought this (could have got cheaper, but this was an add-on item, too lazy to go into town ). And of course the home plug itself Homeplug

Baked.noodle

Cool. Hope they work out. Just make sure the plug isn't too close to the floor or you might have a problem wiring them up.

Gumbi

Baked.noodle wrote: »

Cool. Hope they work out. Just make sure the plug isn't too close to the floor or you might have a problem wiring them up.

Good point! As it happens this plug is the one directly in front of you on the wall and you reach the top of the stairs, handy for the hoover etc. It's conveniently raised a good 4 inches off the ground so there should be no issues there.

marco_polo

Gumbi wrote: »

Cable bought this (could have got cheaper, but this was an add-on item, too lazy to go into town ). And of course the home plug itself Homeplug

Sounds like its too late but just FYI there are only 10/100 ports on the pa441 kit as I rather annoyingly found out after a UPC upgrade to 120 Mbps , as my set of those can only knock out about 90 Mbps in adjacent rooms. Just pointing it out as you are getting it for a desktop.

Very solid and well priced set apart from that and not really a huge deal if its for WiFi or something, as faster sets are quite a good bit dearer and its not like higher rated rated ones are exactly orders of magnitude better in real world performance especially over a reasonable distance.

Robert ninja

Just ordered 2 extra dual link DVI cables. One for my sister so she can actually dual-screen her PC setup instead of using that fancy new monitor just for 360 games... and one for myself @ 3m long so I can once again turn my main monitor vertical when I want to read comics for a while

Also am going to buy a Dualshock 4 controller since my DS3 broke for literally no reason. Was sitting on my desk and hadn't used it for weeks. Fire up Killer Is Dead and it doesn't turn on. Sad face. Couldn't find a single store in town that sells any console hardware... just tesco and their overpriced games... and doritos. Anyone know where I can get a decent price for a DS4 online? I have parcel motel but I still can't seem to find a reasonable price for one. Also need warranty on it... I'm afraid I'll have bad enough luck to get one of the batches with the sticks having rapidly deteriorating rubber.

Squaredude

I have zero will power. My monitor was acting up (bit of discoloration)and decided to hold off until it got to be unusable,I lasted 2 days.This should arrive within the next few hours:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B00LBZLIXG/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1423135767&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SY200_QL40&keywords=asus+rog+swift+pg278q&dpPl=1&dpID=41Ms95qjr-L&ref=plSrch

Gumbi

Anyone interested in an i7 4790k? Am selling mine, it's a few months old (3 maybe? I can check though). It can overclock above average to 4.7ghz at 1.32volts.