rap switch if it does THAT. a switch SHOULD be capable of saturating any link pair and any OTHER link pair simultaneously.
Doesn't of course work when TWO people are accessing the SAME link...when my wife is trying to record a TV program on the server whilst I am busy saving a large file to it ;-)
Thanks to you all for the help and advice.
New machine built and running a treat!
What spec did you go for in the end?
Hi John,
i5 4440, 8GB, 240 GB SSD, motherboard graphics on the Gygabyte H87M-HD3. Went for a Samsung S24C570 monitior. It's all a lot better than I was expecting.
Went with Windows 8.1 for a few reasons, and it is not bad. Installed quickly (about 15 minutes) and seems snappy enough.
The old computer has Ubuntu on it now. Well, I had installed Ubuntu on a laptop drive late last year to try it out, and I just stuck that into the old desktop and it ran no problems! Will now use that to try to teach myself about databases.
That should make for a pretty decent workhorse platform...
If you go to :
And slap that on it, you can turn it back into a semblance of something usable ;-)
Ha! Cheers! Yeah, the new tiles thing is a bit crap - works on phones, but not the desktop. I have set it to boot to desktop, and arranged the start button thing to act as an app menu, albeit massively intrusive!
I have managed to get my install of 8 to behave mostly... I never see the start screen, or any of the mickey mouse "modern" apps. But there are few bits of touchiness that I have yet found a way to banish - like the Networks slide in panel...
(Particularly annoying since that is where VPN connections reside, and you need to enter login credentials for a new connection. However its impossible to copy and past into it sensibly, since a click outside the panel is "consumed" by the panel and also causes it to close. Then when you reopen it, its already forgotten what you pasted into it the previous time!
Yeah, they are an odd thing, I think. It's like having too many rolling news ticker tape things on a TV station, just distracting. I've lost them too. I have a windows phone (it's not great) and I can see how some of the metro interface would be good for a small touch screen, but for a desktop machine with a large window, you'd end up looking like you're doing an interpretive dance each time you use it. And a smudgy screen to just round it all off.
It's a beautiful case of form over function!
My laptop is a vista machine, and it has crap networking abilities. The new router I have bought has a file storage facility (plug un usb...) which is very useful. But my vista laptop just can't access it. All the other machines can. It's very frustrating. I'm going to see if I can pester Microsoft for a free Win 7 license! :-)
Very important update: I have just installed Filezilla client to access the router's storage facility from my vista laptop. Works well.
The soon to come update to 8.1 allows the modern apps to run in a window on the desktop apparently (as do some of the third party add ons like Start 8)
Good luck with that one ;-)
Ah, I'm not going mad then! There was an update installed last night, and I could have sworn things were different yesterday.
It does make things a bit more intuitive, I have to say.
Am I understanding this - Windows 8.1 had an update to allow a program to run in a window?
I can't answer that first hand as what the may have changed is probably something I haven't used!
Yup...
Just not your normal windows app, but your new shiny "I am pretending to be a mobile phone style full screen app"!
(i.e. a "Modern" (aka TIFKAM) application rather than a desktop one)
OK - so we've gone into full reverse back to the 1980s then with single full screen apps? Even my Galaxy Note 3 can manage 2 windows :)
I appreciate MS are tying to clamber back on the liferaft as the steamer of smartphone OSes disappears into the horizon, but why in gods name are they inflicting this methodology on desktops screens?
Yes, this update has done something else as well: It has knackered my access into the router storage. Previously I would go to "run" and type in \\192.etc.etc and it would ask for login & password and things would be hunky dory, but now it is doing the same as my vista laptop and saying that there might be a problem with the network. This is inconvenient.
As for the windows & touchscreen thing, I have a hypothesis that someone saw that sci-fi film with Tom Cruise where he uses a giant touch screen computer and that person thought "that looks like fun!" and ruined the computer using experience for millions of people.
We have a small laptop (11.6" screen), Win 8 and a touch screen (cos that's what it came with, not really looking for it as part of the spec).
I sometimes use it and I surprised myself by finding the touch screen quite useful. Not just for the start screen and Modern apps, but other things like scrolling web pages, web browsing I find my self slipping into using it. And I do find that sometimes I'll use modern apps, cos then it works well with touch.
Wouldn't really work for a desktop, but then the desktop is probably dying out for a lot of home use.
My wife never really uses ours, except for when the youngest plays Minecraft the kids don't tends to use it, referring a laptop. I tends to only use it for things like photos, video editting and the odd game, otherwise I'm more likely to use a laptop,
Well to be fair to it, some modern apps can share a screen (only two though) ;-)
That is a deeper question... Mr Jobs has some of it to answer for, after he came up with the bright idea of inserting himself into the retail value chain for software purchases, gobbling 30%, and for some reason people let him. Henceforth everyone wants an "app store".
Stephen Sinofsky seemed to be angling toward a write once, run anywhere concept, where the "anywhere" was desktop, phones / tablets, and xbox. The problem being that in common with every other desktop OS, windows does not play nicely in a touchy environment - hence the need to create a lobotomised toy town version of it to even make the concept a starter. (The fact that the implementation was also a bit of a miss with three different and incompatible APIs and tool chains did little to help either (although moves are afoot to close that gap a bit))
Rolled into all that was obviously the thought that we have not got the software as a service malarkey working right yet, so we had better ship another version of windows to make some dosh. The resulting "cut'n'shut" of the IT world that we know as Win 8.
I am not quite sure if Win 8 was part of the solution that would facilitate the grand vision of the "surface" tablets/laptops, or whether surface was a way of justifying the bastard love child of WinPho, and Win 7.
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